Adventure Luxury in the Arctic: Kobuk to Kotzebue on Skinny Skis

I'm not exactly sure where I got the idea. I'm not the first person, though. 

The next time I saw Bob I asked him:

"Hey Bob. Wanna ski from Kobuk to Kotzebue next spring?"

"Yeah!"

That's what I like about Bob.

We pondered more people to invite. Robin wanted to come. I was cool with it, because I didn't really know Robin.

Drive to Anchorage. Fly to Kotzebue. Say what you will about Alaska Airlines' combis - planes that are half cargo, half seating - but they have the "old style" seats, so there is actually room for my big ass to sit down. 

This awesome map was made by Robin Beebee.

This awesome map was made by Robin Beebee.

In Kotz we changed planes and jumped in a Bering Air Navajo for the hour-or-so flight to Kobuk.

Above the clouds in the Navajo. 

The airstrip in Kobuk was pretty quiet. It was still fairly early, and village life isn't known for its early starts.  

A little product placement - Bob and I's extra-special skis for the trip. There is a remarkable amount of air traffic to the villages, a lot of which appears to be empty planes. This empty Ravn plane landed just behind our Bering flight. 

We're off! Robin skims through town on fresh snow. We were headed for the river. 

Skating on the river through the fresh snow.

Bob.

The trail left the river and headed into the trees. 

Gettin' near Shungnak.

r

Robin. This was probably the warmest day of the whole trip.

Shungnak. It was only somewhere between 8 and 12 miles to Shungnak from Kobuk. We'd planned a short day on our first day to leave time for kerfuffles with the airplanes, which are common on the west coast. But we had none, and thus made it to Shungnak in the early afternoon.

We went for a walk around town. There is a snowmachine trail that roughly circles the village along the outside edge. We referred to it as the 'beltway.'

  

The Shungnak school. Bob and Robin were really impressed. I'd been to the NANA region before, so I knew it would be nice. Still, I was pretty impressed, too.

We stayed at the school, and visited classrooms.

Portraits of Inupiaq elders hang in the hallways.

One of my big regrets from the trip is that I didn't take a portrait of the principal, Roger Franklin. Lars Flora said he was the "most interesting person in rural Alaska [he has] come across." Roger is a tall black man from Arkansas. He'd been in the Northwest Arctic for a long time - I forget exactly, but at least 10 years. He has a pretty significant stutter. And he was the best school principal I'd ever seen.  The staff obviously loved him. The students obviously loved him. And though I'm not normally a fan of a lot of discipline, this is a place where too little discipline is far more likely to be a problem than too much. The control Roger had over the school and the student body was incredible, and yet it appeared to come easily - the students just seemed to want to do what he said. The man was very easy to admire.

After the trip, while I stood in Lars' office in Anchorage discussing the trip, Lars told me that Roger was a competitive sprinter in his younger days, and that his personal best in the 400 meters was around 46 seconds. Lars expected me to be impressed, but I lacked context. My lack of understanding must have registered on my face:
"That's fucking fast," Lars clarified.
I figured it was faster than I could do it, and Lars is himself a two-time Olympian in cross country skiing, so I knew to take his opinion seriously. But I still lacked context.
"I think the world record at the time was something like 44."
"oh."

Roger obviously didn't care what we thought of him. But he obviously wanted us to be impressed with his school. And we were. He showed us around.
"Welcome to Shugnak!" an entire classroom of kids said in unison, without prompting, when we walked into the room.
"What comes first?" Roger asked the class.
"Education comes first!" they happily replied in unison.
"And what is education?"
"Education is a job!"

Roger, when he spoke to the kids, did not have a trace of a stutter.

I had some connection to the school, which is that I'd participated in NANANordic the previous year, and again the week before this trip. I hadn't been to Shungnak, but I knew the drill. Roger had kept up skiing at the school without the attendance of NANANordic coaches, so when we volunteered to take some kids out skiing in the afternoon, it was a simple thing. 

Robin

We had a restful night staying at the school, touched by the hospitality we received from Roger and the awesome staff. We took off the next morning for Ambler.

