OIL AND ENDGAME
IN THE AMERICAN SERENGETI
Drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
By Doug Lee
NOT MUCH HAS CHANGED HERE on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska’s Far North—for about the past ten thousand years. Wolves knew this view in the Pleistocene. From where we sit, halfway up a mountainside looking due north, rolling foothills and the flat coastal fringe below us are alive with summer's nesting birds and grazing herds of large mammals, caribou and musk ox, Ice Age survivors improbably still at large in our manmade Anthropocene Epoch. The musk ox move like flouncing sable haystacks, coats flashing in the arctic sun. Caribou gather in brown pods and drift like cloud shadows over greening tundra.
The hills and the narrow plain lie between the Brooks Mountain Range and the frozen coast of the Arctic Ocean, perhaps fifteen miles north of us, looking near in the diamond air and light. Pack ice covers the sea to the horizon, where pressure ridges stand tiny and sharp as knives. We are two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle at the moment of the summer solstice. Here the sun last set in May, and won't set again until August.
Nothing moves between us and the North Pole except wind. The silence, when the wind lies down, is as enormous as the cavernous gulfs of distance sculpted by the mountains, plain, and frozen sea. This is the top of the crown of North America, where the spine of the continental cordillera comes within sight of the polar ocean. We are gazing out over a literal, true end of the earth, where one of the greatest wildlife spectacles on the planet is taking place at our feet.
Across the tundra a great burst of life is occurring, a flash of animal and vegetable procreation repeated each year since the continental ice sheets melted, so vivid you could probably watch its greening from the Moon. The Porcupine Caribou Herd, 170,000 strong, has arrived from its winter range south of the mountains to feed and give birth on the tundra of the coastal plain and foothills at the moment of its blossoming.
I'm with a friend from Canada's Yukon Territory, Ron Chambers, camping in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in the northeast corner of Alaska. We've flown here by bush plane from Prudhoe Bay some 100 miles to the west, the oil field complex that lies at the top of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, after driving 400 miles north from Fairbanks up the pipeline’s accompanying road. Now we've set up camp in a north-facing valley on the northern flank of the continent's northernmost mountains, the Sadlerochit spur of Alaska's Brooks Range.
The wilderness before us stretches eastward down the coast into Canada, whose front-range peaks are just visible, impossibly far away. The whole coast for 200 miles constitutes the calving ground of the Porcupine Herd, where its cows give birth over a two-week span in May and June. Biologists label this phenomenon `predator swamping', a practice shared by a variety of species from African wildebeests to arctic seals to myriad insects. Wolves, grizzlies, wolverines, foxes, hawks, owls and eagles all come for a carnival of the flesh to fatten on newborn calves and afterbirth and weakened mothers. But the sheer prodigality of protein outpaces their appetites. Most calves survive the crucial first few minutes before they totter up to stand on wet spindly legs. Within minutes they can run at their mothers' sides, and have a sporting chance of growing up and returning the next year to carry on the ancient dance of new life and stalking death.
The range in front of us is the most consistently used part of the calving grounds, for reasons still not wholly understood despite decades of study. Female polar bears come here as winter sets in to den and give birth in snow banks on land where the plains and hills meet. In summer, the thawed tundra becomes a nesting ground for birds in their hundreds of thousands, from tundra swans that winter outside the window of my old home on Chesapeake Bay, to petite little Arctic terns that fly every year from here to Antarctica and back again. At summer’s end, snow geese in their tens of thousands stage on the plain before starting their long flight south, to fatten on the reddening autumnal flora and build up energy supplies without which they couldn’t make the flight over the North’s vast taiga forests, where nothing that they eat grows, until they can feed again upon reaching cultivated croplands in Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan.
It is also, quite likely, an untapped oil field, possibly the biggest and last of its kind to be found on the North American mainland. The question of whether or not it should be fully explored and developed is one of the most profound environmental decisions to challenge the American conscience.
Reasoned debate on the issue was long ago lost to polemics and ideology in a battle that has pitted the joint powers of the oil industry, Congress’s powerful Alaskan members and the Republican Party against a coalition of environmental and Indigenous People’s groups and their political allies. Native American opinion split on ethnic and economic lines. Science was run over roughshod in 1987, when negative or unquantifiable consequences predicted in a voluminous, multi-year and multi-faceted U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service study of an oil field's possible impacts on the plain’s flora and fauna, painstakingly assembled from dedicated scientists’ years in the field and rare firsthand expertise in their subjects, were rewritten on orders from Washington to make the prospect more palatable to the American public through substituting weasel words and outright falsities.
