Nature Observation in Alaska - Footprints in the Last Wild Place (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine February 2003

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Footprints in the Last Wild Place (Cont.)

LEAVING THE LAST FOOTHILLS behind, the Kongakut River descended into the flat coastal plain of the Barren Ground, where we hoped to cross Siku Lagoon to the barrier island known as Icy Reef. Having cleansed itself of the storm roil of a few days ago, the water was clear jade over the stones, fresh turquoise in the channels. In the brilliant air, the whites of the passing birds brightened the green-gray monotones

Soon the current passed through overflow ice, deepening the chill of a hard wind that slowed the boats. The ice wall was broken here and there by eroded banks over stony earth, presenting a grisly appearance as if a mammoth tusk might protrude at any moment.

of the tundra. Soon the current passed through overflow ice, up to six feet high on both banks of the channel, deepening the chill of a hard northeast wind that slowed the heavy round-bowed boats. The ice wall was broken here and there by eroded banks over ice-filled stony earth, presenting a grisly and primordial appearance, as if a mammoth tusk might protrude at any moment. On a high bank over a river bend sat a small statue of white ice, which from a distance looked like a melted snowman, but the snowman's head revealed a yellow eye—a snowy owl, which in the next instant flopped down and away over the channel. Leaving the delta, the bottom changed to the gray, clay mud of the brackish lagoon. Warmed by the endless sunlight, the lagoon was full of nutrients, supporting great numbers of waterfowl and shorebirds, but on this tide it was too shallow to float the boats; finally we dragged them a half-mile across the lagoon to a likely campsite out on Icy Reef, a narrow gravel spit perhaps 60 yards across and four feet above sea level that separates the lagoon from the drift ice and the Arctic Ocean. Crowding the reef's outer beach, the sculpted forms of stranded icebergs extended offshore a half-mile, reflecting like floating sculptures in the still, black water, which was broken now and then by the dark, skinny head of a ringed seal. We had four days to explore this region before the planes came to pick us up.

Taking a kayak on the second day, I set out across the glassy stillness. Long-tailed duck, eider, and loon pitched in nearby, making a soft, whispering rush as they subsided into the mirror. Where the sea had broken through the barrier island, a large, grayish seal—the bearded seal—parted the surface and slid beneath again, but another was so taken aback by our sudden confrontation that it whirled in a great thrash as it disappeared.

I drifted for a long time in the light of endless day. Off to the south, beyond the plain, rose the steep ramparts of the northernmost mountains of the New World. Off to the west, thin wisps of sunlit rain drifted over the 1002. Across the water, on a low cliff where the barren ground touches the sea, walked the misted silhouettes of caribou, and near the caribou a pair of sandhill cranes. On the beach crest, upright and heraldic on a silver limb, a magnificent peregrine, gray-blue above and lightly barred ivory on the breast and belly, watched the half-man in the gliding craft without the smallest twitch of wing.

That night was spent on the tundra across the lagoon, near an old hunting and fishing camp with an ancient log cabin, a small graveyard, and some grassy platforms where tents were erected and large hides pegged out to be scraped and dried. The Inupiat hunters come here less often now, according to Robert Thompson, who told me that his Inupiat people, accustomed to motor snowsleds and outboard boats, rarely need to camp so far from home. In the quarter-century since the first oil left the Arctic slope in the trans-Alaska pipeline, the dogsled and the dogs themselves have largely vanished.

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