Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder Amid Arctic Climate Chaos

Prologue

A Certain Type of Fun, July 10–12, 2022

Kalulutok Creek would be called a river in most parts of the world. Here in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, amid the largest span of legislated wilderness in the United States, it’s just a creek compared to the massive Noatak River that we’re bound for. But in my mind—while we splash-walked packrafts and forded its depths at least thirty times yesterday—Kalulutok will always be an ice-cold, wild river.

It drains the Endicott and Schwatka Mountains, which are filled with the most spectacular granite and limestone spires of the entire Brooks Range. One valley to the east of us is sky-lined with sharp, flinty peaks called the Arrigetch, or fingers of the outstretched hand in Iñupiaq.

As the continent’s most northerly mountains, the sea-fossil-filled Brooks Range—with more than a half dozen time-worn peaks over eight thousand feet high—is seen on a map as the last curl of the Rocky Mountains before they stairstep into foothills and coastal plains along the Arctic Ocean. The Brooks Range stretches two hundred miles south to north and seven hundred miles to the east, where it jabs into Canada. Although there are more than four hundred named peaks, since the Brooks Range is remote and relatively untraveled, it’s rare that anyone bothers to climb these mountains. My river-slogger companion, Chris Korbulic, and I will be one of the summer’s handful of exceptions.

We carry a water filter, but it would be silly to use it. We’re higher and farther north than giardiasis-infected beavers and there is no sign of the pellet-dropper deer known as caribou. The creek is fed from the pure ice of shrunken glaciers above and ancient permafrost in the ground below. In what seems like prodigious heat for the Arctic, the taps here are all wide open.

When we get thirsty, we luxuriate in one of the freedoms of a journey through pristine wilds: we kneel, cup our hands, and drink directly from the ice-cream-headache water of the Kalulutok. Its root name, from the word for fish, kaluk, has been lost to most Iñupiat, who now mostly speak English. Yet there’s no question that the stream is full of grayling, or sulupaugak, that flit about as sun-blinkered shadows through the eddies.

If I stand still under a twenty-degree angle from the horizon, the grayling won’t see me. A grayling’s eyes are remarkably similar to mine— except they can simultaneously focus on near and faraway objects like a hawk—but the optics and underwater reflections limit their vision. I love their eyes: the rim of sparkly gold iris that surrounds the black, teardrop-shaped pupils. When you snatch the fish from their watery world, they stare back with such wide-eyed purity that you wouldn’t want to dismiss the presence of their soul.

I also admire their finely sculpted, streamlined form and iridescent blue scales. I repeatedly study these creatures that I share the water with as they restively hold the current in the same way that I stand against a strong wind. They erect their distinctive, sail-shaped dorsal fins and anchor themselves in place against the flow. Then they can be seen as vividly as a worm in mezcal.

Usually less than a foot long and found in northern waters, the grayling is a keystone species, a veritable canary in the coal mine in an era when the Arctic now warms nearly four times faster than the rest of the world. In their migrations up and down tens of thousands of small streams, they provide nutrients throughout the ecosystem and are often the only fish—lithe and muscular—that can wriggle up countless narrow drainages that won’t fit the stouter salmon and trout.

Beneath multiple thermokarst landslides caused by permafrost thaw, we tow our packrafts up Kalulutok Creek to avoid bushwhacking in a brush-thickened valley created by the Greening of the Arctic. CHRIS KORBULIC

While that’s the beta from the appreciative fish biologists, they also wonder if this supremely adapted cold-water species will go belly up as the world overheats, streams in the Arctic dry, and summer seasons elongate.¹

A couple of months from now, as this river-creek begins to crackle with ice buildup, hundreds of sulupaugak will migrate downstream into the four hundred-foot-deep waters of Walker Lake. They’ll congregate there until spring, preyed upon by the tubby, bully lake trout—akin to grizzlies amid ground squirrels.

I watch the grayling here in the headwaters of Walker Lake and the Kobuk River as I study birds on the wing and other wildlife signs: the wide bear trails bulldozed through the alder thickets, moose scat remarkably similar to Milk Duds, and, in the willows, the ptarmigan excreta like coarse hamburger curls extruded from the meat grinder. On the river bars, braided-rope-shaped wolf feces are also strewn hither and yon.

TMI, Jon, many people would say. Too Much Information, to stop and talk about and pull apart every piece of animal fecal matter as if it were Play-Doh. Or to badger the Fish and Wildlife Service worker back in Fairbanks on the misconceptions about Arctic char and Dolly Varden. Char only exist in Alaskan lakes, I insisted, while Chris quietly exited the federal offices, chagrined at my compulsion to debate such arcane details.

