The Dangers of Solo Rafting

[If my mom is reading this, nothing like this ever happened.]

On my second day of rafting, the Weyahok joined the Alatna. I became skeptical of descriptions of the Alatna as Class I-II. There appeared to be boiling rapids everywhere, with standing wave trains whose crests were level with my head. Sometimes the rapids would run right alongside a bank of sweepers-- bent or fallen trees that lean out into the water and can snag boaters passing under.

Late in the morning I ran into some shallows. As I had learned the day before, I "planked" to coast out of them. With little water to run in, paddling did nothing and I had no way to steer the boat and emerged into  a set of rapids rushing straight into an Alder sweeper.

I reflexively put up my hand to push the branches away as they aimed for my face. The action slowed me against the sweeper, but my raft continued on. I felt the boat turning over and quickly pulled my legs out to avoid getting rolled under. I released the branch which then gave me a quick punch to the lip before snapping away.

I was in the water. In an instant, I pictured my raft drifting on ahead, righting itself once free of my weight.  It might beach itself at the next bend, or the one after. Or it might continue on without me for some time, finally getting snagged miles away. It might drift into one of the many small braids that break off the main river-- I'd have to search every one. Or it could get trapped dangerously out of reach once I found it, perhaps against a steep cliff wall behind deep, swirling rapids. I'd already passed several such points.

I quickly grabbed hold of my backpack's loops, tightly secured to the raft.

The water was only thigh deep, but forceful. Even this shallow, it was too strong to stand in unaided. It is dangerous to put your foot down in the river when overturned-- it is easy for it to get pinned under a rock as you struggle against the current. But I was focused on just one thing: getting my raft to the shore. The raft gave me buoyancy and I was able to flop out of the strong current with brief exertion of brute force. I javelinned the paddle to shore before putting both hands on my pack and heaving the raft to dry ground.

I was, naturally, soaked from chest to toe. Adrenaline and blood were pumping and I didn't feel cold. It was another warm day so hypothermia wasn't a danger once out of the icy water. But I was shaken by the experience. I would be careful of such obstacles in the future, but couldn't guarantee that I wouldn't be separated from the raft by other means. Without the raft I'd be sorely inconvenienced (and owe the lender $1000), but without my gear attached to the raft I'd be in dire straights. No food, no dry clothes, no sleeping bag or tent, and no satellite phone.

Tying myself to the raft was out of the question, that would be asking to drown. Instead, I decided to tie my paddle to the raft's bow line by a length of paracord wound around the paddle a few times. If I fell out of the raft, I could hold onto the paddle and keep the raft from getting away. Even if I lost the paddle it would be sure to snag on something soon.

General boating safety would frown on such a solution because I could potentially get snagged by the line. But  given the choice between potentially getting snagged by the line and losing everything I needed to stay alive, I went with the former.

Packrafting

The Alpacka with my pack attached. Contrary to the appearance, the pack is fastened across the boat's bow (front), not the stern, which has been turned up by the weight of the pack.

Hiking through the untamed Alaskan wilderness offers spectacular rewards, but it is almost always slow, and often brutally hard. Traveling a linear mile frequently takes hours.

The ranger in Bettles and several blogs mentioned what sounded like an appealing alternative: packrafting. Using a light-weight inflatable raft one could let the current carry you down the many rivers that divide the landscape. Rivers that normally were a barrier and danger to hikers could be a means of conveyance.

By going the packraft route, I could get dropped-off at one lake and then float down to be picked-up at another many miles away. Even better, packrafts are light enough that I could portage great distances with one, potentially exploring areas that would be impractical to travel through on either foot or traditional larger craft alone.

It sounded wonderful, but there were a number of downsides to consider. Most notably, while modern packrafts were incredibly light watercraft, they were still boats, albeit inflatable ones. The most widely recommended brand, the Alpackas, weigh just over 5 pounds with attached spray skirt. Plus, I would need a paddle, inflation bag, and PFD. Paddling gloves would probably be helpful in the cold rivers as well. In total, choosing the packraft route would add over nine pounds to my pack load.

I also had zero experience packrafting. But I had done some kayaking and canoeing and was generally comfortable on the water. The conditions on the Alatna were described as Class I-II rapids with a brief stretch of Class III above Ram Creek, with potentially low water for the first 25 miles (packrafts were noted for being able to handle much lower water than larger boats). I imagined I might have to portage or line the raft (walk beside the river holding a line to the floating raft) for some low stretches or the rapids, but would be able to lazily float enough miles to justify the added weight of the raft.

