summer solstice.
3:59 p.m. Alaska time. 21 hours 49 minutes of daylight. Who's using it all? Those juncos out there singing right now?
This light, and these mosquitoes, and the green of the outfield at Growden Park will be unimaginable in six months. Revel.
Editor's note: I wrote this story for AK magazine. It got lost in broken email ether, so didn't appear there. So, here it is, for free.
We really waste them, you know, those endless hours of daylight that come with high summer. It’s a time of great conflict, when the overstimulated body craves rest, but the warm, bright landscape says, “Hey, you can sleep when you’re dead.”
So, when Mark Ross of Fairbanks resurrected the “Hot Springs 100K” last summer, he offered an opportunity to taste the season of light in its full glory, nap at your own risk.
My friend Andy Sterns was psyched for the point-to-point 70-mile overland trek from Chena Hot Springs to Circle Hot Springs, and our friend Ed Plumb made us a team of three for the race, which attracted an annual group of loose screws a few decades ago, but fizzled thereafter.
About 15 other people gathered in the parking lot of the hot springs resort on a stunning blue-sky day in early June. They were all carrying light backpacks, some of them containing packrafts to help cover the considerable wilderness distance. None had sleeping bags.
Upon hearing that I was interested in the race, my early-20s idol and wilderness-exploring veteran Roman Dial sent me an Alpacka raft from his home in Anchorage. The rugged inflatable weighed about five pounds and rolled up into the size of a loaf of bread, fitting nicely in the bottom of my backpack, which weighed about 25 pounds; my teammates had similar loads, assembled to move fast.
We made it to Chena Hot Springs resort just as our comrades were scattering, each taking a unique path from hot springs to hot springs. Some chose the high country, scrambling over domes of rock and tundra that offer good footing but few puddles of water with which to quench their thirsts. Our route began with a low, mucky path over the Yukon Quest trail, which is quite solid in winter, not so much in summer.
After hiking the pavement of Chena Hot Springs Road for a mile to reach the Quest trail, we hung a right turn into the wilderness and stepped through the North Fork of the Chena River, which runs clear and lovely. Our feet would stay wet for the next 48 hours.
After about 15 miles of hiking the lowlands, past fallen sticks of lathe used to mark the Yukon Quest trail a few months before, we gained solid footing as the trail climbed from the North Fork valley toward Rosebud summit. After several hours on the trail, we saw no sign of the other competitors; there were all off on their own adventures, most of them scampering across the Interior ahead of us.
Much of the landscape was hillsides of burnt matchsticks that were spruce trees before the summer of 2004, when an area the size of Vermont burned in Alaska. Burned areas and the jumble of black logs they leave behind can make even the hardiest hikers weep, but saplings hadn’t yet emerged between the burned trees, most of which still stood. We weaved between the black stems, feeling lucky. Until we neared the tussock fields on the north slopes above Birch Creek. Walking through them was like walking on porcupines.
Birch Creek is the major waterway that almost makes a straight line between Chena and Circle hot springs, and all racers were making a beeline for it. Reaching Birch Creek meant that we could inflate our tiny boats and get off our feet after 25 miles and 20 hours of hiking.
Dragging our own personal clouds of mosquitoes, Andy, Ed, and I dropped out of the tussocks and on to a gravel bar of upper Birch Creek just as the midnight sun dropped behind the hills to the north.
Here, we inflated our rafts, then set them in the knee-deep water and allowed the cold of the water to shrink them, after which we blew in a few more lungfuls. We assembled our kayak paddles that had extended from our packs like antenna and shoved off into upper Birch Creek.
Here was true bliss: To move without walking, to glide past tussocks on the hillside, to see my pack on the front of the boat and not on my shoulders. Most of my Alaska travels have been on foot, and the bombproof little packraft, comfortable as a bathtub, was a revelation. We weren’t traveling much faster than the three or four miles per hour Birch Creek was flowing, but we were now headed toward Circle Hot Springs while sitting down.
Our first sunrise occurred about midway on our winding float of Birch Creek. We had each pulled our boats onto a gravel bar to take care of personal business when the sun threw its first weak rays upon us. As we basked, siren-like canine calls emerged from the woods. First one, then two, then three wolves joined in a chorus, close enough to us that the hair stood on my neck. Even in my 3 a.m. stupor, I realized this is why we were out there.