My disclaimer: Thirty-nine years ago, I decided to learn all I could about life above the Arctic Circle. As a climber, I traded my worship of high mountains for the High Arctic. I substituted bears and mosquitoes for crevasses and avalanches, but more importantly—like the study of crevasse extrication and avalanche avoidance—you couldn’t just read about the Arctic or sign up for classroom courses. You have to go on immersive journeys and figure out how the interlocked parts of the natural world fit together. Without guides or someone to hold your hand. Best to hit the ragged edge of exhaustion and make mistakes so that you learn what’s important. And to go alone at least once. Along this path, acts of curiosity out on the land and the water can open an earned universe of wonders. But you must spend time in the villages, too, with the kindhearted people of the North to make sure you get it right. And you can’t call the Arctic the Far North—it is home rather than far to the many people who live there.

So, after twoscore of Arctic journeys, in the summer of 2022, I’m on one more trip. I could not be on such an ambitious trip without all the previous experiences, which I’ll use to sculpt a cohesive, whole, and fully developed sense of place. (Disclaimer 2: The more I learn, it sometimes feels like the less I know about the Arctic.)

But this time the agenda is different. I hope to better understand the climate crisis.

Chris and I are here to document it however we can. Since my first trip above the Arctic Circle in 1983, I have seen extraordinary changes in the landscape. Only three days underway and we’ve already flown over a wildfire to access our Walker Lake drop-off point. And yesterday we trudged underneath several bizarre, teardrop-shaped landslide thaw slumps—a.k.a. thermokarsts—caused by the permafrost thaw.

In much of Alaska, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) says that permafrost thaw from 2005 to 2010 has caused the ground to sink more than four inches, and in places to the north of us, twice that. The land collapses as the permafrost below it thaws like logs pulled out from beneath a woodpile. AMAP believes this will amount to a large-scale degradation of near-surface permafrost by the end of the twenty-first century. This means that roads and buildings and pipelines—along with hillsides, Iñupiat homes, forests, and even lakes—will fall crazy aslant, or get sucked into the ground as if taken by an earthquake.

Our hoped-for documentation of the climate crisis isn’t likely to be easy on this remote wilderness trip. We don’t expect a picnic—known as Type 1 Fun to modern-day adventurers. A journey across the thaw on foot and by packraft for five hundred-plus miles won’t resemble a back-country ski trip or a long weekend backpack on Lower 48 trails. We have planned for Type 2 Fun: an ambitious expedition that will make us suffer and give us the potential to extend ourselves just enough that there will be hours, or even days, that won’t seem like fun until much later when we’re back home. Then our short-circuited memories will allow us to plan the next trip as if nothing went wrong on this one. As if it was all just great Fun with a capital F. Ultimately, an important part of wilderness mastery is to avoid Type 3 Fun: a wreckage of accidents, injuries, near-starvation, or rescue. We’ve both been on Type 3 Fun trips that we’d rather forget.

I have more than a few outdoor expert friends who claim that the real trick of expeditions is always to be in control, regardless of calculated risk activity, and to avoid the proverbial adventure. But I’ve never really succeeded. No matter how hard I try, on my trips in the North, things sometimes simply go south: someone forgets the stove, you fall and dislocate a shoulder, you forget to tighten the pee bottle in a crowded tent in a storm, you miscalculate a crevasse jump, you shower yourself with bear spray, or someone (not me) lets the tent blow away. You try to avoid these rookie moves, but sooner or later, particularly on a long expedition, the odds are that you or one of your partners will screw up, or the weather will thrash you, and you’ll have an adventure.

Yesterday, in the first hour of our day, while we forded the Kalulutok, I tripped, fell in face-first, performed a splashy left-handed push-up in three feet of water, clambered upright—my packraft, clutched by its bowline like a leashed dog, yanked me backward in the current—and continued the hurried, bowlegged swagger necessary to stay upright in the river and keep my companion in sight.

No big deal (but it could’ve been a time-consuming raft chase if the bowline had slipped out of my hand). I just got soaked and it cooled me off.

As far as I could tell, Chris never tripped, much less paused, as we beat our way toward an unnamed pass several thousand feet above. Chris is a sponsored outdoor athlete, born thirty years after me, one of the world’s most accomplished expedition kayakers, and a talented photographer and filmmaker. On first descents of the most hairball rivers on the planet, he films the guys who get made into heroes, then jumps in his boat and drops into the same maelstroms anonymously, a whitewater ninja with little of the credit or notoriety heaped upon his companions. He’s kind, thoughtful, and dyed-in-the-wool laconic, so you have to pry to get him to speak a full paragraph.

