Looking for Alaska (52 page)

Two of the snow machines warmed up, but Eric seemed to be having a problem with the third one. He could not get his started. He pulled and pulled. He lifted up the hood, looked around, and came over to us.

“I've got to fix something that's broken,” he said. He had that look on his face he had had the previous night when Foxy was dying and he was thumping her chest. He was just slightly frustrated. Eric had the same kind of almost-never-flustered, Midwestern-farmer temperament my brother-in-law Aaron has, and Rita. I've calmed down 100 percent, well, more like 300 percent, compared to the way I was when I grew up in the Connecticut suburbs of New York City.

Eric took some substantial-looking part out of the engine compartment and laid it on the twenty-five-below-zero ground. He went inside the garage of the truck stop and, twenty minutes later, after borrowing some of their tools, had the machine running. It seemed to me that it sputtered, but they all ran differently. He returned the tools and we were off. It was thrilling, the first mile or two; the trail was well used. Eric would later tell us that he was worried about at least two of the snow machines because “there were broken things on them.”

We moved with ease along a creekside through evergreens, then over the creek, up a hill. We came into some open flats at the base of a range of four-to-five-thousand-foot-tall mountains. They were smooth, rounded-off, and white.

We traveled like this for hours, single file, gunning it up narrow mountain passes with steep drop-offs, across frozen open swamps, through passageways into the cold-stunted woods. It was so severely cold that what trees could grow here did so slowly. Eric would stop before especially steep slivers of winter trail and come back and tell me to be sure to accelerate as fast as the snow machine would go. If I got stuck with this heavily loaded sled, it would be a major hassle to get both the snow machine and the sled back down the hill. On the first one, we made it, then slowed down substantially. Even if Rita fell off, Eric told me, just keep going. She could always walk up these steep inclines.

Then we came to possibly the worst piece of the trail, across a creek with steep, almost vertical, banks on both sides. Eric had already said twice that this spot was dangerous and difficult. First it was tough getting down without crashing. If you went too fast down the bank and then hit the flat, ungiving ice, it could be a bad wreck. You could break a ski, break some bones flipping the snow machine and sled and metal, fifty-five-gallon drums loaded with gas on top of you, the two-foot-thick ice below.

Worse, this creek at this crossing point was susceptible to overflow. What creates overflow is that, early on, the creek or river freezes over. But springs and other water sources continue to feed the creek, so more water is flowing underneath the ice than there is room for it. So, the water breaks through somewhere and flows on top of the ice. Often the overflow is camouflaged by fresh snow. Say you stay out of it but your snow machine sinks into the overflow a foot or two. You can't move the snow machine. It gets colder and colder, the overflow freezes. It is already a granular slush and can soon harden like concrete. If you do make it through the overflow, then you must hit the bank on the other side and rocket out without flipping the snow machine over on yourself. We made it, we all made it. The overflow was just to our left; Vicky and Julianne hit a bit of it, but they were light and powered through it. I let out a small yelp when we were all on the other side and had stopped to get instructions from Eric on the next obstacle. Eric told us that a long, narrow section with a tight trail lay ahead. Whatever you do, he warned, stay right on the trail I make. We did that section with no apparent problems.

Right before we crossed the south fork of the Koyukuk River, we took the halfway-point break. It was not far north to the headwaters of the south fork and Horace Mountain (elev. 5,446 feet). Eric got off and flopped backward into the deep snow alongside the trail. In all directions all we could see was hundreds of miles of undefiled snow. Eric made a snow angel. I fell in on the other side of the trail and did the same, as did Julianne. Vicky and Rita walked down to get some cover from the riverbank. Elizabeth sat on the snow machine. How many snowflakes lay on top of each other in this country? Never had I been around snow like this. I could drop a quarter into it and it would drop through the snow to the bottom.

Eric was excited about having a dog team at their house. I couldn't believe they wanted one. Where would the food come from? There wasn't much game out here; it was too cold for much to survive, much less thrive. I lay still on my back in the perfect snow, the sun soaking into me with its faraway power. I opened my eyes to find Eric standing over me.

“In the late seventies when I was sixteen, my friend and I, we bicycled across the United States from the West Coast to the East Coast. We collected signatures on a petition from people who believed in putting this part of the country into wilderness,” he said. “Now I live here.”

He'd been inspired to do that by my book
A Walk Across America,
he told me. Rita and Vicky walked back from taking a pee, a big job with all these layers. I found myself feeling guilty for being so cautious. For the past couple of days, I'd been feeling like a wolf around a trap. Several things just hadn't looked right. But now I'd shaken that feeling, and I felt relieved. We rode on.

We'd dropped down into the frozen wetlands of the upper Koyukuk. Arctic Village was less than a hundred miles northeast. When we ran through about eight inches of fresh powder, it flew up and parted like the lightest waves in the world. We created clouds of snowflakes behind us. It was a beautiful series of sensations, combining movement, sight, the cold air on my face with the warm heart and body of Rita holding on behind me. We rode as one. It felt so free, somewhere between riding smooth ocean swells and flying.

Eric and Julianne taking a break on the winter trail in the Brooks Range.
P
HOTO BY
R
ITA
J
ENKINS

Another couple hours and we were to the edge of Chandalar Lake. Eric stopped us right before we drove atop its two or three feet of ice, which was then covered by two feet of snow that had been sculpted by the wind into wavy ridges. He said that on this end of the lake there could be dangerous overflow, even a hole in the ice from a spring bubbling up in the shallows. We sped onto it and crossed the danger zone without running into overflow, staying to the center. We were like a little caravan and we hoped our arrival would be victorious—another trip down the winter trail with no breakdowns, no emergencies.