And then nature really kicked in. All the migrant songbirds, fresh from somewhere else, started belting out songs to mark their new northern territories. White-crowned sparrows, ruby-crowned kinglets, robins, all the birds that say summer in Interior Alaska. A hawk owl watched us float by from a fire snag created in 2004.
A few sections of rapids required us to portage, not a hardship when your boat weighs five pounds. We learned later that others used their Alpackas to shoot the rapids, coming out wet but invigorated at the other end.
I was getting flat boat-butt when, in midday, we pulled over onto a gravel bar for a break. The seductive heat of the sun soon had us curled up on the gravel with our backpacks for pillows. Then followed two hours of blissful sleep. I’d never believed adventurer Rocky Reifenstuhl when he said a couple hours were refreshing, but now I’m in his club.
As we woke on the gravel bar, another raft appeared from upstream. Grizzled race veteran Rourke Williams pulled up to chat and told us that the wood smoke we had smelled on the river a few miles back was his. He had vomited and had the chills on his overland trek to Birch Creek, but was feeling better after he camped for a bit. He shoved off again into the creek, and we followed.
There began a slow-motion chase in which Rourke somehow lost us. A few hours later, we saw his boat beached near a tributary stream and we went up to see why he had started another campfire.
“This isn’t mine,” he said of a smoking hole in the duff. “I’m just trying to put it out . . . Did you guys see that bear standing by the river?”
I looked back just in time to see a jet-black body swimming across the river behind us. Cool. Then it was time to put out a fire.
We filled dry bags with water and carried them up the bank, dumping them on the fire, which was started by someone in canoes who had camped at the site. Except for the hot spot, we had seen no signs of people on our float down the creek.
Fire quenched, the four of us sat in our boats. We had been in them about 15 hours by that time, and I was looking forward to the transition to hiking.
We stopped boating when we reached Harrison Creek, which we knew led to a mining path that was the back door into Circle Hot Springs. As the sun dipped below the hills and the air cooled, the mosquitoes applauded our decision to return to land. We rolled up our boats on a gravel bar, tucked them into our packs, and had a snack before heading up the creek.
We found an occasional path on either bank, but it had been a few decades since the paths were made, and walking up the ankle-deep water was more efficient. We weaved through the current for a few hours, gaining a few miles while glancing sideways at every bear track we saw pressed into the mud.
Finally, we intersected a mining path, and we again smelled wood smoke. We soon came to a cabin with white smoke billowing from its stovepipe, indicative of a recent fire.
“I’ll bet Rourke’s in there,” Andy said.
I was hoping my traveling partners would suggest that we join Rourke for a warm snooze to escape the 40-degree morning chill penetrating our wet legs, but we all kept marching by the cabin. Sigh.
In the rosy light of dawn, we hiked the backside of a dome that was between Circle Hot Springs and us. After being wet for so long, my feet were beginning to bark, assuring that I would find blisters when I someday peeled off my neoprene socks.
Our morale was drooping after 45 hours on the trail when we got the gift of our second sunrise, the sun an orange ball on the northeast horizon. We picked up our painful paces at different clips. Ed took off ahead, I was in the middle, and Andy was third. We daydreamed about other racers catching us, not knowing that most of them had already finished.
With each step on the gravel causing a burning sensation that cost me molar enamel, I limped on, encouraged by the sightings of more cabins and gravel-moving equipment. Finally, after nearly 48 hours of moving, I saw a lovely sight—my beater red Subaru wagon parked at the Circle Hot Springs airstrip, where a few friends had dropped it the day before. I hotfooted it down the road, walked past the Subaru, and headed for the old lodge at Circle Hot Springs.
There was Ed, lying flat as roadkill in the driveway of the gabled resort.
“Hot Springs is closed,” he said. “And there’s all these signs that say ‘no trespassing.’”
I was a bit disappointed to arrive at an abandoned establishment. Not that I wanted to soak in a hot springs on the 80-degree day, but I was hoping to talk with other racers about their adventures.
I schlepped over and got the Subaru from the airstrip. Ed and I were airing out our trench feet as Andy turned into the driveway with a smile on his face. Rourke followed shortly thereafter, and we exchanged weary high-fives.