In spring of 1989 an effort to open the area came within hours of passing Congress. On the Friday before a Congressional vote was expected to approve it on Saturday, the Exxon Valdez ran onto rocks at the south end of the pipeline in Prince William Sound and began spilling oil. The advocates of developing the coastal plain quietly shelved the idea, but have never given it up.
The fact is that no one can say with certainty what effects major development would have on the Porcupine Herd's calving success rate, or on snow geese migration, or on polar bear denning and birthing. This is among the most untouched parts of North America, rightly called America's Serengeti for its untrammeled wilderness and great migrating herds and the free-roaming predators who follow them. Precedents set elsewhere may not hold in a system never before affected with drilling pads, pipelines, the busy activity of exploration and development, and above all roads—roads that change a place from wilderness into something else forever.
Not that this coast is a total innocent to outside influence, some arctic virgin unwary of smiling strangers from the south. One thing the Pleistocene wolves didn't see here is the Eskimo village of Kaktovik, within our view on the coast. Through binoculars we can make out microwave receivers that electronically link this outpost of about three hundred souls to the rest of the world. They and the village’s airstrip are the only links. There’s no road to it. Basically, outside of flying in—and out—you literally can’t get there from here.
The musk ox marching along the hills are not native to this coast, genetically speaking. The original tribe of musk ox that lived here was decimated in the 1890s when an international whaling fleet gathered in the western Arctic Ocean to hunt the world's last plentiful stocks of bowhead whales. For a decade the fleet overwintered on Herschel Island, 115 miles east of us across the Canadian border, and paid local Inuit hunters to provide them with meat, while fraternizing with their women. When the whales were all but gone the whalers sailed away for the last time, leaving behind disease and alcoholism. At a point not precisely determined, the local musk ox population went extinct. These animals are descended from 53 from Greenland stock transplanted here in 1969. They did well, and grew to number in the low hundreds, but have more recently suffered a decline.
Some years ago a senior hunter from Arctic Village, the United States’ most isolated Indian community, home to some 200 members of the Gwich’in people, Native Alaskans and among Canada’s First Nations, which lies nearly 150 miles almost due south of Kaktovik on the other side of the Brooks Range, spotted a large, shaggy creature that he took to be a grizzly bear. He shot it, but when he approached, something about it didn’t look right. It appeared to him as though the creature had no head!
The familiar mountains seemed suddenly stranger than he had known in a lifetime spent among them, and he lost no time getting to his boat and speeding downriver to Arctic Village. At the government school, teachers Dennis and Debbie Miller took out a picture book of arctic animals, and the hunter recognized his beast.
A pioneer bull musk ox had crossed the continental divide of the Brooks Range, a high, hidden, windswept world of snowy passes and hanging glaciers rarely seen by human eyes, to reclaim ancestral grounds in Alaska's interior. There another of the Arctic's elders took its life without knowing what it was.
It seems the musk ox had been gone too long.
*******
AFTER BREAKFAST ON OUR FIRST MORNING of camping, while Ron squared away the campsite and I readied gear for a day's hike, he said casually, "Look through your binoculars and see if that's a caribou down there."
"No, that's a bear," I replied. "No, that's two bears."
They were a pair of straw-colored grizzlies, probably siblings, fat with spring and baby caribou, still several hundred yards away, sniffing and digging their way toward us up the broad, dry creek bottom in which we’d pitched our tent. They moved in the easily distracted manner of undisturbed animals, engrossed in whatever lay next directly before them.
In 1984, when Ron and I first became friends in Kluane, the Canadian Yukon wilderness park where he worked as a Parks Canada warden, he told me the sum of a lifetime's experience with grizzlies.
"Bears can hardly see. They can hear like you wouldn't believe. But mostly, a bear is one big nose connected to a stomach. The stomach goes wherever the nose tells it there's somethin' good."
A sharp up-valley breeze blew from the bears toward us, keeping from them any lingering breakfast smells we might have emitted. Our camp was clean, the only way to be in bear country, foods sealed and packed in airtight containers. But the sight of the two animals ambling toward us, disappearing and reappearing around bushes, getting closer each time, seemed to call for some action.
"What should we do?" I asked Ron, not taking my eyes off the bears.
"Well, if you want to take pictures of bears, now is probably a good time," Ron said, still wiping dishes.
Looking around, I saw no alternatives. We were miles north of tree line. The low-growth willows and open tundra offered no refuge. I set up my tripod and commenced taking photos.
