The Idea

Early this year, to pull myself out of a funk, I embarked on an ambitious project to do something different every single day for the month of February. The project was such a success I found myself a few months later thinking I'd like to do something else different. Something too big for a single day event, something epic and adventurous.

I'd recently been looking at US National Parks and recalled one park that seemed the epitome of adventure: The Gates of The Arctic. Even the name was epic. It sounded like a D&D adventure, not an actual place. Or a location that might be introduced by the phrase "Indiana Jones and."

And its description was wild. The northernmost US National Park, it's entirely north of the Arctic circle. There are no roads in it, no maintained trails, campsites or services. The only practical way to access most of it is by bush or float plane from one of the nearby villages of Bettles or Coldfoot. The second largest  National Park, combined with the Noatak to the west it forms the largest contiguous wilderness in the US. Despite being almost the size of Switzerland, the park service logged fewer than 1000 overnight visitors in 2010.

Reading up on it, I became convinced I had to go there. Its general inaccessibility has prevented it from becoming overly popular. There's a real opportunity for exploration: while indigenous people have inhabited the region for millenia, remarkably little information is available for large parts of it. There are no guidebooks for the park. Apart from a very general National Geographic Trail Illustrated map, the only maps are USGS topographic maps at 1 inch = 1 mile scale. The maps were produced from aerial photographs and leave a lot of room for ambiguity. Two contour lines might represent a steep, but negotiable 30 degree grade, or two nearly level ridges separated by a 50 feet cliff. There was no way to know. They might even be simply wrong about elevations.

Which routes are navigable? What peaks are climbable?

Staring at the maps got my imagination running. I tried to envision what the terrain would actually be like. Having been to Alaska before, further south in Denali, I had experience with tundra, but how similar would it be?

The best information available seemed to be the online blogs from previous visitors. And those focused on the more popular areas, such as the dagger-like Arrigetch peaks or eponymous Gates themselves. Some of the off-the-beaten-track areas I was looking at were completely devoid of information. Given the size of the park and the small number of visitors meant that some of the more remote areas may have not been visited by modern humans. Or at least, if they had, no one had gotten around to writing about it.

The notion of hiking through a valley or pass that was for all practical purposes, unexplored, gave me chills.

That's pretty hard to find nowadays. Every square mile of land on the Earth's surface has been  photographed by satellites and mapped, at least to a rough degree. There are 1:250,000 scale maps available for the whole of Antarctica. While there are large areas where man has yet to glean every last bit of data, they are shrinking fast. Just over 200 years ago when Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore the American West, he had little details of what lay west of the Mississippi; the possibility they might encounter woolly mammoths (whose bones had recently been discovered) was not fanciful. In 1911, a Peruvian native boy led Hiram Bingham up a mountain to the remarkably preserved ruins of Machu Picchu, whose remote location had protected it from discovery by the Spanish.

Today I can, from the comfort of my desk, load up Google Earth and explore via satellite imagery every remote corner of the world and even see the photos that on-the-ground visitors have uploaded. I can do a virtual fly-over of the route of Lewis and Clark took. I can book a hotel room that overlooks Machu Picchu. It's impressive and a little sad at the same time.

Google Earth's imagery for the Gates of The Arctic was helpfully detailed in places, and tantalizingly vague in others.

Still, there are remote valleys and passes in the world whose details remain essentially unknown. We might be lucky to be living in the first generation for which low-cost air travel made these practically accessible to someone not willing to dedicate years to the expedition, and the last generation before they've all been photographed in detail and cataloged in numerous blogs. 

As the idea gelled in my head, I decided I wanted to cross the fuzzy line from "fantasy adventure" to actual, real-life adventure. I've found the most effective way to make this happen is to make some "committing action" that binds me to the project. So I picked a time period after mosquitoes would be well past peak but before there was sure to be snow on the ground and booked a ticket to Fairbanks. The date was a couple months away, so there was plenty of time to research, prepare and get in shape.

Leveling-up from "imaginary wilderness adventurer" to "actual wilderness adventurer" requires a new guidebook.