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.

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.