On the Beltway headed to the far side of the village. Shungnak apparently had quite a bit of snow, but it had melted/sublimated/blown away in the weeks before we showed up. We were saved by the dusting that arrived right before our arrival. But there was quite a bit more snow down by Ambler and further down valley.

These markers line the entire trail. In a region with no roads, the trails are the primary mode of transit between the villages - so much so that the markers are often paid for with Federal Highways money - and are very well used. Hence the title of this blog post: we were able to cover large distances through a remote* part of the world because of these trails. The Northwest Arctic of Alaska is a tough place: it's cold and windy, and has a long history that is quite distinct from the rest of the United States, given that Iñupiat culture still rules. It's far from life as we know it in the cities, even Alaskan cities.
And yet, we slept in doors every night, with all but one night in a village. We had heat and running water, and we could buy candy bars and cokes if we wanted them (no beers, though - the villages are dry). And we enjoyed tremendous hospitality everywhere we went.
It was an adventure. But it was luxurious.

* "remote" is, of course, relative. If you were born in Shungnak, NYC would be pretty remote.

Looking back at Shungnak.

Almost ice skateable.

Happy skier.

Alaska offers another reminder about the dangers of aviation. I've lost track of how many plane wrecks I've come across scattered around the state.

These trails are the highways of the region. 

Whenever I take one picture, I usually take 10, so they end up being a series. As I reviewed my photos from the trip, I saw that this series of Robin ended abruptly with this photo, which was apparently the beginning of the end of her interest in being civil.

Before we ran into two guys, who were on their way out to get firewood, we'd had a brief conversation with another woman passing by with a gorgeous fur hat and coat. I was chewing on my regret for having not taken her picture. So when this guy came by I asked if I could take his picture. "Are you guys friends of Hannah Corral?" he asked. "Yeah!" I replied, "we're staying with her mom."
"Yeah," he said. "Our place."
"Oh! Nice to meet you, then, Harry."
(I think I'd met him briefly once before, but it'd been a while.)

We continued on our way into Ambler. 

Ambler comes into view.

One of my good friends from high school's mom, Kim, is the doctor for Ambler, Shungnak and Kobuk. She lives in Ambler with her husband Harry (who we met out on the river), and they live in here in his childhood home. Staying with them was one of the highlights of our trip.

Real photographers always seem to know what's going on with their cameras. I'm not one of those people. Sometimes I barely review the photos after I take them, or I just don't know why my photos aren't coming out. Only after a while did I notice that my camera was really struggling with what should have been plenty of light. Finally I figured out that the ISO had gotten set on 100, rather than automatically selecting from a range. Did I do that on purpose at some point, and then forgot? Or did I just hit the wrong button with mittened hands? I'll never know. But I have this blurry photo of Robin to remind me of my shortcomings as a photographer, while Robin has this photo to remind us of her shortcomings as a person. 

Harry is a musher, and to feed his dogs for the winter he caught 3,000 whitefish, which he allowed to freeze and stacked them whole like cordwood. He then boils them up for the dogs. Robin helped Harry feed the pooches. 

Harry made this giant whitefish slurry. There is a new fishery for these fish, which have become prized at Jewish delis in New York for passover meals. This is true. 

Harry does not mush the morbidly obese Golden Retriever. That would be stupid. 

Harry dug into the freezer to get us some treats. He'd traded with friends on the coastal villages for this - I forget what he called it, but it's basically beluga muktuk. I think true muktuk is from bowhead whales, and it's raw. This is cooked, and beluga. Or maybe all this is nonsense, but at least it was definitely whale meat. I'd never had muktuk before, but had been warned that it's especially oily and chewy, with a very strong taste. This stuff was that, but it must have been less so, because it was pretty good. Robin uses an ulu to slice it up for us to take on the trail.  

Harry and Kim.

On our way out of Ambler we skied by the town dump. We felt the ridiculousness of taking a picture of the dump, but somehow there is something about a dump in the middle of the wilderness.
...and then we'd have to remind ourselves that to the people that live there it's not wilderness at all, but just home. It's no more wilderness than anywhere else, after all. Except it is. Except it isn't. Except really, it is.