My heartbeat speeded up and time slowed down. Early in my acquaintance with Ron, we came across a hiker on a wilderness trail in Kluane who had crept too close to a bear while snapping its picture, only spotting its cub at the moment the mother bear spotted him and a companion. She put a fang through his boot and foot when she pulled him down out of a tree. Then she went after his partner, and nearly pulled him down too, though he was ten or twelve feet up. The first hiker escaped and ran into us on the trail. We found the second one high in a treetop and had to throw him a rope from an adjacent tree Ron had climbed to belay him safely down. I could still picture the round-eyed and faraway looks of fear in their faces, and how the tree-climber's knees sagged in the aftermath of an extended adrenaline rush.
But grizzlies in open country, when not surprised or disturbed with cubs or guarding a kill, are usually best dealt with face-on. The wind flapped our tent like a sail and shook my camera. The bears gamboled out of the creek bed and partway up the bowl-sided valley, drawing nearer. I thought they might pass above us. Instead, when perhaps 200 yards away and parallel to camp, they sat down and seemed to contemplate distances and think of private things, not once looking our way.
Ron was holding the little launcher of skyrocket-like cracker-shells that was our grizzly deterrent, meant to discourage bears with a loud whiz-bang. The grizzlies rolled on their backs, stood and shook like dogs, showering the air with a corona of sunlit golden hairs. Then they turned and walked back the way they had come, more purposeful in their strides as they grew smaller and left over the lip of the valley without a backward glance.
"Those are wild bears," Ron said. "They don't know what we are."
"I don't think they saw us," I said, finding my voice.
"They knew we were here," Ron said. "They couldn't make us out very well, but they could see the tent flapping for sure—a big noisy thing. They knew it was something that didn't belong here. So they decided to go somewhere else."
"They never looked at us," I said.
"Oh, they looked at us," Ron replied. "They never stood up and looked at us. If they'd done that, then I would have known they were really interested, and we might have had to try a cracker shell on them."
In Ron's company, I feel as secure as a man in grizzly bear country armed only with little skyrockets can. Of equal parts Native American and European heritage and with dual Canadian and U.S. citizenship, Ron has a foot in more worlds than one. He’s a member of both Canada’s Southern Tutchone and Alaska’s Tlingit Tribes, and his earliest memories are of dogsled travel through the woods in deep Yukon winter, wrapped in furs on his mother's sled with a sister on either side of him as they made her rounds among trapping campsites and cabins in what is now Kluane National Park, before it became a park. He has lived around bears all his life, not to mention wolves, wolverines, ornery bull moose and even more fractious moose cows, and he has an acute understanding of animals’ psychology, motives and reactions, combined with a keen instinct for survival.
Over the 20 years he was a Parks Canada warden, a ranger by the nomenclature of U.S. parks, Ron served on Kluane's Alpine Rescue Team, frequently finding himself dangling from the end of a cable beneath a helicopter hovering as close as possible to cliff-sides to pluck stranded, sick or wounded climbers off the highest mountain range in North America, the Yukon’s St. Elias Mountains, which continues uninterruptedly into Alaska as the Wrangell Range. Ron's chief rules when in the wilderness are to keep perspective, keep active and keep laughing, and he is grinning now in appreciation of what we've just seen, and even more at the earnest look on my face as I strive to understand bears' thinking—among the most critical of wilderness subjects, and, in bear country, a pet preoccupation of mine.
"They were checking us out the whole time,” he told me. “That might be why they walked up here. But you could tell, they aren't used to camps. They weren't looking at this camp and thinking, Hey, there's a meal.
"Bears are dumb, but they're not stupid. They're sly. I watched a mother Dall sheep with a little lamb, probably a couple of days old, near a grizzly who was grazing. The bear's eating grass, eh? Not looking up. The lamb kept running out farther from its mother towards the bear. It wanted to play, right?" Ron demonstrated the lamb with running fingers.
"The grizzly didn't pay any attention, just kept eating grass. The mother kept calling, saying `Get the hell back here,' but the lamb kept running a little closer. Until the bear went...." Ron snapped his chops with a sideways bite.
Weeks later, when my slides were developed, the bears looked small in the frames, some blurred by windshake. But in person, their round, sunlit shapes became the riveting features in the landscape, the walking essence of wild country. Their presence defines wilderness, arbitrates it for lesser mortals such as ourselves, and nothing concentrates the powers of the wild and tunes our emotions about them quite so finely as an approaching grizzly.