Finally, there was cost. Alpacka rafts are hand-made and expensive: over $800 not including a spray skirt or any of the necessary accessories, such as a paddle and personal flotation device (PFD). Buying all the gear outright would be over $1000. But I discovered that there was an outfit in Fairbanks, Northern Alaska Packrafts, that rented them by the day with discounts for longer trips. I spoke with the owner, Ed, who agreed to rent me a Yukon Yak (the second smallest raft) with all necessary accessories for $300 for two weeks. He also happily discussed possible routes and offered helpful suggestions.

I had yet to hear from a single source that packrafts were not the way to go. I decided to book the raft and planned my trip accordingly, extra weight be damned.

When I arrived in Fairbanks, Ed met me at my hotel to deliver in the raft and demonstrate how to inflate it, along with some basic repair instructions.

The Alpacka uses a rather clever method of inflation. Most of the inflation is done using an inflation bag, which works by squeezing the air out of a large nylon bag into the raft, until raft's body has taken shape. The last bit of topping off requires blowing into the inflation tubes. Here's an Alpacka employee how the bag works on YouTube:

After the raft is inflated, the seat cusion, back rest, and spray skirt band are inflated as well. Next, gear is stowed. Most guides recommend lashing your pack horizontally across the bow, straps down, careful to center the weight as much as possible left-to-right. The raft I had was equipped with a strap line, but I also used a pair of ladder straps to secure and center it (the straps were also used for attaching the raft to my pack when hiking, and acted as guy lines for the tent on windy nights).

Note: Inflatable craft needed "tempering"-- immersion in cold water causes the air in them to cool and contract, so they need to be topped-off after a while to remain fully inflated, not because they're leaking. Conversely, I was warned that a raft needs detempering if taken out of the water and left in the sun, otherwise the air may expand and burst the raft and/or seat!

I had my first opportunity to try the procedure on Day 3 of my trip, when I reached the Weyahok from a smaller tributary. With my limited whitewater experience, I was unsure what condition the river was in. It seemed full of bubbly rapids, but low in volume. I guessed it a Class II.

Choosing a relatively calm stretch, I inflated the raft and got in for a practice run without my pack. I went nowhere because my weight fixed the boat to the riverbed. I got back out and moved the raft deeper, and got back in. Success! I quickly floated down a hundred feet and had no difficulty steering the raft back to shore with the paddle. I attached my gear and was off.

When one hears of a new piece of backpacking gear that will work well in all conditions, be a joy to use, and nigh indestructible to boot, it never, ever actually works out that way.

Except this once.

The Alpacka Yak is an incredible piece of equipment. My meager paddling background was enough for me to steer the craft through the bumpy rapids. I watched with delight as meandering terrain that would take hours to traverse on foot went by in twenty minutes. Periodically, I would run into shallow water and find myself grounded. I shuddered as I felt the Alpacka drag against the rocky bottom, sure that it was developing numerous tears, but whenever I got up to line past these shallows, I found the bottom intact. I soon discovered a technique I called "planking" where I would stretch myself out flat as a board when running shallow. With my weight thus distributed evenly, the raft glided through water only a few inches deep, something I imagine no other craft besides an inner tube would be capable of.

The packraft was light enough to allow me carry it for miles while exploring, but a reliable enough that I could then raft some 60 miles of Alaskan river ranging from rocky shallows to swollen Class III rapids. With practice, I was able to switch from hiking to paddling my Alpacka in under ten minutes, including inflating the raft, strapping down the pack and getting underway. This came in handy on the second to last day when I had to carry my raft a short distance to the river, paddle for a half-hour, bushwhack through some woods and marsh to Circle Lake, then paddle across the small lake to setup camp.

At the end of my trip I decided to award the Alpacka my "Most Valuable Gear" award. I fully expect my next wilderness adventure to be planned around using one of these to extend my travel range.

Incidentally, you may be wondering about whether the Alpacka has any "dual-use" functionality. Reportedly, it can be used as a sled, although I did not have an opportunity to experiment with this. It does work well as a rugged ground cloth for my one-man REI Quarterdome T1 tent. I had hoped to use it semi-inflated as a sort of air mattress, but upside-down it's unstable (because of the curve of the boat) and right-side up it's got a big hole where you sit.

I fully expect some clever individual to design a sleep-shelter system centered around the raft as a cushioned floor and the paddles as tent poles. When they do, please let me know.

Additional resources on packrafting:

• Alpacka Rafts There are other makers of packrafts, but these are currently considered "best in class."
• The Roaming Dials, Roman Dial's blog, who wrote the book on packrafting.
• Erin & Hig's Alaska Trekking (these two are a little crazy if you ask me)
• Hidden in Plain Sight Blog entry about packrafting in the same area I was.

Danger: Bears!

