The mail plane leaves Anaktuvuk Pass twice a week, and on the morning of July 2 it lifted off with the last of our excuses on board. You can hear a single-prop for a long time up there — four minutes, five — a thin whine folding itself into the John River valley until the land closes over it. What replaces it is not silence. It is attention. West of the gravel airstrip lay four hundred miles of the Brooks Range without a trail, a road or a bridge in it, and the only practical way home was through the far end.

The plan fit on an index card, which should have been the first warning. Walk west out of the Nunamiut village of Anaktuvuk Pass, through the passes of Gates of the Arctic, roughly 150 miles to the headwaters of the Noatak River. Inflate the packrafts we would carry the whole way like penance. Then float 250 miles down the Noatak to the Iñupiat village of the same name, where a scheduled flight to Kotzebue constitutes the region's entire transportation network. My partner for the month was Etta Kroll, a fisheries biologist out of Fairbanks with the two qualities that matter most above the Arctic Circle: she is impossible to alarm, and she reads moving water the way the rest of us read menus.

The Walking Problem

Nobody warns you adequately about tussocks, because tussocks cannot be conveyed, only survived. A tussock is a knee-high pedestal of cottongrass, the diameter of a dinner plate at the top and a teacup at the base, wobbling over six inches of standing water, and the tundra grows them in fields that run to the horizon. Step on top and it capsizes; step between and you post-hole into the water table. For three days out of Anaktuvuk we averaged well under a mile an hour through them, hips burning, ankles bending in directions ankles were not issued for, while Etta developed a working taxonomy — drunk bowling balls, wet ottomans, the committee — that I am still petitioning the Park Service to adopt.

The arithmetic of the range humbles fast. Eight miles was a strong day; ten was an event. We crossed the upper Anaktuvuk, the Alatna and a dozen unnamed creeks with shoes on and arms linked, facing upstream while the current tried to file our legs down like the gravel it carries. Twice we walked on aufeis — sheets of turquoise overflow ice six feet thick in July, lying across an entire valley floor like something winter forgot to take with it. Aufeis is the best walking surface in the Arctic and also a roof over moving water, and the sound it makes underfoot, a hollow settling boom, keeps conversation short.

Eight miles was a strong day; ten was an event.

Caribou Weather

On day eight, on a bench above the Killik River drainage, the western Arctic herd found us — or a tributary of it, maybe two thousand caribou, cows and calves, pouring off a pass in a line with no beginning we could see and no end. They moved past camp for over an hour, the clicking of their ankle tendons arriving before the animals did, a dry sound like a room full of knitting needles. A yearling walked to within thirty feet of the tent, looked at us with the blank courtesy the Arctic extends to all trespassers, and moved on. The grizzly two days later got less poetry: a sow methodically mowing sedges half a mile off, upwind. We took the long way around the drainage and she never lifted her head. That is what most bear encounters are out there — a course correction, and a story you tell less honestly later.

The divide into the Noatak drainage does not announce itself. There is no crest, no cairn; the creek at your feet simply changes its mind and starts running west. We dropped past a chain of tarns into a valley that widened until it was less a valley than a hallway for the whole watershed, and on a gravel bar near Lake Matcharak our food cache was waiting where a pilot out of Bettles had left it three weeks earlier: two sealed drums, fifty pounds, untouched. I have opened Christmas presents with less feeling than I opened the drum with the salami in it.

The River Takes Over

A packraft weighs about as much as a full water bag and inflates with a nylon sack and patience, and it converts the worst country on foot into the best country there is. The upper Noatak is fast, cold, Class I water with a Class V view: a jade ribbon braiding through terraces of dryas, the Schwatka Mountains stacking to the south, all of it lit by a sun that had stopped bothering to set. We made more distance in our first afternoon afloat than in our best three days of walking, and neither of us said a word about it, out of respect for the feet.

The river days took on a shape. Paddle four hours, land on a bar, walk small circles until the blood came back, boil water, paddle four more. Below the Cutler confluence the wind found us — a three-day westerly straight off the Chukchi Sea that stood the river up in whitecaps and pinned us to a gravel bar barely higher than the water. We ate through the storm's share of the rations, then some of the calm's. On the second day of it, Etta and I had the expedition's only argument, which was about oatmeal, and which I lost, and which was not about oatmeal.

You do not finish the Noatak. At some point it finishes with you, and lets you off.

  • Days out: 26. Days with rain: 11. Sunsets: 0.
  • Miles walked: 152. Miles floated: 248. Miles of trail: 0.
  • River crossings made on foot: 31. Grizzlies seen: 4. Grizzlies that cared: 0.
  • Caribou counted before we stopped counting: about 2,000.
  • Arguments: 1, on the second day of the windstorm, over the oatmeal rations.

What the Map Doesn't Say

Noatak Canyon arrived on the last full day: the braids gathered into one deep green channel between walls of tilted shale, and the river, which had spent a week sprawling, went suddenly professional. It carried us at seven miles an hour with a stillness on its surface like held breath. A pair of peregrines worked the rim. Neither of us made anything but steering strokes for an hour, and when the walls laid back down and the delta light opened ahead, I felt a disappointment I had not budgeted for.

We beached at the village of Noatak on the evening of day twenty-six, and a kid on a four-wheeler towed our deflated boats up the bank for the price of hearing where we had come from. "Anaktuvuk," he repeated, and gave us a look — not impressed, exactly; recalibrating. The Brooks Range gets called empty by people planning trips there and by nobody who has finished one. It is occupied country — by the herd, by the sow in the sedges, by the Nunamiut behind us and the Iñupiat around us, by the westerly that pinned us to a gravel bar for three days — and for twenty-six days it let two more bodies move through on its terms. It never once noticed us. A month later, that is still the part I can't put down.