********
THE ARCTIC NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE is enormous, one 20th of the entire area of the refuge system nationwide. Of its 19,286,722 acres (78,050.59 sq. km., more than 30,000 sq. mi.), 8.1 million are classified as wilderness, permanently barring mineral exploitation or any other development. Another 10.1 million are designated for “minimal management”, where limited uses such as recreation and hunting are allowed, but the overarching principle remains the maintenance of existing natural conditions and wild values. The 1.5-million-acre coastal section of the Porcupine Herd’s calving and summer feeding grounds we’re looking at, generally referred to by its legislative designation as the 1002 area, enjoys no such protection.
Limited exploratory drilling took place here in the 1980s, with results not made public, but thought to be promising. The area's permanent status has never been decided by Congress, and a bi-partisan moratorium on further drilling has been in place, threatened now by shifting national politics. Wilderness designation would remove it by law from any contemplation of further exploration or development for good. A vote to open it to exploration and development would connect it with the North American energy and road grid, which would proceed to expand across it.
Two or three times during the week Ron and I camped there, we heard and glimpsed airplanes flying patterns over the plain, carrying researchers counting the caribou herd. Censuses have watched the Porcupine Herd fluctuate from a low of 123,000 in 2001 up to nearly 200,000 counted in 2013, the most recent tabulated data. The Central Arctic Herd, which centers its range in the vicinity of Prudhoe Bay's oil fields, grew from 16,000 to a peak of 70,000 by 2010, but since then has seen numbers drop to 22,000 in 2016, for reasons biologists blame partly on a disastrously late spring in 2013 causing a low calf survival rate, but admit they cannot fully explain. For many drilling proponents, the herd’s increase (until recently), seemed to clinch their argument that development—pipelines, roads, residential and industrial centers, land and aerial traffic—can be good for caribou, by keeping predators at a wary distance from humans’ unnatural installations. Under most, though not all, circumstances the Central Arctic Herd shows little concern for scattered installations. But the conclusion overlooks key differences between the two herds.
The much smaller Central Arctic Herd enjoys a vastly wider coastal plain—almost 100 miles, 160 km., between the coast and the Brooks Range, compared to the Refuge's ten to fifteen miles (16 to 24 km.)—and moves around it seasonally but does not migrate over the mountains. Still, and crucially, its cows avoid oil field activity during certain critical times of their yearly schedules, most importantly when calving, an option cows in the Porcupine Herd might not have on their narrow calving grounds should they become an oil field.
In addition, the Porcupine Herd’s caribou have special needs to build up maximum energy reserves before their long migration over the Brooks Range, in the form of fat laid on by summer grazing along the lush coastal plain. Most critically, the cows must be able to trek hundreds of miles and survive on the lichen forage of winter with enough energy left to nurture a fetus through the months of darkness, carry it back over the mountains, and deliver it into the world on the coastal foothills and plain. Their circular migration is the longest made by any land animal in the world. Any serious disruption of this cycle could endanger the herd’s breeding success, huge and healthy though it may currently be.
Another key and often overlooked factor is that during the peak summer months, mosquitoes, the universal curse of the arctic summer, plague every warm-blooded creature. Caribou receive the additional attentions of egg-laying bot flies whose offspring mature in the animals' throats or under their hides with hideous and dehabilitating results. The caribous' only defense when insects swarm on warm summer days is to form into massive aggregations, sometimes 10,000 animals or more packed shoulder-to-shoulder, and together, en masse, walk into the wind. Since mosquito densities remain constant within a given area, the ratio of insects per animal is greatly lowered when the animals crowd together and seek breezes to ease their torment.
Caribou around Prudhoe Bay pay little attention to pipelines, where they can commonly be seen walking and lying beneath them…except when giving birth, and when forming the great aggregations, in which cases they avoid them.
The cows of the Porcupine Herd could fail to acquire much-needed fat due to increased insect stress should infrastructure pop up to disrupt their way, and no matter what’s been claimed or will be said about it, neither science nor the oil companies can in any verifiable way project what development of the 1002 calving and feeding grounds would do to the herd’s health and calving rate.
It’s true, as the oil industry argues, that present-day techniques of “small footprint” development of an oilfield impose a much smaller direct presence on the ground than in earlier days. Many fewer drilling pads are required to tap an oilfield today through directional drilling by which a well can bend, and reach oil that’s miles away. And that’s to be commended. But claims of only a 2,000-acre total footprint put forward by leading advocates of development are disingenuous. That might be so of actual drill-pad areas, buildings and direct lengths of pipelines, but purposefully overlooks the overall extent that the infrastructure web would reach, and the even greater areas affected by noise and other disturbances. And oil spillage, as we all know, and other forms of accidental or negligent pollution inevitably occur, at one level or another, within the best-run operations.
