Notes From Tundra Ground

Photography by Jeff Pflueger

The first night of this wilderness journey we camped in a roadside gravel quarry within earshot of eighteen-wheeler jamming gears and spewing up mud. Five of us had converged in the Fairbanks airport, where we had a van waiting, a dented Ford Econoline on loan from our employer. We filled the gas tanks, raided the 24-hour supermarket for last-minute junk food, then headed northward in the dark. It was late August, and the never-ending summer days were now ending. We drove an hour or so on pavement, then hit the dirt of the Haul Road, the only road in Alaska that crosses into the Arctic Circle. Built to bring construction crews to the oil pipeline, it only opened to the public a few years back, and feels somehow post-apocalyptic: a barren dirt road through the hinterland dotted by the occasional crooked cross to commemorate where some trucker lost control. The only other evidence of civilization is the pipeline itself. At the quarry we laid out our bags in the mud, slept through the sprinkles of rain, and got up before daylight and kept on driving.

Our destination was Coldfoot, the northernmost truckstop in the world, and proud of it. 250 miles later we pulled our mud-splattered van into the gas pumps beside a diner, a gift shop, and a row of motel rooms. Down the street was a two-room National Park visitor's center, and across the highway was the airport. A sign for the northbound traveler said: Next Services 220 miles.

The other half of our group had a three-day headstart and, as far as we knew, had already flown into the Arrigetch Peaks, part of the Brooks Range inside the Gates of the Arctic National Park. There were ten of us total. Seven, including myself, were instructors for Outward Bound. We had already spent, on average, sixty days in the Alaskan wilderness that summer. This trip here was vacation.

Despite my supposed expertise in the outdoors-it was tenth season as a guide-I still didn't know where the Arrigetch was. Fact is I could hardly call myself a rockclimber. And once we'd started poring over topo maps, I realized I was in a bit over my head. The serious climbers on the expedition had collected ascents of big walls in Yosemite and big mountains in Alaska, Patagonia, and the Himalayas. They were planning long alpine routes, aid climbs, and multi-pitch first ascents-in an area which would take three days by jet, van, plane, and foot to get to.

To get myself oriented, I read Exploring Arctic Wilderness by Bob Marshall. I've never much cared for outdoor writing, so I skimmed, and the only thing I retained was Marshall talking about long rest days in which he and his companions read War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Judging from the photos of the prospectors and dogmushers Marshall traveled with, I assumed that Tolstoy's were the first books they'd ever read.

Now that sounded like a good time: laying around a tent in the Arctic reading the Russians. But I had already read both big Tolstoy novels, so in Anchorage I landed at Title Wave Books looking for works that were comparable in scope, humanity and power. Figuratively I wanted heavyweights, but since I'd be carrying them on my back for two weeks, they literally had to be lightweight: big books in small packages. I settled on Crime and Punishment (437 pages, 7 ounces) The Brothers Karamazov (812 pages, 12 ounces) and The Idiot (653 pages, 9 ounces). Thus outfitted with 2000 pages of Dostoyevsky and no climbing gear, I set out for the northernmost peaks in America.

An indicator of how far Coldfoot is from the rest of America is that when discussing the weather, people mention fronts coming in from Siberia. And not surprisingly, in a place whose temperature varies between 82 below zero and 98 above, the principal topic for discussion in "town" was the weather. What was surprising was that it wasn't very cold. We had just missed a big rain storm that had delayed all flights and washed out dips in the Haul Road. But at noon, it was about fifty degrees with occasional sun beaming through the clouds.

We followed a dirt road to the air field. I was first aware of how different the Coldfoot airport was from other airports when, finding the office unlocked but empty, I knocked on the door of a trailerhome and a pretty young woman with two blondheaded toddlers peaked through the door and said, "We're closed today."

Once I explained that we were a day early for our flight, she admitted to being co-owner of Coyote Air, and invited us to move into the office to sort our gear, and if we wanted, spend the night on the floor. "If anyone comes by, tell them we're closed." Her husband, the pilot, would not be able to take us in early, because he was out hunting for sheep. Just then the telephone rang, and as we were shuttling in backpacks from the van, I heard Danielle turning away a potential customer.

"Not only can we not get you there," she warned, "but you wouldn't want to be there now anyway."

