Going Solo: Isolation

I've always been a little bit of a loner. I enjoy plenty of "me" time and spending a couple days by myself can be a refreshing way to recharge. But I realized that this trip was going to be upping the isolation bar further than I'd taken it before. This was the most remote place I'd ever been. On the first day I would come within 70 miles of the furthest point in the US from human habitation. I would be starting 150 miles from the nearest highway. Ranger Zack in Bettles guessed the nearest other hikers might be almost 50 straight-line miles away in the Arrigetch region.

I could potentially be without outside stimulus for the whole time I was out-- no people, no phone calls, no Internet, no books. I hadn't even brought an iPod. Just me, my thoughts, and the vast Arctic wilderness expanding in all directions farther than I could see or walk in a month.

The emptiness was both exhilarating and intimidating.

When far from civilization, one is not merely half as many as two.

For one thing, you need to carry more weight. Gear that normally could be split between two people (cooking pot, tent, first aid, etc.) is entirely on you. This is merely a physical inconvenience.

On a deeper level, you have gone from one partner on your adventure to zero. No one else is there to pick up your spirits when you're feeling down. Nobody is there to remind you where you put the fire striker. No one to talk to.

Different people have different needs when it comes to social interaction. Some people get by for weeks without so much as a phone call or posting on an Internet forum to remind them they're not alone in the world. Other people need to chat with friends or coworkers throughout the day or they feel isolated. But everyone eventually needs someone or they start to go off the rails.

The lack of moral support did try me at times. Being entirely self-sufficient is an empowering feeling, but creates an opportunity for self-doubt.

There were a few occasions after I suffered some setback where I began to question whether I was really prepared for this sort of thing.

On the second evening, exhausted from a challenging day's hike and unable to find a decent camp spot, I cooked my first dinner wilderness dinner and was alarmed to see how much more fuel it took than I had budgeted. It would probably not cook six more meals, certainly not ten.

The problem was serious, but not life threatening. I had a decent (although insufficient) supply of food that did not need cooking. I still had fuel to cook some, just not all, my meals. Assuming I could find sufficient dry wood, anything I could cook on the stove, I could cook by campfire. I imagined that pasta or rice could probably be rendered at least edible by soaking in cold water. I could call my pilot and request an earlier pick-up, admitting defeat. And failing all else, a healthy individual will not starve to death in two weeks.

But at this moment it seemed to presage disaster. I had been in the wilderness for less than 36 hours and already a non-trivial flaw in my planning had appeared. Had I grossly overestimated my preparedness?

A companion could have put perspective on the situation and pointed out that I wasn't going to starve (I'm assuming an adventurous and optimistic companion; if you normally travel with a pessimistic Eeyore he may convince you that, yes, you are in fact going to die.) He or she might even have avoided the situation altogether by questioning my fuel assumptions.

Fortunately, food and a good night's sleep was enough to put the problem into a manageable perspective. The next morning I felt certain I could work around the problem somehow, and in fact the next afternoon I cooked a hearty meal over a campfire.

Lifeline to the Real World

Isolation dramatically increases the threat of most physical dangers. In the wilderness, a second person could rescue you from any number of potentially life-threatening scenarios: Save you from drowning with a throw line. Stave off hypothermia with their body heat. Provide a bear with someone else to eat. Most importantly, someone else can go for help.

I imagined slipping on a talus-covered slope and breaking a leg. Or being thrown into the icy Alatna and, delirious from hypothermia, making a series of unrecoverable blunders. It does not take a creative mind to come up with all sorts of calamities which, serious enough in the front country, would mean almost certain death without outside aid. If I ran into trouble in the (relatively) popular Arrigetch valley, it still might be days before someone else came along. On the upper Alatna, it could be weeks or longer. In some remote unnamed valley or pass where I had found no record of prior visitors, who knew?

Years ago, such risks were a hard fact of the wilderness. Today, the modern wilderness traveler has a few options for communications in even the most remote corner of the world. The most versatile and far-reaching is a satellite phone.

Iridium 9555 satellite phone, with antenna extended.

Normal cell phones communicate with their network by contacting a nearby ground transmitters, usually a tower, which joins the call to the network. There are no such transmitters in remote locations-- even in Bettles my cell phone wouldn't work.

Satellite phones like the Iridium shone above communicate directly with satellites orbiting the Earth. Iridium has a constellation of 66 satellites, each completing a polar orbit of the Earth every 100 minutes. With such a device, if I could see the sky, I could make a call to anyone. If you think about it, this is an unbelievable piece of technology, straight out of Star Trek.

Initially, during the more fantasy-driven stage of planning, I felt that a long-range communication device was outside the spirit of the adventure. The ability to contact anyone in the world at any time during my trip seemed like cheating. Satellite phones were insanely expensive and heavy. A satellite phone might cause me to take more risks, I rationalized, making me overly confident like someone who goes into the wilderness with just a cell phone assuming help is just a quick call away.

On the other hand, going into the Arctic wilderness by myself introduced enough dangers, it was ridiculous not to take every sensible precaution. While early satellite phones weighed a couple pounds, the latest Iridium phone was just under 10 ounces. They were expensive, but could be rented for under $100 a week. In an emergency, a satellite phone would be the piece of equipment most likely to be able to save my life. It was easy to envision some very plausible scenarios where I could be without one but wishing I did. It  took more imagination than I had to picture the reverse. Weather or remoteness might mean rescue was days away, but that's a lot better than waiting until I failed to show up at the pick-up point and hoping an aerial search would locate me.

Reality trumped idealism. I ordered a rental Iridium 9555 from an online store. For most of my trip it would sit in a Ziploc bag, in the inside pocket of my down vest, which was stuffed into my sleeping bag, inside a waterproof stuff sack. I didn't have to use it, but would know it was there, a ready lifeline to the outside world.