In the broadest global picture, caribou and reindeer herds all around the Arctic Circle increase or crash in poorly understood cycles, and the factors that might trigger a future crash are not clear to science. But a herd weakened in its reproductive success by the intrusion of the industrial world might not come back from a natural cyclical low point. The experiment hasn’t been done yet, and we must hope that it never will be.
The political pressures to open the coast are enormous. Prudhoe Bay and the fields adjoining it form the largest energy complex in North America. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) pumps North Slope crude oil to the port of Valdez on the Pacific Ocean for shipment out in tankers. Opened in 1975, TAPS is one of the great engineering feats of all time, running 800 miles over mountains and river valleys, through earthquake country and some of Earth's harshest climate. In the 1990s, the oil fields and pipeline were supplying 40 percent of the nation's domestically produced oil, 25 percent of its total daily consumption. (Ron and I made this trip together in 1994, and though I haven’t been back since, I use up-to-date animal numbers in this article, and the basic facts of wilderness and development haven’t changed, nor has the nature of the experiences with true wild that we had. So I feel this story remains pertinent and worth telling today.) But oil fields have lifetimes, and Prudhoe and its sister fields’ production has been dwindling for a long time, kept up only by the opening of newer adjacent fields. The prospect of a major find in the Refuge's coastal plain has been tantalizing beyond measure to companies and interests who have invested billions in Prudhoe Bay-centered facilities that would become useless liabilities should the currently developed fields ever actually run dry, or production run too low to be economically feasible. The fracking boom in natural gas has lowered crude prices, for now, making the investment required to explore and then develop the 1002 area less glittering in its bottom line. But proponents of doing so would very much like to have the option open, and now, in 2017, they may be able to.
Not only industry but the state of Alaska and its Eskimos, too, from whose political jurisdiction the oil flows, depend heavily on North Slope oil revenues. For the state, it comes in royalties on barrels of oil pumped. For the Eskimos’ North Slope Borough, which spans Alaska’s entire Arctic Ocean Coast, income is generated from taxes on the industry’s infrastructure. And in the long view, there are other energy resources north of the Arctic Circle yet untapped. Offshore geology under the Arctic Ocean promises oil and gas deposits of unmapped extent, and the green light has recently been given by the current Administration to explore them, despite near-disastrous recent false starts at getting an exploratory offshore rig there.
Onshore on the North Slope but out of reach of present-day technology and
economics are also tar sands and frozen oil fields. Fields in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve adjacent to development were once sacrosanct, but no longer. A fact little noted in public forums is the massive coal deposits that underlie much of the North Slope. Energy companies would prefer to make all forms of North Slope energy sources open to exploitation, and decisions and rulings about expanding areas open to oil drilling could have little-publicized ramifications for future mining—although the coal industry’s long-term decline makes that nightmare increasingly unlikely viewed at present. Boosting the pipeline’s flow with oil from the Refuge would be a short-term bonanza for the companies involved, with long-term implications in keeping future forms of North Slope development on the table.
As for what the Refuge's potential reserves mean to the nation as a whole, it depends who you’re asking. Estimates of the 1002 area’s yet-undiscovered deposits first ranged around 3.2 billion barrels, though they could be three or four times that, and figures of around ten billion recoverable barrels are popular in current pro-development arguments. To proponents, these figures signify hundreds of billions of dollars going into domestic coffers rather than spent on foreign oil. Yet they do not mention that the oil itself might go overseas; Congress removed requirements that Alaskan oil could be sold only in the U.S. and shipped by American-flagged tankers that were laid down as part of its original approval of the pipeline in the 1970s, to the dismay and detriment of American shippers and independent refiners.
And, of course, the elephant in the room, the ascendance of natural gas, has changed the whole picture of America’s energy consumption, with crude oil prices dropping below what might be profitable, considering the investment that would be required to open up and start pumping from the 1002 area, through another pipeline connecting it to Prudhoe and TAPS. While the global energy picture will continue to evolve in ways near-impossible to predict, to opponents of drilling the 1002 area, any amount of profit is too small to justify invading one of the nation’s—one of the world's—last great bastions of nature working by its own rules.
*******
A HIKE ACROSS TUNDRA in the greening of the year is an adventure one can have and truly not know what might happen next, or what might be found. On the coastal plain below us, polygon pools across the melted tundra are aflutter with more than a hundred species of birds, nesting, breeding, feeding or passing through. In the drier hills where we hike, bird life is less obvious, but still abundant and unafraid.
The first creature we meet is a mother sandpiper who hops up like a jack-in-the-box when I walk within a yard or so of her nest without spotting her camouflage. Two cream-and-chocolate eggs nestle in a pouch, tucked into the tundra in a multi-colored sac woven of tundra plants. It's set between the slightest of mounds, fashioned so that the eggs and the mother's body sit below the wind.