When I described my planned adventure to friends at home, invariably they fell into two camps: those who thought I would die some slow horrible death like Chris McCandless and those who didn't think I'd last that long.

Most assumed that I would be eaten by a bear soon after getting off the plane. A buffet line of grizzlies with red-checkered napkins around their necks would be waiting impatiently for me to land.

My typical day in the wilderness. Only with fewer dogs, more bears and no gun.

Bill Bryson notes in his famous A Walk in The Woods, "To begin with, the really terrifying American bear, the grizzly-- Ursus horribilis, as it is so vividly and correctly labeled--doesn't range east of the Mississippi, which is good news because grizzlies are large, powerful, and ferociously bad tempered... [they] number no more than 35,000 in the whole of North America, and just 1,000 in the mainland United States, principally in and around Yellowstone National Park."

This is reassuring information if you're hiking in the mainland United States east of the Mississippi, but implies that the remaining 34,000 grizzlies are lurking in Alaska and Western Canada (or less likely, in Hawaii and Mexico).

And there's no shortage of black bears in Alaska, either. Or wolves. Or even moose, who are completely capable of trampling you to death if they feel threatened. (An Alaskan state wildlife biologist, apparently sick of the attention bears get, recently warned people to "assume every moose is a serial killer.")

So you might not be surprised if I informed you that animal attacks are the number one cause of death in the North American backcountry.

But you should be, because I would be horribly wrong.

While bears are the most dangerous large animal in the North American wilderness, they do not often attack humans, and almost never kill them. In a study of wilderness injuries and fatalities at eight California National Parks, there were 61 deaths. Bears came in dead last at zero, behind "volcanic fumes" (one) and "sharks" (also one). In a general survey of 2010 backcountry deaths in National Parks, there was just one attributed to bears. In bear attack central, Glacier National Park ("Home of the Most Fatal Bear Attacks"), there were only nine deaths caused by bears from 1913 to 1995. That's one third the number of people killed in car accidents on the park's only road.

Fatal attacks are so infrequent that if you do find a bear consuming you there is at least the consolation that the incident will earn you an entry in Wikipedia's List of fatal bear attacks in North America, which mercifully has only a handful per decade. Some of these are clearly attributable to high risk activities, such as climbing into the polar bear enclosure at the zoo (a strangely common occurrence).

"All bears are agile, cunning, and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn't happen often, but-- and here is the absolutely salient point-- once would be enough." 

-- Bill Bryson, A Walk In The Woods

As uncommon as bear attacks are, they do sometimes occur.

Bear Canisters

To minimize the risk of unpleasant bear encounters, I stored my food in a bear canister. Many parks require the use of a bear-resistant canister, a hard-shelled barrel that is essentially indestructible. The Gates of The Arctic does not, but it is strongly recommended. If a bear gets into your food, he (or she) will associate the smell of humans with food. This is a very dangerous association.

Most parks will loan canisters to campers free of charge. The park standard is the Garcia Backpackers Bear Canister, mostly because its reliable and not exceptionally expensive. The downside is that it's heavy at 2 pounds, 12 ounces. It can only hold about 600 cubic inches of food, which is far too little for 12 days, or even 10.

Bearikade Expedition, with beer for scale.

I ended up renting a Bearikade Expedition from Wild Ideas. Made of carbon fiber, it's almost a half pound lighter than the Garcia, but 50% larger. The downside is that it is both ridiculously expensive ($275 to buy), and still incredibly cumbersome. As a hard, uncompressible and featureless cylinder, it is very difficult for a bear to manipulate or destroy. It is also very difficult to pack, particularly when heavy with food. If loading your pack is like playing gear tetris, the Bearikade Expedition is like trying to place a piece that's bigger than all the other pieces combined and actually pokes out of the screen.

I only found one practical way to pack the canister: in the main compartment, on top of the tent (sans poles) wrapped in my sleeping pad. These two items protected my pack from the canister-- at nearly twenty pounds with hard edges and a tendency to spin, its bottom edge was practically a circular saw. Even with these precautions, by the end of the trip the canister and worn two small holes through the pack bottom (the Garcia brand canister has rounded edges which avoids this problem). 

Bear Encounters

A bear canister can reduce the chances of an unpleasant bear encounter in camp, but what if you encounter a bear on the trail?

There is no 100% agreed upon protocol on what to do when meeting a bear in the wild, because the right course of action depends on what the bear is thinking. Is the bear surprised by you? Does it think you're food? A threat to her young?

