August 5, 2023 

~3 miles hiked 

Without an alarm, I wake up around 8. The sun is filtering through the trees and warming up my tent so pleasantly. Ahh. Sleeping in. 

When I pop my head out I can see that Carrot and Chelsea are sitting on the gravel bar around a fire in the fire ring. Morning fire! We were going to have one last night but we’re all pooped, so I guess we’re making up for it now. I gather my food and cooking things and join them, and Gahl follows not long after. Chelsea is going to town on the fire. We tell her that she has Scout Master energy: she’s always positive, always down to try new challenges, never sleeps in, and can build a mean fire. 

“Chelsea, your love language is Scout Master,” Gahl comments. 

Chelsea keeps working on the fire periodically as we settle into our very luxurious and over-the-top breakfast. Carrot has beef that she bought at the store last night, and she plops it right in her cook pot and sticks it in the fire. “RIP, little red handle,” she says. Despite the concern about the handle, she looks very excited about this beef chunk. 

Meanwhile I have a bagel and cream cheese and a coffee. Then, when the beef is ready, I feast on that too, along with Fritos, bean dip, and salsa. It’s good in that hiker-gross kind of way. 

We finish our meals but stay there by the river for hours, just lying around in the sun and talking. All our stuff dries. Even my shoes dry because Chelsea has put them by the fire and rotated them so all the sides feel the heat. What a gem. I feel so content. 

Eventually we all start to slowly pack up our things as the fire dies. Then we check everything one last time and head to the store again. We hit it during the lunch hour, so we have to wander around the town until 1. I get a few more things I don’t really need like a frozen sandwich for dinner, pop tarts, and another Sprite. Then we head back outside to pack up our goodies. 

When we do, there are two guys standing out front who have also been hiking in the Brooks. We chat with them for a moment. They’re not using poles and they have big hiking boots on, and they show us a video of an ice cave they found. It looks like they’re not carrying bear spray, but Carrot notes later that one of them had a gun of some sort. They’re college roommates and they’ve been adventuring in Alaska together before heading back to Purdue for the start of the school year.

We follow the road north and out of town for a while, hoping to find an ATV track to avoid the bog. On the way, we spot a basketball court. Chelsea’s eyes light up. “Oh, I really hope there’s a basketball,” she says, and when there is one lying next to the court, she makes an excited noise, takes her pack off, and immediately starts shooting hoops. Gahl decides to join in and guards Chelsea without even taking her pack off. 

We continue through town after that, passing dumpsters painted with traditional Nunamiut values. Carrot has told us that the Inpuiat, the larger group of inland indigenous people in Alaska to which the Nunamiat belong, hold many values, but there are two in particular that are important to them: humility and a sense of humor. We have commented over the last few days that both are visible in the landscape of the Brooks itself. It will humble you instantly. But it’s also kind of funny if you step back from the situation and watch yourself as if from the outside, slipping on rocks and rolling over tussocks. If you were going to survive full-time in an environment like this, you’d head a healthy dose of humility and humor. I spot both words painted on colorful dumpsters as we leave town.

We turn left on a road heading towards the mountains, then follow the extremely nice ATV track for a while until it ends up at a sort of disassembled shed next to a creek. From there we follow the crispy bits and manage to totally avoid wet bog. It feels like cheating somehow.

“This is so nice!” Carrot says incredulously.

“No!” Gahl interjects, not wanting to jinx our fortune. “Don’t say it!”

“Oh, right. Yeah this sucks!”

At the top of a crispy hill we spot a pile of rocks with a caribou skill and antlers on top. The light on the bones and the mountain behind it is magical. We do a bit of alternating between side-hill walking and following the gravel of the creek for a bit. 

At the peak of one of the steep side-hill climbs we find a spot that could be good camping, but it also could be better. Chelsea and I sit for a minute while Gahl goes for evening cathole time and Carrot scopes out another spot downstream and just across the creek. The latter comes back and tells us that it looks good over there, so we follow, and yes, it is an absolutely magical campsite: soft moss interspersed with rocks, right next to the ripply flowing water. It’s nestled in a cradle of green between two towering talus-covered mountains. 

It’s so comfy that I just lie down right on the moss and start to fall asleep. Then I feel raindrops, jolt to awareness, and see that the others have begun putting up their tents quickly because a sudden storm is rolling in. I jump up and get my tent and stakes out and madly set up my shelter, putting heavy rocks on top of the stakes to keep them down in the suddenly powerful wind. I dive inside and hope that all the stakes stay in. It’s a very odd storm because it’s raining and the wind is wild, but the sun stays out the whole time. But before long it calms down and we all poke our heads out to see a clear sky. That was weird! 

We decide to head down the canyon a little further to explore without our packs on—slackpacking, if you will. It’s really beautiful back here. There’s another mossy-rocky hill that we follow up, then cross a creek, and we wind up at a structure made of stone. It’s sort of circular, with a dug-out floor and a fireplace. We hypothesize that it’s either a temporary living structure of some sort or a place built for hunting, since the grassy slope below is covered in lichen and what looks like caribou trails. We sit there talking for a while in the stone circle. Afterwards we climb a little higher on the grassy part of the steep slope and take in the view below us. 

Back at camp, we sit in a circle on the mossy ground and eat our dinners. Gahl still has a large container of salsa from town that she’s trying to get us all to eat. I have the now-thawed chicken bacon ranch sandwich that is surprisingly good, though that’s probably because of all the preservatives. 

The weather is really nice tonight and the vibes are chill and wistful, very last-night-of-trail style. We sit there for a long time talking about our lives and ideas and what we liked about this trip. We reflect and we laugh. 

As much physical suffering as the Brooks Range entailed for me, I loved this experience and I’m so grateful to have been able to spend some time in this unique place with such amazing women. The trip was only open to women, trans, and non-binary people, and I mention this to Carrot as something I really appreciated about it. I’ve hiked with some wonderful guys, but there’s just a specific and not always positive vibe when there are men, especially white cis men, in a group like this. When I showed up in Fairbanks and met Gahl, Carrot, and Allison, and later Chelsea, it was like there was no adjustment period. I just felt comfortable right away. We could talk about certain things that would not have been as comfortable with men present. We could pee freely and do creek baths without a second thought. It was a really special and specific experience.

Soon it’s close to hiker midnight—not that it looks like 9pm here in the arctic—and we all retreat into our little tents, deciding again to just wake up when we wake up. Tomorrow is our flight back to Fairbanks. It feels like one entire lifetime has passed since we got to Anaktuvuk. I wonder what the lasting impressions and lessons from this trip will be for me. It feels like an experience that will stick. Like a teacher.