August 3, 2023

~14 miles 

Our starts are creeping progressively earlier every day. Today my 5:15 alarm wakes me up mid-dream, open-mouthed and drooling. I can’t locate my phone and I’m so confused. Finally I find it, struggle very hard with the temptation to just go back to sleep, and force myself up. Hello! It’s very cold. Coffee, breakfast, feeling pretty accomplished, realizing that I’m going to be the last one ready again because I have to dig a cathole. Man. I’m like, incapable of being ready for things at times. 

We hop back on the ATV track, which is sometimes good and sometimes bog. But then, after a creek where we get water, it remains good for pretty much the whole time until we stop for lunch. It’s so good, so smooth and easygoing, that the four of us walk together, chatting and generally enjoying life. This walking might not be as exciting or interesting as the spooky bits we did on the first couple of days, but man, it is great. And the sun is coming out. The sky is blue. The light is shining on everything and it feels like a completely different place.

We come upon a patch of berries that Carrot has told us are called cloudberries. Unripe, they’re a sort of gentle pink color not unlike that of raw salmon flesh, and ripe, they are a pastel yellow. They sort of look like engorged raspberries, and they grow upwards into the air as if offering themselves. We plop our packs down and spend some time in the cloudberry patch. The taste is something like applesauce, but maybe also a bit peachy. But the texture is mealy, thicker than the juice of a raspberry. This is only something you can experience here, in the bog of this region. It feels like a religious experience to eat the berries beneath the mountains and a clear blue sky. 

Lunch isn’t much farther off. We navigate some boggy willow bits and then come upon a river with a nice sandy beach. We take an hour—a whole hour!—and luxuriate on the banks. Chelsea gets in the creek again. She does cold water swims at home so I think that’s a bit of a thing for her. I’m not into it, but it does look like a nice day for it, with the sun shining directly on us.

After lunch I sort of enter a fog, even though I had a coffee and electrolytes. We bushwhack through some willow, lose the trail, cross the creek a bunch, then navigate more willow. We find some teeth that we think might belong to a moose. Actually, we’ve seen lots of tracks today—moose, but also bear and what we think might be wolf. 

As we follow the river, in the distance we spot something white. Snow? Carrot thinks maybe it’s aufeis, which is compressed snow above a river that never melts. It could be that, or possibly just very intense snow that has stuck around this long into the season. Either way, as we get closer we realize that it looks so, so cool and we want to play on it. It’s blue underneath like a glacier, and the texture of a sno-cone on top. It’s causing a sort of cool breeze right on the water that feels magical in this surprisingly warm sun. 

We take a snack and water break in a patch of willows. I settle in for a nap while Carrot goes to take a little dip in the river, followed by Chelsea and Gahl. I wake up when they come back over and Carrot says the word “camp.” Not yet, but it’s not far off now either. We’ve really been traveling today because of the super nice road so it looks like we’ll be able to do way more miles today than we’ve been doing on this hike so far. 

We’re hollering and singing as we walk through the thicket of trees and trying to be loud so we don’t startle a bear or moose. This is always good practice in grizzly country, but it’s especially necessary today given all the willow we’ve pushed through and how many tracks we’ve seen. Our sounds just get more and more absurd as we continue onwards. 

The ATV road comes back and we follow it for a while. Gahl is eyeing a spicy route up through some mountains. I think she wants a final challenge before the end of this adventure. But Carrot talks her out of it, citing the fact that it looks like all talus and we don’t know how long it will take or how steep it will be once we get up there. Gahl accepts, but still, I see her looking up wishfully at the pass as we continue on the ATV road in the boggy valley. 

I have to stop suddenly for a cathole (cloudberries, probably), and after that I meet back up with the other three, who point out three sets of tracks in the mud: moose, wolf, and bear, all together. They’ve each added their footprint next to the animal tracks, so I do too. All sorts of animals out here! 

We continue along the road until it gets ridiculously boggy, then hop into the gravel braids in the river and continue that way. After much indecision and inability to find a good campsite, we come upon a thick sand bar and decide to call it a day. It was a good one! Cruisey, berry-filled, sunny, and with what may or may not have been aufeis. 

It’s a struggle to set up camp because it gets really windy, but big rocks do the trick. We all cook dinner together. Gahl initiates a sharing of “roses, thorns, and buds” for the day: a good part that stood out, a tough moment, and a hope for the next day. My rose is the cloudberries. My thorn is my post-lunch blahs. My bud is that there is pizza in the store in Anaktuvuk tomorrow—we’re planning to make it there around midday, camp, and have a chill overnight the next day. After bailing on our high route and choosing the boggy valley instead, our pace has really sped up.

When I get up for my now-routine bathroom break in the middle of the night, the moon is rising over the mountains to the east. It looks enormous, like a huge shiny plate. I stand there for as long as I can manage in the cold. What a beautiful place.