If you remember only one thing about bear encounters, it's this: do not run.  Running will trigger a chase instinct in the bear, and you cannot possibly outrun one-- they can go over 30 mph for short distances and can plow through the rough terrain. If the bear's intentions are not obvious, remain calm and slowly back away or move aside while speaking in a normal voice, loud enough for the bear to hear you. The point of speaking is to clearly identify yourself as human. A traditional call-out is "hey bear," but since the bear won't understand you, feel free to ad-lib.

My reaction after encountering a bear on the trail.

Bear Spray
When hiking in bear country, having something to defend yourself can make you feel much more comfortable. Most people going into bear country carry bear spray.

Bear spray is a powerful chemical irritant, like Mace. It has a similar active ingredient, but a much larger volume and range. It will wreck the bear's day (or yours, if you manage to accidentally get any on you), but is non-fatal and unlikely to cause permanent damage.

A small canister weights around 12 ounces and should be kept somewhere you can easy draw it out. I kept mine on my pack's waist strap. Sometimes I practiced drawing it out, like a gunslinger.

Some hikers carry firearms for defense, but there's some doubt as to whether a gun is as effective as bear spray. A gun capable of stopping a bear is substantially heavier, requires greater accuracy (bear spray may deter a bear without a direct hit), needs a higher level of confidence in target identification, and is considerably more expensive. Unless you're already bringing a gun to hunt or entering polar bear country, bear spray is probably a more effective and appropriate choice.

Going Solo: Freedom

Standing atop a minor summit straddling an unnamed and out-of-the-way pass. It was not a remarkable peak, but there was a reasonable possibility I was the first person to climb it, which made it basically Everest to me.

"But if you judge safety to be the paramount consideration in life you should never, under any circumstance, go on long hikes alone. Don't take short hikes either--or, for that matter, go anywhere alone. And avoid at all costs such foolhardy activities as driving, falling love, or inhaling air that is almost certainly riddled with deadly germs."

-- Fletcher & Rawlins, The Complete Walker IV

I hadn't decided to embark on this adventure alone simply because I was a friendless misanthrope.

Soloing offers a level of freedom far exceeding that which you'll get on an organized tour, trek with friends, or even with just a single companion.

Every decision was mine to make, with no consideration beyond basic wilderness care but to my own pleasure. I could hike until I was dead on my feet, or decide that a day was for resting and contemplating the literally awesome wild beauty I was immersed in.

See the Unheard-of Weyahok Falls!

On the third day I had just begun experimenting with my packraft on the Weyahok river. It was shallow but exciting. As a named river, I could only assume that people had at least traveled along it, but the only reference I could find to this high tributary of the Alatna was a single geologic survey from the late seventies that told me nothing except of the mineral deposits I might find there (basically that there were none). As for packrafting, or any water travel, there was nothing.

On the map, it looked similar to the headwaters of the Alatna, so I assumed it would be low and it was. But I approached it with caution: I had basically no experience with white water rafting (the closest I'd come was floating down the White River of Vermont on an inner tube a few weeks earlier.) And while the map didn't seem to indicate anything like dangerous rapids or waterfalls, as I mentioned earlier, the contours of the map left room for doubt.

After about an hour out, I had traveled a few exciting miles and was fairly soaked from a combination of the turbulent water, my own inexperience with the craft, and a brief attempt to operate my waterproof camera while paddling. I considered taking a lunch break to see how the gear in my pack was faring.

My picture doesn't really do it justice, but I guessed the falls were about sixty feet from  drop-off to bottom.

At that moment, I happened to look right and caught sight of an impressive waterfall nestled into one of the narrow side valleys. I made the immediate decision to stop and make camp to  check it out up close. After lunch (and taking a short nap in my tent during a brief rain shower), I spent the afternoon hiking to the falls, then up to the valley it flowed from. I followed it as far toward its source as seemed prudent. As I worked my way back, I spent some time observing caribou, until they became aware of my presence.

This sort of experience would have been impossible to have as part of an organized group trip. For one thing, tour organizers understandably avoid planning trips through areas that they nothing about. For another, it either wouldn't be on the itinerary or the itinerary would have been built around it ("Day 4: Lunch at Weyahok Falls, 2 hours. Please be back at the boats by 1pm at the latest."). There would not be the opportunity for the spontaneous decision that exploring a newly spotted feature was more important than completing the twelve mile route prescribed for that day.

Even with a single other person, by the time one of us had seen the falls and we'd both managed to beach our rafts to take a better look, we probably would be another half-mile down river and one of us might feel it wasn't worth the bother to bushwhack back.

Most of us, even the loners, spend our time surrounded by other people and our choices are circumscribed by considerations for them. In a rare span of time where I was truly alone, I welcomed the opportunity to exercise a freedom of movement seldom enjoyed.

Sometimes I don't want to be nice and share. Here, I got to hog all the beauty to myself.

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.

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.

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.