We would learn later that we were among the last few finishers, and the co-winners, Jim Lokken and Andy Seitz, covered the 70 miles in about half the time we did. We chugged toward home in the red Subaru on a sweltering day, making it only 15 miles before we pulled over for a dusty sleep, our first extended rest since we had embarked on the 48-hour day. Much later, passed out in our beds at home, we missed what would have been our third consecutive 3 a.m. sunrise. I give, Summer. You win.
A biologist once said a dark-eyed junco he was studying would come back to the same tree in Alaska every year after migrating back from the Lower 48, and that the bird would perch on the same branch.
I think it's happening now. Here, I wrote about the spiraling song of a Swainson's thrush in a spruce tree to the east of our house one year and one night ago. He's there again tonight, for the first time. Maybe it's a different dude. Maybe he really likes that tree.
The Dog After
We lifted off from McCarthy towards Skolai Pass, three-and-one-half souls on board. Along with the pilot and my future wife Kristen was a black ball of fur, curled at Kristen’s feet. The trip to the Goat Trail in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park was Chloe’s first. The puppy was not yet six months old, and I wondered how she would handle the wild, gray-green world beneath us.
Chloe had a tough act to follow. I was still aching with memories of Jane, my chocolate Labrador retriever, who had died two months before. Jane had shared my 13 years in Alaska, and I was closer to her than to most people. She was my friend, a warm body that pressed against my sleeping bag at night, a travel partner, and part of my identity. When my father etched the names of my brothers, sisters, and their partners into a cement slab at the entrance to our childhood home years ago, he wrote “Ned and Jane.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of Chloe. She was Kristen’s dog, even though I was along when Kristen picked her up from a woman in the Goldstream Valley for $30. People asked what breed Chloe was, and we shrugged: Border collie mom, dad with a good vertical leap. Jane was a purebred Lab, a beautiful creature with kind brown eyes, expressive brows and a groan when she plopped down that made her seem almost human.
Chloe is built like a creature of the desert—serpentine tail, snout like a fox, tubular body, spindly legs. Her ears belong on a mule deer. With them, she heard the laughter of a woman who passed us on a trail near home one day:
“That dog looks like a fruit bat.”
Jane had met the fruit bat, and Jane wasn’t thrilled. She was 13 then, in her last months of life, and here was a bouncing little pest that clamped onto the loose fur under her neck and tried to herd her. A few times, I had to cup my hands around the puppy’s hips and pull her toward me when Jane was about to snap.
The contrast between them made my heart heavy. Chloe, lithe and flexible, showed that Jane was indeed an old dog, stiff and shaky, nearing the end. One of the saddest moments of my life was the time I closed the tailgate with my old friend in the back of the truck, getting ready to run the Angel Rocks trail with the new puppy. The trail was too steep for Jane, who had arthritis in her back. She looked at me from the back of the truck with sad brown eyes, as if she was letting me down.
When Jane died, I wrapped her in the chamois sheet that covered her couch and buried her at our favorite walking spot behind my cabin. At the grave, along with Kristen, friends Andy and Lisa and Lisa’s dog Suzy, was Chloe. She had no sense of the gravity of the moment, and at one point dashed to the grave and mouthed the wild rose pedals Lisa had set there, shaking them to confetti.
Then, Chloe was all there was. She saved me from the empty dog-dish syndrome after Jane’s death, but she was no Jane.
I had made it my mission to give Jane a happy life. I’d go bird hunting at 5 a.m. just to experience the teamwork of crawling to a pond together. I walked across Alaska with her when she was 10 years old, in large part because I wanted one summer when we could be together 24 hours a day.
With the loss of Jane came a waterfall of other changes, including the death of my father and a decision to move in with Kristen after living in a one-room cabin with Jane for more than a decade. I tried to push away as much of the change as possible, including the little black dog that used to ambush Jane.
But Chloe chipped away at my walls by expressing her own quirky personality. She was so excited in Skolai Pass that she nipped my pant legs, gently pinching my calves as she knew a good day in the outdoors was ahead. Kristen, Chloe and I hiked up the broad saddle of Chitistone Pass, with Castle Mountain looming in the background and the ocean of Russell Glacier ice a few miles east. At its steepest, the Goat Trail is a narrow walkway of rock pressed into canyon walls by the footfalls of sheep, Native traders, and, after lonely men spread the word about gold in the town of Chisana in 1913, prospectors and pack horses who wanted to avoid a dreadful trip up the Nizina Glacier and Skolai Creek.
