The Magazine of The Sierra Club
How I Finally Checked a Brooks Range Traverse off My Bucket List
It took years and a lot of planning, but I'm glad I did it
Illustration by Grace Helmer
Within minutes of landing in the mountains for my trek through Alaska’s Brooks Range, I got my first surprise. I was still fiddling with my pack when a grizzly popped up on the tundra. The bear reared for a better view, caught my scent, and scooted. Over the next four hours, I encountered a total of seven bruins. Number five galloped up to me from a stream bottom, curious and confident, and I unholstered my bear spray before the subadult turned and fled.
Over the years, I had guided dozens of backpacking and float trips through the Brooks Range, and I was no stranger to the wonders of the place, like its copious, pushy bears. Yet there had never been time to explore every peak, glen, and cascade that tempted me. My job as a wilderness guide—camp chores and rigid schedules—demanded my attention, and missing flights home always galled clients. Such journeys were rewarding but far too short.
It always took days to quiet the monkey mind, and then concerns of the world left behind would start to intrude at the end of a trip. I wanted to stretch out the middle part—that time of single-minded blissful presence—as much as possible. I knew that somewhere beyond the threshold where resupplies are necessary, roaming transforms from a pastime into a primeval passage. At that point, you settle into the itinerant life as if it’s the only one you’ve ever known. The landscape comes to fit like a glove.
So, as a 50th birthday present to myself, I decided I would take one summer off from guiding and cross the entire length of the Brooks Range, that 700-mile-long, 150-mile-wide upthrust that is the highest mountain range within the Arctic Circle. The journey would take about two months. At the time, more people had seen the Mariana Trench than had trekked the entire range.
But year after year, I hesitated. Mostly because I could ill afford to take entire months off. Also, frankly, because I dreaded logistics, which for this expedition were complex and crucial. I was aware, though, that time keeps on slipping into the future, and that I would get neither younger nor fitter.
Finally, a weeklong backpacking trip I led across Guilbeau Pass got me motivated. The first evening of the trip, Kate, a middle-aged high school teacher, fell hard for the incomparable landscape of mountain-cupped water—the place will do that to you on a fine day. Like some celestial slide projector, a restless sun pierced the clouds and transmuted the nearby lake from quicksilver to pewter to jade.
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Kate sat for hours beside her tent, absorbing the light’s changes. The next morning, she told me she wanted to get funding to return the following summer with students from her school. Then at camp two days later, she said she was having chest pains. She told us she had experienced repeated bouts of a deeply rooted carcinoma and showed us surgical scars.
The next spring, I learned that Kate had passed away. Her early death served as a memento mori, reminding me that there is never any time to waste. I crossed some invisible line demarcating the boundary between dreaming and doing.
I eventually achieved my aspiration with a 58-day journey that took me from Joe Creek, near the Canadian border, to Kotzebue, near the Chukchi Sea. The traverse was one of the most difficult physical and mental challenges I had ever confronted. The last leg nearly turned into tragedy. On the nine-mile crossing from the mouth of the Noatak River to Kotzebue, wind and tides threatened to blow my inflatable canoe out to sea. Some Iñupiaq fishermen in a motorboat kindly saved me.
Despite all the hardships, the experience was a gift, and I’m glad I did it. Looking back, I’m also glad I’ll never have to do it again.