We had planned the route with assurance from an acquaintance who had enjoyed an easy trek along the creek bottom to Walker Lake after a descent from the Arrigetch a couple of decades ago. Type 1 Fun. The caribou migration, a half-million strong back then, had punched game trails along the stream through dense alder thickets with a profusion of branches thick as human arms splayed in every direction.

We found something entirely different. The trails petered out a quarter mile from the lake, more than fourteen miles from the pass we had to reach. So we were forced to march directly up the slippery river with packrafts in tow. Or, as the river steepened and deepened, we teetered along banks strewn with rounded boulders beneath low-slung alder branches. While I struggled to catch Chris on day three as he made his way uphill through tussocks into a boulderfield above the choked creek, I figured out what had changed in this valley.

The Western Arctic Caribou Herd population has dropped from a half million to 152,000 animals. This isn’t news to wildlife biologists. Around the world, climate change and habitat loss have caused a decline in caribou populations.²

Then there’s the Greening of the Arctic phenomenon, which will continue as we cross into the Noatak River valley in a couple of days. Basically, as temperatures warm and the summers lengthen, forests have begun to move north into treeless zones. Even the native shrubs— smallish alders, dwarf birch, and knee-high willows—have grown more than six feet tall and into dense thickets.

In stagger-step behind Chris (who has gained another hundred yards on me), I begin to get it. The Western Arctic Herd—shrunken since our acquaintance’s Type 1 Fun trek through here a couple of decades ago—hasn’t migrated through and left trails in the brush of the Kalulutok drainage, which has now turned into a lush bushwhacker’s nightmare. As for the game trails we sussed out on Google Earth, the satellite pictures are probably several years old. Plenty of time for the Greening of the Arctic to transform the valley into a warmed-up arboretum.³

I finally catch Chris at a steep stream valley that leads up toward the pass. Reindeer lichen crunches and breaks in brittle white pieces beneath our feet as we sink several inches into the soft sphagnum moss. For the first time in three days, the heat has eased as the sun hides behind thick clouds propelled by a steady wind.

My hands, thighs, and calves have repeatedly locked up in painful dehydration cramps, undoubtedly caused by our toil with leaden packs in eighty-degree heat up the steep streambed or its slippery, egg-shaped boulders. After my water bottle slid out of an outside pack pocket and disappeared amid one of several waist-deep stream fords or in thick alders yesterday, I carefully slide the bear spray can (looped in a sling around my shoulders) to the side so it doesn’t get knocked out of its pouch. Now, to slake my thirst, I submerge my head in the stream like a water dog. I’m beat.

To get Chris, a caffeine connoisseur, to stop, I simply utter, Coffee? His face lights up as he throws off his pack and pulls out the stove. I pull out the fuel bottle. Since Chris isn’t a conversational bon vivant, I’ve learned not to ask too many questions, but a cup of coffee will always stimulate a considerate comment or two about the weather. As I fire up the trusty MSR stove with a lighter, we crowd around and toast our hands over the hot windscreen as if it’s our humble campfire. We’re cold and wet with sweat and we shiver in the wind. But at least we’re out of the forest-fire smoke—this summer more than three million acres would burn in dried-out Alaska.

We slogged nine miles yesterday, but with constant route decisions and swift streams to cross and prolonged zigzags and thick brush to muscle through, the labor weighed on our backs like a thirty-mile day on trails. Still, I suspect that Chris’s brief laments about the packhorse work are only empathetic commiserations for my exhaustion. Several months before the trip, as I trained with hill runs and bike rides, I emailed my younger partner and asked if he could, for my sake, gain fifteen pounds or take up cigarettes.

Yesterday on another well-earned coffee break, I zipped up after I’d watered the alders with a dehydrated, amber stream of urine. Chris sat in the heat, shirt off, with his back to me and I noticed his unusual anatomy: two latissimus dorsi muscles bulged like a set of transplanted quadriceps. I knew then that if this bushwhack-in-the-river-style backpack seemed an uneven catch-up race for me, once we took out the packrafts and he shifted his paddle muscles into gear on the Noatak River, I’d never catch him.

Today, with the all-day uphill climb and inevitable back-and-forth route decisions through the gorge ahead, we’ll be lucky to trudge even five miles to the lake below the pass. Why, I ask myself, as Chris puts on his pack and shifts into high gear, could we not have simply flown into the headwaters of the Noatak River instead of crossing the Brooks Range to get here? One step at a time, I think, as I heave on my pack and wonder how I’ll catch Chris, already far ahead.