Many national parks, including Denali, don’t allow dogs in the backcountry, but Wrangell St. Elias does, and I was glad of it. The more adventures I had with Jane, the more I trusted her not to run off after a moose calf or gallop back to me with a bear following. Now it was Chloe’s turn to earn some trust. As a tiny pup, she had ridden in a fanny pack to a cabin in the White Mountains north of Fairbanks, but the days of the free ride were over; it was time to use her own skinny legs.
Two things stick in my mind when I remember the Goat Trail trip: River crossings and a wolverine. The river crossings scared me more than anything else. Jane would have dogpaddled across them, but Chloe was too small to cross the glacial creeks and the Chitistone River. I carried her in my arms across the smaller creeks, but when we came to the upper Chitistone I needed my arms free.
Kristen had an idea. She would ferry the pup across in her backpack, if we could get Chloe inside. I hoisted Chloe and Kristen folded her legs into the backpack. We snugged the cord around Chloe’s neck, securing all 30 pounds of her in a doggie straightjacket. Kristen and I each clamped onto a spruce pole with both hands, and I led us into the river. Invisible rocks detached beneath our boots and tumbled downstream. Cold water knifed through the seams of our rain pants and penetrated our boots. As our feet went numb, Chloe was silent, taking in the scene above Kristen’s shoulders like a calm little Batman.
When we neared the end of the trip the next day, Chloe minded my heel command as we busted through an alder-choked trail next to the Chitistone. When we popped out of the brush and onto a gravel bar, Kristen squinted at something up ahead.
“Is that a bear cub?”
The wolverine shot a glance our way. We had caught it out in the open, at the river’s edge. The wolverine wheeled around and tore back for the brush, kicking up a roostertail of sand.
Rather than chasing her first wolverine, Chloe stayed at our heels, tracking it with her radar ears and sniffing the air. The wolverine disappeared and Chloe looked up at me, waiting for the OK to start moving.
Chloe is now a regular companion on trips through Alaska. She makes me laugh as she throws a stick into the air and catches it after a long day, and she impresses me as she carries her doggie pack without whining. Chloe will never replace Jane, but she pads a bit deeper into my heart with every mile we cover.
We left Shishmaref two mornings ago for the 100-mile ride cross-country to the village of Deering. Before we left Shish, we stopped for gas again, because one of our five-gallon jugs was missing and the tanks on our machines were also a bit light.
Here’s a donation can at the Shish store for the potential move to the Tin Creek site. There’s a price tag of $180 million, and the villagers will have to pitch in if they are going to pull off the move.
Here’s our friend Kaji, who flew into Shishmaref to help us with the drilling and logistics, and because he likes Shishmaref. He did a great film series on Shishmaref:
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/
Out of Shishmaref to Deering, more than 100 miles across tundra and sea ice, Kenji was again breaking trail, taking us on a straight line through very flat light. I asked him how he could navigate so well, and he says he uses the sun or other features of the landscape to keep oriented, and checks his GPS when he needs to.
We had almost no visibility for the entire 100 miles, and the light got so flat that I couldn’t see Tohru’s tracks in front of me. It was surreal, bumpy and a bit brutal, and I was glad to get to Deering, the first one-street village we had seen since Shaktoolik. Steve, the principal, let us into the school, and we met a few locals, including Calvin Moto and eighth-grader Ting-Mac Hailstone.
This morning, we took off again into flat light that Tohru described as being inside a ping-pong ball, and riding wasn’t much fun–we’d hit bumps on the sea ice without seeing them. We rode this way for about 5 hours and 90 miles.
Here we are finally hitting the markers for Kotzebue, after another stellar navigation job by Kenji. Today, with an invisible sun, he said he used the clouds to keep his bearings. And we were on sea ice. I continue to be impressed.
We made it! More than two weeks and 800 miles, stopping at 16 villages and installing permafrost monitoring stations at all of them. Saw a good portion of the fantastic, varied terrain of the Seward Peninsula. From the mouth of the Yukon to north of the Arctic Circle. We fly back to Fairbanks tomorrow. Thanks for coming along.