Ambler to Kiana was the longest push of the trip - two 45 mile days, with the night spent at a shelter cabin almost exactly midway. The first of the two days was definitely the prettiest portion of the trip.

A huge number of the trail markers had caribou antlers on them. 

Robin has some of the muktuk. She's actually a vegan (this is true), but she was willing to make an exception for endangered marine mammals.

The theme of this day, and especially the next day, was wind. Here you can see the trail beginning to get blown in. What follows is a lot of pictures of Robin and Bob bundled up.

Robin bundled up. 

Bob zipping up.

Robin and Bob bundled up.

Bob bundled up.

Robin skates into the ferocious headwind.

Bob still zipping up.

Robin bundled up.

We regularly consulted the GPS to try to figure out if we were ever going to get out of the wind.

There were wolf prints all over the trail - we were told that a pack hangs out in this area. We didn't see them, though. Or any wildlife on the whole trip, really. That always happens to me, it seems. 

The sections where the trail leaves the river are called 'portages.' On the first day out of Ambler there were three of them.

This is the beginning of the third portage. It was beautiful - in fact, I'm a bit frustrated with myself, because I like to think that my attraction to photography is never having to tell people "the photos don't do it justice."

But my photos from that day really didn't do it justice. It was stunning.

A little product placement. How could I know, at the time that I took this photo, that I would break *both* of these skis during the trip?

The skate tracks are from Robin, who was on classic skis. The classic tracks are from Bob, who was on skate skis.

I saw this moment, pulled out my camera, and banged off this photo - before the camera had a chance to focus. I never got a second chance.

I think some of my dissatisfaction with my photos comes from having gotten a new zoom lens, and using the hell out of it. I have always used a lot of wide lenses, and I can't shake the feeling that I was right. 

It was a mind bending-ly beautiful evening, but the end of the evening was into a head wind, and a few miles longer than we wanted it to be. By the time we got to the shelter cabin, we all felt a bit like this:

Robin got some cool photos from inside the shelter cabin - a humble little structure, but with a wood stove and out of the wind. It was also scrawled all over the inside with people's names, dates, and what they were up to/where they were going.

The next day was entirely on the river. A lot looked like this. Some was worse. 

...this is what I mean by worse. We had a lot of headwind and blown-in trail. I'm not generally prone to meltdowns, but I had one on this particular day.
"I'm actively not enjoying myself," I bitched. "I'd rather be doing anything else. The second a fucking snowmachine comes by I'm getting on it."
Bob and Robin looked at each other.

No snowmachines came by. Not a single one. All day.

Generally, apart from breakage, I was pretty happy with these skis. But you could not possibly design a worse ski for skiing through snow drifts.

Robin, meanwhile, left these perfect tracks. I tried to stay ahead of Bob so he wouldn't fuck them up, not that I was doing any better than him.

It never really stopped being windy. But the wind eventually turned into a tailwind, which made all the difference. As day turned to evening, and we had a kicking tailwind blasting us down the trail in the evening light, my frown turned upside down. It also meant that we were averaging around 10mph, which was a big improvement from one, which is what we were doing earlier in the day when fighting the headwind.
(Robin's GPS had the coordinates of the next village, Kiana, programmed in. At one point, fighting upwind around a bend, then back downwind through stupidly deep drifts, we spent almost two hours fighting with the weather. Due to our slow progress and the circuitous route, however, the GPS showed us no closer to Kiana.)

While it stayed windy, the trail stopped being drifted and was hard snow or ice. There was a stretch of time that was good, old fashioned fun as we rocketed down the river. This was the last photo I took in the waning light. 

The next day, wandering around Kiana. 

It was at the bed and breakfast that we stayed at in Kiana when I realized that my skis were beginning to disassemble themselves....

But there was naught to do but keep on, keeping on. We blasted the 25 miles to Noorvik in about 4 hours, on trails that looked like this (and suddenly with way more snowmachine traffic).

Boats parked outside Noorvik.

Bob skis into Noorvik.

More attempts at ski repairs at the school in Noorvik. Robin exclusively did it, since I don't really have the patience for things like this. She did as absolutely, positively good of a job as you possibly can. Unfortunately, that's not very good, as skis are not really repairable. 

