Seth Kantner's Changing Alaska

April 23, 2008

Photo: Seth Kantner. Open creek with icefog from the cold.

I’m heading west into a warm storm that’s melting the trail. I’m following the river (local bush pilots quip that “IFR” here doesn’t stand for “instrument flight rules,” it means “I fly rivers). In my case I’m on the ice, although snowgoing in this near-whiteout does feel as if I’m racing along through a cloud. A cloud with invisible, rock hard, frightening bumps. And a few sinkholes where the river ice has collapsed.

Miles back I left the trail stakes where they veered up onto the portage; I was worried I’d get lost on the open tundra. Now fog shrouds the willowed riverbanks. Snow has been falling for twelve hours, heavy; it’s turning to rain. Gusty south wind streaks slush past my eyes. I’m trying to get 150 miles from my sod house, where I’ve been staying, to the coast. There I have to pack supplies, answer book-related emails, and then get the family back upriver before travel on the snow and ice is over—what we call Breakup.

Yesterday, in the village of Ambler, I dropped off Andy Koster, a friend who’d come up to camp.  He’s a young pilot for FedEx, and the first thing I did was put him on my dad’s old 1978 Arctic Cat snowgo. “I’m used to gauges,” he joked. He gestured below the tied-on, cracked windshield. “Oil pressure, temperature?”

“There’s a gas gauge,” I said, not sure a twisted wire through a cork—reading E—would satisfy this Boeing 727 driver. Regardless, within a few miles Andy proved to be amazingly adroit at handling a snowgo, dropping over riverbanks and climbing cliffs.

Now, it’s almost hard to remember thirty-six hours ago. The sky was blue, and we were sliding down a slope in steep powder in the Jades after hiking to the summit. Up on top was cold, with a north wind. There was sign of caribou wintering on the rocks at the very pinnacle, an icy place to over-winter. Fresh sign of wolves, too, that had climbed up to visit themselves upon the caribou. Back at our campsite, the valley had chilled and was falling toward another twenty-below night. The moon came over the peak behind us; the sun hung orange over mountains to the northwest. I lit a campfire on slabs of slate—to keep it from plummeting—and stirred a sizzling pan of muskox burger and rice, slipping in a chunk of butter when my athletic friend wasn’t looking. Fat is good for handling the cold.

On the way home, crossing cold white tundra, we came across a flowing creek, ice fog hanging over it. The open water didn’t make sense. Somewhere back here last week, an Eskimo friend told me he’d shot four beavers. He’d wondered why they were out, and if their lodge had flooded. Maybe from ground water.

Now, rain sweeps the fog-shrouded river. Spring travel is often tenuous and tense, the trail so important, yet in balance between sun, warmth, and the date on the calendar when all falls apart. We’re accustomed to this precarious balance. But raise the temp a few degrees, bring down the rain, and our traditional knowledge feels like how it feels when we get on the jet to Anchorage—not too useful.
In the wet gray of this warm storm-front blowing inland, and with so much travel left contingent upon cold, I feel a twinge of envy for my friend, up in the sun, flying away to towns and cities, roads and roofs, where weather isn’t the boss.