Emerged from the thick alders, Chris walks with camera equipment under one hand and a fully assembled paddle at the ready in the other, still days away from the Noatak River float. JON WATERMAN

Shards of caribou bones and antlers lie on the tundra as ghostly business cards of a bygone migration, greened with mold, and minutely chiseled and mined for calcium by tiny vole teeth. We kick steps across a snowfield, then work our way down a steep, multicolored boulderfield, whorled red and peppered with white quartz unlike any rocks I’ve seen before. As rain is shaken out of the sky like Parmesan cheese from a can, we weave in and out of leafy alder thickets while I examine yet another fresh pile of grizzly feces. I stop to pick apart these scat—and thumb through stems and leaves and root pieces—this griz appears to be on a vegetarian diet.

Hey, bear! We yell again and again until we’re hoarse. I hold tight to the pepper spray looped over my shoulder to keep it from grabby alder branches.

On the first day of our bushwhack, an alder branch knocked my can of pepper spray out of its holster, and Chris and I searched for a half hour until we found the can half hidden by an alder trunk. In another tight tangle along the way, Chris lost his ski pole but didn’t realize it until miles farther on. Minor mishaps all, but part of a score that might tally up into a so-called Adventure.

The stream gorge cliffs out at a waterfall amid boulders laced with spiderwebs so intricate I couldn’t help but wonder if these Arctic arachnids were out for game bigger than mosquitoes. We climb out on the opposite bank and work our way along the cliff edge. But a half mile farther the route dead-ends, so we’re forced to descend into the gorge again. With Chris twenty yards behind, I plunge step down through a near-vertical slope of alders and play Tarzan for my descent as I hang onto a flexible yet stout branch and shimmy-swing down a short cliff into another alder thicket. A branch whacks me in the chest and knocks off the pepper-spray safety plug. When I finish my swing to the ground, I get caught on another branch that depresses the trigger in an abrupt explosion that shoots straight out from my chest in a surreal orange cloud. Instinctively I hold my breath and close my eyes and continue to shimmy downward, but I know I’m covered in red-hot pepper spray.

When I run out of breath, I squint my eyes, keep my mouth closed, and breathe carefully through my nose, and scurry out of the orange capsaicin cloud. Down in the boulderfield that pulses with a stream I open my mouth, take a deep breath, and yell to Chris that I’m okay as I strip off my shirt and try to wring it out in the stream. I tie the contaminated shirt on the outside of my pack and put on a sweater. My hands prickle with pepper.

You really okay? Chris asks, concern on his face.

Yeah. If that spray had hit me in the eyes, it would’ve been really, really bad news.

Then we’re off again. As we clamber up steep scree to exit the gorge, my lips, nasal passages, forehead, and thighs burn from the pepper. As I sweat from uphill exertion, the pepper spray spreads from my thighs to my crotch like a troop of red ants, but I can hardly remove my pants amid the storm clouds and wind.

With the last of the alders below us, we enter the alpine world above the tree line. As I walk, slicked with peppery sweat, I understand—maybe even sympathize with—how bad a sprayed grizzly would feel, with its huge snout and a sense of smell so superior to my inadequate nose, which feels as if I’ve snorted Tiger Balm.

The final climb to the lake is up a steep streambed, with wafer-thin snowfields that creak under our steps. If the thin bridges break under our weight, it’ll be a wet epic to clamber out of the icy stream with its slimy rocks. So, I pretend it’s a perilous glacier and walk with light, delicate steps and distract myself from the potential crevasse plunge while I study hundreds of marmot turds strangely clung to the rocks like squashed button mushrooms gone black.

Although I have learned a lot on past trips, I am drawn back to the Arctic again and again. I am fascinated with a place that alternately resembles the lost world of the Pleistocene—gouged throughout by the ancient push of glaciers—then in the next moment is unexpectedly filled with weird spiders huddled on the side of their massive webs. When you really need distraction, and you pay attention to your surroundings, wild creature signs can appear like an overstuffed bazaar filled with feces of all sizes and shapes, story-filled track paths, and fur caught on a branch where an animal scratched its back—a moose, or maybe a caribou. Or so I occupy myself as I labor steeply uphill with an unwieldy pack and pepper-sprayed skin.

There’s nowhere else to walk in this steep valley. The tundra trail alongside the stream is maintained by a grizzly as if it’s a regular commute, given that the rest of the valley is flooded with sharp-angled boulders. Every hundred yards or so we spy more excreta as big as horse piles on matted tundra compressed several inches from the bear’s weight. Its prints are longer than our size twelves and twice as wide. To make sure I don’t lose Chris, I quickly punch open the scat piles with my ski pole and find them sun-crisped on the outside, with no bones inside.

These intelligent bruisers are commonly thought to be voracious meat eaters. But the truth is more complex: since animal prey is hard to find and harder to kill, bears have an uncanny nose for proteins found in any number of plants—peavine roots, Boykinia, and sedges—that I would do well to add to my nutrient-poor salads at home.