So we spent the day in a tiny office that reeked like diesel fuel, taking inventory of a thousand pounds of gear and food and trying to reduce it by half. We were allowed 1200 pounds on the plane, but that number had to include our bodies-five of us-which took up about 750. We were aided by four-year-old Bremner who insisted that we "clean up our mess," and by his little sister Deriene who thought we should go pick berries with her, instead.

When the pilot eventually touched down in his canary yellow Piper Cub, I was reminded again of the difference between Coldfoot and other places I'd boarded planes. There in the back seat of the cockpit was what looked to be a diminutive co-pilot, but as the plane bounced closer on the tarmac I saw that it was not a person at all: It was a sheep's head.

The next morning we lifted off in a 1952 DeHaviland Beaver, with seats for one pilot and five passengers. Dirk told me it was the best bush plane ever built-engineered from the ground up as a bush plane, not built for regular flying then modified for the bush. "You'll freeze your ass off, but this old bird will fly at forty below."

Dirk Nickisch learned to fly atop a wooden crate in his father's cropdusting plane in North Dakota. His grandfather was also a pilot. He first came to Alaska in 1994, with a dog and a pick-up truck, and found a job flying ski-planes out of Talkeetna.

"People know what to expect of me," Dirk told me through the headset as we soared above the brown hills speckled with early sings of yellow and orange. "They either like it or they don't. I won't get up early, but I will fly late into the night. And if you get weathered in Coldfoot, you'll be picking berries with my kids."

Dirk is one of the few pilots in Alaska who lands his planes on land rather than water, so his are equipped with wheels rather than floats. Since Beavers were no longer built after 1963, finding parts for them is like collecting original parts for a hot rod. Dirk's wheels were located by a dealer in Laos who paid more in bribes to get them out of the country than he did to buy them. The axle is also rare and unusually strong, and I soon learned the reason why. Dirk planned to land this fully loaded plane on a bumpy cobble bar on the bank of the Alatna River. It was slightly disconcerting when the pilot spread a topo map over the dashboard and said, "Where exactly did you want to go?" but once we located the mouth of Arrigetch creek, he made a pass to inspect the river bank, then set down the plane on the cobble, more smoothly than a jet on a runway. While we unloaded our gear, someone asked if he knew any of the climbing routes in the Arrigetch. He said he'd heard good things about these peaks, but that he himself hadn't ever climbed here. He added that he hadn't climbed much since his kids had been born.

"It seemed any time I'd go climbing it would end up a body recovery."

"Oh."

Dirk jumped back in the plane and left us knee-deep in black plastic bear-proof food barrels. He asked if we had a satellite phone for emergencies.

"No."

"Well, you'll probably be fine," he said. "See you in two weeks."

If this expedition had a leader, it was probably Jeff Pflueger. It was his idea, anyway. Jeff is the quintessential Outward Bound instructor: square-jawed, sandy haired, a bit stronger than a mule, and owner of a toothy smile that widens in proportion to danger and hardship. For many years Jeff was an expert kayaker, but then got bored and decided he'd try climbing. So he bought a book called Big Wall Climbing and went to Yosemite and climbed the Prow of Washington Column. Then he climbed Denali. Then he returned to Yosemite and tried El Capitan. He recounts getting ambushed by a sleet storm a thousand feet up the granite wall, and making a hasty to rappel to the ground: soaked to the skin, fingers numb, ropes frozen stiff. When Jeff tells the story he laughs with a squawk and concludes, "It was so funny!"

While Jeff is exuberant, his climbing partner is precise. Tall, rail-thin and bearded, Robert MacKinnon is also an Outward Bound instructor, and he did not think the icy retreat from El Cap was funny; he told me it sucked. Robert had wanted to delay the climb due to the storm predicted, but Jeff had said that forecasts could not be trusted, and the weather would be beautiful. Robert has been accused-by Jeff-of methodically planning his climbs using army men tied with string. Robert denied it. They were not army men, he insisted, but rather little pieces of paper with numbers written on them that could be moved around to demonstrate where climbers would be.