She plays the broken-wing ploy, cheeping and fluttering frantically for my attention, until I back off and she settles back on her eggs, fussing a bit. And here she will sit, watching the sun circle the sky, for her time of incubation, vulnerable to any fox or other egg-and-mother eater who comes along, with only camouflage and her wits to save herself and her young.
She lets us come close so long as we move slowly. I can only wonder at the survival of any wild animal in the face of the predators and natural forces arrayed about us. It must be that only in the vastness of the tundra lies the salvation of its tiniest citizens.
Fog and low clouds roll in off the pack-ice when the wind blows from the north. On a south wind, when the sun shines, the tundra shines too, a lustrous pelt in the pure arctic light. A butterfly, one of the Arctic's 29 species, flutters between tundra flowers. Translucent yellow arctic poppies turn perfect, four-petaled faces toward the sun's orb, tracking it, cloud or shine, like light-seeking radars as they follow its ellipse around the sky. It rises high in the south, dips low in the north in the wee hours, and slips sometimes behind mountains' heads, but never below true horizon. The flowers’ faces follow the sun with precision, even when a mountain is in the way.
"Notice something about the sun?" Ron asks as we look due north at midnight. It hangs low over the North Pole, a pale round mirror of itself reflecting on the ice. "It's white. Anyplace else, the sun that low would be orange or red."
There are virtually no particulates suspended in the atmosphere on a line between us and the sun.
One of my most vivid and haunting impressions of the Arctic Coast, where I spent nearly six months traveling and researching an article on ANWR for National Geographic Magazine in 1987, witnessing an entire spring, summer and fall, comes from a similar midnight on those travels, eastward down the coast in Canada, on the calving grounds at the height of the birthing frenzy. Caribou cows and newborns trotted hither and yon across the mountains' knees. The tundra was streaked with unmelted snowbanks glowing rose in the low light. Ptarmigan startled me and my two companions, another writer and a photographer, both Yukon residents, when the birds exploded into the air all around us in mating displays, launching themselves twenty feet skyward in a heart-stopping explosion of wings, like a whole covey of quail erupting unexpectedly out of the briers, then falling like feather dusters back into the low willow bushes.
Every puddle held a breeding pair of ducks, every pool a pair of tundra swans (birds I could look out the windows of the home where I lived for many years on a bank of Chesapeake Bay, and watch, come winter, after they'd flown diagonally clear across the content on a bisect from the Arctic Ocean to America’s mid-Atlantic). Bushes were hung with songbirds’ nests. Piratical jaeger gulls bullied the little residents of the tundra, especially the ubiquitous lemmings, plucking them up while on the wing. Ghostly snowy owls of silent flight stalked and murdered them. Grizzly bears tromped along the ridges, blood-lusty with a stiff-legged gait and rolling with fat. Four golden eagles sat on the tundra facing each other in the twilight like a convocation of undertakers, momentarily sated with death.
For the first time, in the presence of caribou, I felt something I've only known since when hiking alone and unarmed in bear country. It was a kinship with the caribou, a commonality and equal footing as large mammals in the presence of larger predators who may or may not mean us harm, at their whim and inclination.
Caribou change the landscape in the opposite way from grizzlies. They take the tension from it, soothe it, at least until a fright seizes them up in mad dashes from dangers we can only strain to spot. Yet they are so completely a part of this country that when the panic flight stops, heads drop to graze and calves scamper like children, then the calm is contagious. I sat with my human companions through the hours of low light, watching the drama of life and death unfold around us.
A calf not half a day in this world walked up to the photographer’s tripod, sniffed his camera, and decided the apparatus must be its mother. It was cute, following us like a puppy, but soon became a problem as its real mother rushed back and forth across the tundra, honking for her calf, circling outside a certain perimeter of distance, unwilling to come any closer. We finally had to run across the tundra to leave the puzzled calf behind. Later, we saw a lone pair that we hoped was the stray calf and mother reunited. Our simple presence was an intrusion, a potentially fatal disruption in the lives of at least one cow and her calf. That is wilderness.
A caribou cow lay down on her side on a hill above us, nearly the same color as its dun vegetation. When none of us were looking, she gave birth. We watched as the calf struggled to its feet. A pale sun and paler moon stood opposite each other in the sky like gladiators circling an arena of titanic events. We seemed to have slipped into another time, on a geological and mythological stage for events witnessed only by the stark mountains and the frozen sea; a secret imparted to us alone of the world's incredible fecundity and ferocity, glimpsed like life on another planet, briefly visited in this Neverland of springtime beyond the northernmost mountains.
