Preparation

"... in exploration, what cannot be predicted is what is around the next bend in the river or on the other side of the hill. The planning process, therefore, is as much guesswork as it is intelligent forecasting of the physical needs of the expedition. It tends to be frustrating, because the planner carries with him a nagging sense that he is making some simple mistakes that could be easily corrected in the planning stage, but may cause a dead loss when the mistake is discovered midway through the voyage."

-- Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage (The story of the Lewis and Clark expedition)

All of the gear. Except for packraft, paddle, PFD, bear spray and a bit more food.

As you expect, there is more preparation for a solo wilderness excursion into the arctic than perusing a few blogs and buying a plane ticket.

I am not a Les Stroud wilderness survival guy. I was not an Eagle Scout. I cannot run a marathon. I'm literally allergic to my own sweat. Prior to this trip, I had never been camping by myself for more than 24 hours.

Even so, I felt I was not going in woefully unprepared. While not in superstar athlete shape, I wasn't in horrible shape either: I could jog for 4 or 5 miles without doubling over. I had done a fair amount of hiking and camping in a variety of environments. Most significantly, my former girlfriend and I had done a six-day camping trip through the Denali backcountry. While not the arctic, it was both wilderness and in Alaska and I had practice with river crossings, tundra terrain, bushwhacking and other relevant experiences.

But the more I read the more I realized that this was not going to be simply a longer version of that trip. The Denali backcountry was legitimately described as wilderness. But the Gates of the Arctic was described as "wilderness on crack." And I was going in alone.

I prepared a list of everything I needed to do before I could consider myself reasonably ready for the adventure. I needed to select a route. I needed to know what range of weather I might encounter. I needed a gear list. I needed to obtain any gear that I did not already have. Any new gear needed to be tested.


Research

Reading blogs and staring at maps was an excellent source of inspiration, but for real planning the best source of information was talking with people who knew the terrain. Most horror stories of someone going into the wilderness and suffering some terrible fate seem preventable with a bit more research. I talked with locals who chartered flights into the area and got an idea of what were reasonable start and end points. I discussed my plans at length with a park ranger, Zach Richter, both on the phone and in person when I finally arrived in Bettles.

Zach was exceptionally helpful-- although he had not been to the area where I was flying into, he had spent a lot of time in the park and talked to visitors, pilots, rescue personal and police who went in. He had a good idea what the weather might be like, how bad the bugs would be, what gear worked, and what the terrain might actually be like. "Pretty easy once you get up on the benches," he'd point out as we traced a possible route on his computer, "but this looks steepy-steepy. Could get jammed up in there pretty bad before it opens up."

On the phone, we had talked about gear. He approved of my choice to rent a Bearikade Expedition for a food storage. He nixed my idea of going with a down sleeping bag. And he turned me on to a new idea: Packrafting. More on this later, but a packraft is a sturdy, lightweight, inflatable boat that would change rivers from obstacles into highways.

Gear

I had sort of assumed that I was pretty set on gear, since I still had almost everything we'd used on the Denali trip. But as I assembled my list, I discovered that what I had wasn't going to cut it: My two man tent was far too heavy for a single person to carry. My 20 degree bag had lost too much loft and would not keep me warm enough. My rain jacket's waterproofing was failing and was too heavy besides. I needed to rent a satellite phone. My camera was too fragile for rafting usage. Even my trusty boots, well broken-in and comfortable, promptly disintegrated the weekend before I left, forcing me to purchase a new, expensive and unbroken-in pair.

Practically everything was in want of replacement or upgrade except my camping spoon (which would break in two on the third day, and three pieces on the sixth).

Besides equipment, I would need food and lots of it. I was aiming to spend at least 10 days out, possibly 12 or more. 1.5 pounds of high-calorie food per day was a conservative estimate for someone my weight. While drinkable water is plentiful in Alaska, I might be half a day's travel from it at times when crossing between drainages or climbing a peak. And to be safe, I would want to treat many water sources, so I could expect to be caring 1-2 liters at a time.

In total, my actual starting "skin-out" weight (the weight of everything I carried outside my own skin) was over 65 pounds:

Open the gear list in GoogleDocs

And all of this would need to be carried, by me, for days over terrain that had no obligation to be easy or even feasible. My previous experience with Alaskan wilderness suggested that difficult travel would be the rule.

But without making major compromises on my route, duration or safety, there wasn't much I could do except try to get into better shape. I was not in bad shape to begin with. But I was in less good shape (and a few years older) than my last trip to Alaska, where I was carrying at most 50 pounds. So I did squats. I did 1-2 hour hikes with 45, 60 and finally almost 70 pounds. I did an overnight with superfluous gear. While all of this training certainly helped, it also made it abundantly clear that this was going to be a seriously demanding trip, and a couple months was an optimistic period to prepare.