After deboarding the plane, finding a way up Arrigetch Creek was not as easy as we'd hoped. Faint trails appeared in the pine trees then petered out. Jeff and Robert had been on the first flight, and they tried hiking up the creek itself, and soon found themselves chest-deep in frigid water, confined by the steep rock walls. They left us a note at the food cache recommending we follow a faint trail on the slope above the creek. We found the trail, celebrated, and then quickly lost the trail and slogged through the muskeg for an hour. The packs were unreasonably heavy, as they always are. With each step I sunk deep into the soft turf. We found ourselves hopping over a steep talus field, covering about quarter-mile in an hour. Finally we discovered a well-worn trail, and by sunset we'd found the others camped along the creek.

The Arrigetch Valley is big and pretty in the way that the ocean is blue and wet. Tucked between the towering walls of granite, our camp was barely a speck. If you were to set a lemon on the front steps of the U.S. Capitol building, take two-hundred paces back and have a look-that's how it felt to catch first glimpse of our largest tent. Though the peaks are only six or seven thousand feet in elevation, most of the height is gained by an almost mile-high jump from the valley floor. And because it's so hard to get here, the Arrigetch sees only a few hundred visitors per year. The peaks were first climbed in the sixties and seventies, and they have seen only a few dozen attempts since then.

©Jeff Pflueger

We crossed the creek on cobblestones, threw off our packs, and got to setting up stoves and tents. It was the last week of August, and we'd been warned that we were cutting it close to wintertime. Most groups came in June or July, and we were prepared for storms, to be tentbound for two weeks. Secretly I thought rain would be fine: I had Dostoyevsky, after all.

But the next morning the sky was blue and the sun was brilliant, and we postponed another trudge back to the Alatna for the remaining food, and instead went to explore. We discovered a wonderland. The Arrigetch peaks tear up through the tundra like sharpened fangs of some beast, spilling talus and glacier into the creekbottoms below. Pooled between the snow-dusted spires, reservoirs of runoff glisten a phosphorescent blue-green which I'd previously thought occurred only in mouthwash and antifreeze, not in nature.

But as I swooned at the knife-blade ridges and knife-point peaks, my rapture was offset by a knot in my gut: There was no way I could get up these peaks without a rope. Fact was, I was afraid to even try. Having worried that the rest of the Arrigetch party might be a bit too enthusiastic about climbing, I had recruited my friend Erik Bluhm to come along. He lives in Los Angeles and is my collaborator in a now-bankrupt magazine, part-time lackey in a swank art gallery, occasional spinner of country-western 45s in a dingy bar, and otherwise a generally sullen graduate student of California history. And though he spends a lot of time in the backcountry, I chose him not as an outdoorsman, but because I hoped he might like to sit around reading books. Erik is even less of a rockclimber than me, but after giving my proposition a week's consideration, he cancelled his enrollment at the university and bought a ticket to Fairbanks. But once in the Arrigetch, Erik turned out not to be the homebody I'd hoped for.

"This route up the backside of the Citadel looks okay," he said the first thing next morning. "Come out and have a look."

"Hold on: Raskalnikov is about to murder the pawnbroker."

There is no guidebook for the Arrigetch, but the serious climbers had come prepared with various scraps of data procured online: hand-drawn topos and thirty-year old accounts of first ascents. Studying these maps, Erik was convinced that we could walk up a certain aspect of the stunning granite peak called the Citadel. I personally doubted it, but after much bickering I saw that there was only one way to prove myself right. We got up before daylight and ate a pot of oatmeal.

"We better bring a sleeping bag," I said. "Seeing as we'll probably get stuck up there and have to bivy."

"Are you going to complain all day?"

"This is your idea."

"Shut up," he said.

I made a big deal of stretching my legs and making a wincing face whenever I bent my knee, but Erik ignored me, and at first light we set up a steep talus slope. Jeff and Robert were also attempting a route up the Citadel, and so we brought radios and planned to check in the afternoon, and maybe meet up at the summit.

None of us made it to the top. Erik and I scrambled up 2500 feet of loose rock and friction slabs and eventually reached the ridge below the summit. I took one peak over the edge into Aquarius Valley, and the vertigo set in. I dropped to my knees and gripped the rock and looked down at the tiny green lakes glimmering below. I had little faith that the whole ridge wouldn't give way. I crawled away from the lip and Erik and I ate our lunch on the spectacular ridge. We regarded the final pitches of the Citadel: steep, sharp, and loose, a terrifying proposition even with ropes. No way. I had been waiting all day to say I-told-you-so, but now the view was so cool and I was so glad to be there, that I forgot to mention it.