*******
RON AND I FELL UNDER THE SPELL of the constant daylight, sometimes hiking for eighteen hours straight, or bunkering down in our tent during 24 hours of wet, horizontally driven June snow. Evidence of the land's predatory energy lay strewn all about the valley and mountainsides: bones and skulls, horns and antlers, tufts of fur and hide. Silky black strands of musk ox hairs clung to bushes. We picked up clumps of caribou fur and Dall’s sheep’s hair to carry as hand warmers. My own heat sprang back at my palms when I clasped them in my pocket. Warmest of all, when we came across it, was the tail, snow white and a foot in length, of an arctic fox that something had scattered in bits and pieces for a half a mile up and down the valley.
"What do you suppose would do that?" I asked Ron, partly from curiosity, partly in awe at the thoroughness with which one toothed creature had eradicated another. Could it have been wolves, being playful? A wolverine, feeling malicious?
"Something that doesn't like foxes," Ron said.
"I like to take my time when I'm hiking," he has often told me. "Some people get all excited about how many miles they hike. I like to slow down and see what's around me."
On a hillside of stratified outcroppings, Ron picked at fossils on a boulder. The fractured surfaces over most of the slope's face were decorated with spirals and whorls, cones and tiny needles and snails' coils, like fine bas-relief. We were walking on old ocean floor, and its inhabitants.
It’s likely that some of their juices, in the unthinkable oceans of time that have passed since the seashells turned to stone, cooked down through the soil of ancient sea beds to add to the hydrocarbon deposits that may very well lie under our feet. These stones spring from the same fossilized reefs that run beneath the oil fields around Prudhoe. In the foothills near us stands an outcropping of brown, sandy rock that will burn if touched by a flame.
Geologists have searched all along the coast, seismically probing it. From the air, light and dark stripes of tundra vegetation traveled over by seismic exploration crews’ heavy equipment calibrate the entire 60 miles between Prudhoe and the Arctic Refuge's border—currently the only part of the entire Alaskan Arctic Coast off limits to drilling, 110 miles out of 1,200. Westward from Prudhoe, near Point Barrow, oil literally oozes out of the ground in seeps, or used to, according to Eskimo memories and early explorers’ accounts. Eskimos there lived through the darkness of arctic winters by the light of petroleum lamps before the rest of the world arrived with other uses for it.
Where our valley opened down onto the plain, we found circles of rock marking old tent rings left by Eskimos from Kaktovik, who have come for generations to the mountains' edges to fish and hunt caribou and sheep. Tundra grew in odd-colored patches over long-abandoned hearths, marked by standing stones that once threw heat like ovens.
Legally, the surface of the coastal area in question belongs to the Eskimos of Kaktovik, whose leaders have declared in favor of development, anticipating a share of the return from what lies underneath. The larger native community of the Far North is divided.
The Gwich'in, south of the mountains in Arctic Village and its related, scattered settlements in both Alaska and Canada, are fearful that changes in the Porcupine Caribou Herd's numbers or migration patterns could mean the loss of hunting as a major element of village life, and force them more completely into the cash economy. One of the few alcohol-free northern communities, Arctic Village relies on the herd for meat that accounts for as much as 80% of their diet, and, perhaps even more importantly, for the cultural functions and continuity, demands and satisfactions of hunting as a way of life.
Eskimos, their neighbors to the north across the Brooks Range, have done well by North Slope development. Tax revenues have modernized lonely villages, brought satellite-age communications, schools, health and elderly care, plumbing, gravel roads, streetlights and pre-fab houses. The Eskimo’s North Slope Borough’s capital of Barrow has taken on the fast-food trappings of more mainstream American communities, where you can eat enchiladas or Kentucky Fried Chicken. Caribou form only a minor part of the hunting diet in most Eskimo communities; for them, whales are the keystone of traditional diet and culture, and Eskimos’ concerns about expanding development are focused primarily on their fears of offshore operations hurting the marine environment.
"I don't see what's to be afraid of," Ron told me. "You saw the pipeline. Caribou were sleeping under it. We saw sheep, moose, caribou near the pipeline in the mountains, just from the road. It doesn't look like it's bothering them.
"If I hadn't gotten the Parks Canada job, I probably would have gone to work on the pipeline. My cousins from Alaska all worked on it. One guy's job was to sit on a tractor for eight hours and keep it running, in case they needed it. It was so cold that if they turned it off, they couldn't start it again."