Seeing the lights of our snow machines, as I'm sure their boys could by now, after a few weeks of seeing nothing new may have been exciting. How many people in our world could go a week or two, or a month or two, without seeing a headlight, even if it's just the headlight of a snow machine? Or Mike, Pete, and Dan might really enjoy being in the wilderness alone. When we were about a mile away, close enough to see their house and its blue roof, built up on a high bank, Eric stopped and waited for us.

“Julianne, congratulations. You're the youngest girl to make it this far on the winter trail.” She was nine and a half.

“Oh,” she said, and smiled, though all that showed through her wool face mask was her mouth and bright blue eyes. “Thanks, it was fun.” Julianne, like her mother, is a woman of few words. Julianne had adapted quickly to riding with Vicky, moving as one. Vicky turned and patted her on the shoulder with a snow-covered mitten. We blasted the last mile and floored it up the steep bank of the lake to their home. Their home was no little log cabin; it was impressive, almost like a mirage in the desert. How could they have built that way out here?

The Jayne homestead on Chandalar Lake is twenty-five miles south of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, about thirty miles north of the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge, and about thirty miles east of Gates of the Arctic National Park. Directly behind the piece of lakeshore rises a mountain over six thousand feet that is home to several snow-white Dall sheep. They like the windblown heights in winter.

The world around us for millions of acres, now our world, was different shades of white, in different shapes. The lake was supposedly flat, but the wind had created intricate waves and ridges atop it as its currents curved the snow precisely. They were symmetrical, as pretty as white on white can be; it almost felt bad to run over them on the snow machine. But the next wind would perfect its creation all over again. The wind was one of the rulers of our new world. The mountains all around were rounded as foothills and pure white. Their lines were smooth and beautiful like the curve from Rita's thin waist to the top of her hip and down to the beginning of her thigh. The mountains here were not sharp and steep, but seductive, inviting. Of course, they weren't actually welcoming. Go to them, alone, or even with someone experienced, this time of year, and risk dying. Even the horizon appeared silver-white, the lowering sun a cold yellow with white and silver rings around it. The sunlight here at this time of the afternoon was cold like fluorescent lights.

All three boys were standing outside waiting for us. Mike, the oldest, was the stocky one, like a young bull. Pete was maybe an inch taller at five feet nine inches, but wiry. Mike looked straight at you, while Pete snuck a look. They immediately began unlashing the cargo, which was coated with a crust of snow and ice crystals. Dan, nine, their adopted son, was small but obviously strong. He was standing off to the side until Pete told him, in a tough tone, to come help. It was nine below zero—I remember looking at their thermometer—and the three boys had on just long-sleeved, cotton shirts, no hats, no gloves. I guess everything, even below zero, is relative.

The house was not a log cabin, the easiest structure to build out here. Eric and his sons had built a frame house. The siding was made from cedar shakes from Oregon, and its reddish orange color drew me to it, everything else was so white-cold. And it was not a little bitty space but appeared to have quite a bit of room. Four dormers came out of the blue roof, indications that Eric was a talented carpenter. He had made his living as one before he was a vet.

Every nail, every window, each door, the Canadian wood furnace, every tube of caulking, each screw, every piece of roofing, every inch of electrical wire, they had transported to this spot. The same went for every tub of Sheetrock mud, the toilet, every piece of blue metal roofing, every four-by-eight-foot piece of easily broken Sheetrock. All of it they had hauled here personally, almost all of it on the winter trail on a snow machine trip like the one we'd just made. Some of it, not much, had been flown out in a Beaver with floats and boated over in their little outboard. Why would anyone want to do such an extreme amount of work just to live here? It's a huge undertaking to build your own home five miles from a Home Depot. Eric and his family, apparently, had a rich mix of skills and talents, daring and courage, and a deep need for the uninhabited deep-white silence of the Alaskan bush.

A NO. 9 LEVEL RISK

It's not enough just to have a need for Alaska; to make it you must have a rare blend of many abilities. Near here last fall two men had been dropped off in search of their vision of the wilderness life. They thought they had what was required to tame it, or at least survive in it. They'd chartered a bush pilot and his Beaver, the Alaskan workhorse. The pilot flew them and their supplies in and landed on the north fork of the Chandalar River. No one knows why, but they'd chosen a spot seven miles upriver from a long-deserted mining camp called Caro. For some insane reason they chose a basin of landscape that trapped the cold. Since they were squatting, they may have just seen a spot off the river that the pilot thought he could land on and said, “Down there.” Surely they didn't know it was one of the most frigid places on earth, thought to have reached one hundred below zero. Certainly they didn't think the spot they chose was void of all edible life in winter, but it was. There was nothing to hunt that whole fall, winter, and spring. They must have been dangerously mistaken since they had so much ammunition and guns to hunt with.

You can be a hundred yards off a road in Alaska and break a leg and never be found. Where these men went, between Thazzik Mountain and the Hadweenzic River, there was no hope of being found. How did they ever expect to get out? They even brought in a woodstove that weighed over two hundred pounds. They would be dead by now if State Trooper Curt Bedingfield, the one who had rescued Eric by breaking trail, had not spotted their green canoe on a routine flyover while checking on wilderness moose hunters. They had no way to communicate with anyone. If Curt hadn't flown over that fall afternoon, there was basically no chance he would have flown over that spot again in his seventy-three-thousand-square-mile territory. If their canoe had not caught some sunlight, if Curt had been concentrating on something in front of him, he would never have known they were there. They had made the ultimate mistake: they had not contacted Curt before they'd headed into the best or the worst Alaska can offer.