We radioed to our friends, and Robert reported that they were stuck in a steep gully smeared with birdshit, and that Jeff was currently knocking down loose rocks overheard.

"It sucks," Robert said.

I was pretty sure I could here Jeff laughing in the background.

So we all four retreated from the Citadel and met partway down the talus field. We descended back to the valley, and once within earshot of the gurgling creek falling through stones, we crawled over the red autumn fields of bear berries and fed ourselves till our fingers were stained purple.

We had expected to meet bears, which was why we'd packed all our food in bear cans, and why we carried with us spray cans of mace-hot sauce, as skeptics call the stuff-flavoring for when the bear eventually eats you. But despite the well-used camps that generally attract them, we never saw one. Which was not necessarily a result of excellent campcraft. We had arranged to cook in climbing pairs, so that each pair would be self-sufficient, and by the twelfth day, Jeff's frank dismissal of culinary hygiene had infuriated Robert.

"Why wash the pot?" Jeff reasoned. "It all tastes the same anyway."

More than once I'd seen Robert storm from the kitchen with the wretched pot, and with a posture that said at once your-sloth-is-causing-me-great-pain and look-how-easy-this-is-if-you-just-get-off-your-ass-and-do-it, he scooped up some creek water, scrubbed it with gravel and flung the wastewater into the tundra, one hundred paces from the water.

"I don't mean to be your mother," someone called from the kitchen, late one night, "but someone left their dirty dishes out."

"That was me," called Jeff, the moonlight catching a flash of his cornfed smile. He was lugging around a camera a tri-pod, heading off to photograph the northern lights. The advantage of late summer's dark nights is that on cloudless nights the sky opens up into a light show of green shafts and yellow glows. Jeff had optimistically tried to explain the science of it several times, but I simply didn't get it-or maybe I didn't want to get it. I just knew that whenever someone shouted in the middle of the night to look up at the sky, all the unzipping and crawling around was worth the spectacle of the night sky alit and the natural wonder of that which I could not explain.

Robert was feeling sick-probably from eating out of a filthy cookpot-so Jeff and hatched a plan to climb Wichman Tower together. I'd accepted that I wasn't going to get to the top of anything without a rope, and now that I was so close, the peaks were more inviting than Russian books. The route involved a long approach on a cracked glacier followed by some roped climbing. We set out with Erik and Nettie Pardue, another Outward Bound instructor who'd flown up from New Mexico just for this trip. She is a Taos ski-patroller in the winter, but this was her first time in Alaska. In the evening we packed light packs and headed up canyon, to where Arrigetch creek was a meandering trickle in a green meadow. The granite walls loomed overhead. Erik and I had brought a tent, so we made camp at the top of the meadow. Jeff and Nettie didn't have a tent, so they climbed the talus looking for something to sleep under.

We woke in the morning to a rainstorm. The peaks were socked in. Erik and I got dressed and ate grits. Then Jeff radioed and said that they were bivied underneath some boulders at the base of the glacier. "We're going back to sleep and see if it stops raining," he said. This was great news to me, as I was approaching Raskalnikov's confession, and I slipped out of my jacket and back into my sleeping bag.

When the storm broke an hour later, Erik and I dressed and hiked up to meet the others. We'd lost a big chunk of the day. No one wanted to start such a long route in bad weather and oncoming darkness. So I proposed that we go tool around with crampons and ice axes on some other unnamed glacier in the vicinity. Erik and Nettie had never been on a glacier, and Jeff and I could give a short lesson.

So we set out over the boulder field, strapped on crampons, and went walking across the ice. And once we got to the steep part, we stood there looking up at the gaping bergshrund that split the headwall. We couldn't see the top of the glacier. No one had brought a map.

"Let's climb it," said Erik.

We looked at each other. It was five PM.

"Okay."

So we broke out the rope and began to tie in. Jeff and I tied on our prussiks-knots that would catch us if we fell into a crevasse.

"Do you two have prussiks?" I said to Erik and Nettie.

They shook their head.

We looked back up at the crevasses.

"It looks like we can avoid those," I said.

Jeff stifled a snort as if trying to stop his beverage from spilling out his nose. I knew that no matter what disaster lay ahead, he would one day look back and describe it as a good time.