Well, that'll hafta do.

Starting the last day of the trip, the ski from Noorvik, out to the ocean, and then across to Kotzebue on the Baldwin Peninsula. Bob decided the night before to fly back to Kotz to meet us, and not do the ski. It was classic Bob - he'd been having trouble breathing for some mysterious reason, but didn't say a word about it until he announced that he couldn't keep going. He never said a word on the river when he was breathing hard and only sort of keeping up. We were bummed to lose him, but if you know Bob you know that he was really disappointed to not do the ski with us, and so it must have been serious.

The ski leaving Noorvik wasn't super interesting, just a bunch of miles on the Kobuk before crossing into swamp lands at the delta. But I was excited about getting to the sea ice, since I'd never been on sea ice before. 

Just as a reminder, I thought I'd put in this awesome map made by Robin Beebee again. We are on the final stretch, between Noorvik and Kotzebue.

Robin is an insane narcissist. She's like a tiny, impoverished Donald Trump that also likes skiing. 

As the ground became swampier, it became hard to tell what kind of terrain we were on. This must have been a lake. 

An abandoned hunting cabin.

and we kept on, keepin' on. 

Another abandoned (or semi-abandoned) hunting camp.

Basketball is big time in rural Alaska.

Lots of old cabins along the lower part of the river. 

After six days and 200 miles, we finally reached the mouth of the Kobuk River where it drained into Kotzebue Sound. Robin celebrates.

No big downhills coming up.

Hotham Inlet under the bright midday sun.

Someone put this couch out on the ice next to a pressure ridge that ran for as far as we could see. Say what you will about littering - there are doubtlessly uncountable thousands of couches littering the ocean - but this is the only one that has ever made me laugh.

Initially, Robin was doubtful that there was even water underneath the ice, saying the water was likely very shallow in summer - almost just a tidal flat, and non-existent in the winter. "Water moves," she observed. "If there was water, there would be features in the ice." Then we found this feature. "Oh huh," she said. 

In a frustratingly stupid fuckup, evident throughout my photos from this trip, I didn't use a small enough aperture to make the sun a starburst, instead creating a big white blob. It was amateur-hour on the Kobuk - but amateur hour lasted for a week.

Couch potato.

A shelter cabin on the other side of the inlet, just getting off of the sea ice. At this point I suddenly got really weirdly out-of-breath. Skiing at the same pace that I'd been skiing all day was suddenly very difficult. I thought I must be getting sick, but then after the trip I didn't get sick and felt fine. Then about a week later I got the flu. So did I get sick, fight it off, then have it come back? Or did Robin just thrash me? Or could it have been the high-altitude?*

*this last part is a joke. 

Starting the 10-or-so mile ski across the Baldwin Peninsula to the end of the trip in Kotzebue.

Though Robin was difficult to keep up with the entire trip, suddenly keeping up with her was impossible. I took photos to pretend like that was the reason, but it's also worth mentioning that I'm no Bob Gillis: Bob was stoic about his difficulties, whereas at the first sign of shortness of breath, I used my precious little wind to bitch as vociferously as I could. 

Kotzebue's infrastructure comes into view. We don't know what this thing is.

As the trail merged with the roads, Robin was careful to obey the traffic patterns. 

Finally, Kotzebue comes into view. 

We were glad to see it. 

The final stretch into town. Except that we actually wandered all over trying to get someone to give us correct directions to the bed and breakfast that we were staying at. 

After we'd arrived in Kotz we did some walking around (and a lot of eating). Kotz is a funny place - it's like an oversized village. Someone told us that you didn't need a license or registration to drive on any of the roads in Kotzebue. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but there were a number of vehicles like this one that I'm certain are impossible to register in the US. This one was a right-side drive and everything. 

Someone clearly using the window as a major entrance and egress for the house.

Along the waterfront. This is the opposite side of the Baldwin Peninsula from where we came in, and this overlooks Kotzebue Sound.

Someone's dog was given an entire frozen fish as dinner. 

...and like that, it was The End.