"Mark and I will go first," he said, "so if anyone falls through, it'll probably be us."

Erik and Nettie nodded. Blissful ignorance. Now I wanted to climb, and I didn't want to talk them out of it. So we roped up and I led. I kicked steps into the wind blown crust, and probed into what looked like snow-covered cracks with my axe. I stepped over the hollow parts. After all my pretending to not be a climber, it was still fun. Once I actually punched through a snow bridge and felt one leg dangling over nothingness, but with a quick jump I landed on solid snow. We proceeded like soldiers, marching in time, each separated by forty feet of rope. All else faded away except my footsteps and my breathing. I was sweating. I unzipped my jacket and counted to two between each step. Every step my crampon broke into some soft snow and I slid down half the inches I'd gained. Sheer granite rose off each side of the glacier, and crevasses crept toward me in the center.

And then the angle decreased and I could see the top of the ridge. We unroped atop the snowy pass and there the gradual slope of the glacier was cut by a sheer and dizzying drop, like we'd reached the edge of the flat earth and were looking down at a different planet. Below was a flat gray river valley amidst a never-ending jumble of jagged peaks and rolling tundra. The evening sun broke through the storm clouds in smoky yellow shafts. Cold drafts of mist floated past us on the ridge.

"I think we're at the continental divide," someone said. "But I'll have to look at the map we get back."

Somehow I must have suspected that I would not get another chance at Wichman Tower-it would storm the next day and we would return to base camp. So I savored the top of that ridge as if it were a summit. Jeff and Erik headed off to try to find a route up the peak beside us, and Nettie and I waited there on the divide, spellbound by the bigness and the remoteness and the alpenglow burning on the distant towers. And finally when they returned unsuccessful we roped up again and without saying very much descended the glacier and hiked back to camp.

On the seventeenth day we loaded everything into our packs and returned to the banks of the Alatna to await our pick up. That night a wet storm blew in, the worst weather we'd had. We got up early and organized camp for our departure. Twenty six bear-proof food containers were lined up on the edge of the gravel bar that served as runway. The climbing gear was consolidated under a tarp. The storm continued. Finally everyone went back to their tents, and suddenly what I'd speculated about for this entire trip was true: we were at the mercy of the arctic weather. We had enough food for two days, and then what? What if winter came early and dropped a foot of snow on our runway? It was a hundred miles to the nearest road.

At dinner time the storm was howling worse than ever, and we had to string up another tarp to cook under. We squatted in the mud and cooked our leftover food. Should we eat all these bean flakes now? Or save half for-well I don't know when we'd be saving it for, but it seems we'd better save it.

After dinner the clouds broke and the stars appeared. At three AM I was awakened by a shout and I unzipped my tent and poked out my head. "Wake up," someone called. "Look outside!" There among the scattered storm clouds, the wide shafts of the aurora borealis lit the sky.

The next day the rain stopped but clouds sank to the valley floor. When we heard a propeller we all ran out from the tents: there it was! We scrambled for the radio and called the pilot, but it wasn't our plane. He said things were pretty backed-up after the storm, and he didn't know if our pilot was on the way. Back to the tents.

Dirk touched town later in the afternoon, and when we returned to Coldfoot that evening, it felt like the nick of time. Dirk said the Indian Summer was ending and the cold front was moving in from Siberia. It was about to be winter.

So after burgers at the Coldfoot truck stop, we packed all ten of us into the van and headed south for Fairbanks. The roof rack was stacked high with backpacks, and an extra can of gasoline-this time of year, this time of night, there is no place to fill up on the Dalton Highway. The arctic sky spread itself out across the Brooks Range in yellow. The rolling hills were red with autumn. A construction crew was working the graveyard shift on the Jim River bridge, and we slowed to a crawl and had to straddle to iron planks to get across a lane-wide ditch. With the big van groaning and coughing beneath its load, we strained up hills and coasted into valleys. The road was empty except for the occasional eighteen-wheeler and the rare gunshot roadsign for a place like Gobbler's Knob or Connection Rock. As darkness came, most everyone was asleep, shoulder to shoulder, heads bobbing. On a long flat stretch the driver killed the headlights, and those of us still awake craned toward the window for a last look at the northern lights.