But what about the road that will come with the pipeline that will go with the oil field, I asked? In 1987 I had spent two late-autumn weeks in Kaktovik during whaling season, waiting for its hunters to catch a whale, which didn’t happen while I was there. But I did what I could to get to know people in the community, and found them somewhat torn, and of two minds. They felt helpless in the face of the enormous powers summoning them to open the plain, but desperate at the thought of despoiling the wilderness at their back door, perhaps affecting their hunting grounds, and opening their village to the outside.
"People told me they'd like to be able to get in their pickup truck and drive to Fairbanks to buy furniture, or groceries, for that matter,” I said to Ron. “But they don't want all the rest that comes with it."
"It's their land," he replied. "They should decide what to do with it. How can anybody else tell them what to do with it?"
"What about the Gwich'in?" I asked. "They've got legitimate worries."
"If they were doing it the traditional tribal way," Ron said,” the Eskimos and the Indians would have met and parleyed. They would have worked it out. Before the boundary-makers. That's a native name for white people. They drew lines on maps and called them boundaries."
"I've got an interest, too," I postulated. "I'm a U.S. citizen. So are you. You've got an interest too."
"Why should you have anything to do with it? Or me?" Ron asked.
"It's part of being a nation. We're all Americans, and certain things go with that. Public lands are assets that belong to everybody."
"Yeah," Ron said. "You tell that to the guys in the village down there, and they'll tell you to fuck off."
The residents of Kaktovik, in my days there, were polite with flashes of warmth. But they were worn out by media exposure and political pressures, and wished for nothing so much than that I and all other media reps—of whom I was the last lingering presence of that summer, when the issue had gained a certain amount of national limelight—would take a permanent trip back south whence we came.
Ron has his own viewpoint. "When I was a kid I used to run all over Kluane on my snowmobile. That was my mother's tribal trapping ground, our hunting ground. Me and my cousins used to run around on glaciers, jumping crevasses. When I think of it now, it makes me shiver. I'm lucky to be alive.
“Then they came and said, ‘No, Kluane isn't yours anymore, it's a national park. You can't trap there, or hunt, or run snowmobiles.’
“I've always wondered…who gave it to them?
“That's why Indians call white people boundary-makers."
So who decides this land's future, and for what purposes?
*******
MORE RAIN, MORE TENT TIME, in sleeping bags a little damp now, in clothes ripening after a week without running water. In a lull, I peered out the flap to see other humans—a sight my brain didn't instantly comprehend. They were a wet bunch of campers who had hiked up from an airdrop on the coast, and would be picked up in a few days at the angled piece of nearby hillside that passed for a bush airstrip, where we'd been dropped off. They had cached food in bear-proof cylinders there, and seemed relieved to find them. I couldn’t help but notice certain tensions over supplies that may have been exacerbated by several days in wet leather boots while hiking in wetland tundra—rubber boot country.
We told them what we knew of the area, they told us where they had seen peregrine falcons nesting, and moved down the valley to camp. Ron and I ducked out of the wet to cook beans and pasta—a far cry from the rack of ribs we had put on the fire our first night camping.
"They never would have camped like this in the old days." Ron said, stirring beans. "Indians are meat-eaters."
Ron's father was a well-known Yukon Territory big-game guide, Shorty Chambers, like Ron of bi-ethnic heritage, who brought the flower of society from Toronto and Montreal, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and London on hunts in the rugged St. Elias Mountains. In the off-season, he was a well-liked fixture of the Yukon’s bars, and when he died, Ron was proud to tell me, a line of mourners formed that ran around the bock from the Whitehorse saloon where his open coffin had been lain atop the mahogany bar, and hundreds of Yukoners filed by to shake Shorty’s hand one more time, and toss back a last shot of liquor with him.
Shorty also joined his Indian relatives on annual mountain sheep hunts, and brought young Ron along. "When I went with my dad on Indian hunts, they wouldn't bring anything with them except maybe a little pemmican, a little rum. No other food, and we didn't eat until somebody shot a sheep. Sometimes that would be two or three days. Then they'd build a big fire, skin out half the sheep and throw it on the coals. After you'd been out there climbing around with nothing to eat, you didn't wait too long. And it tasted good."
Ron chortled. "Take those campers. What do you suppose we could have charged them for shots of rum?"
Ron had spent many more months than I on this coast as the first warden of a Canadian national park declared in the 1980s as the Northern Yukon National Park, renamed Ivvavik in 1992, which borders the Arctic Refuge and extends the Porcupine Herd’s total protected area greatly. An even newer one, Vuntut, established to its south in 1995, borders both Ivvavik and ANWR. We had planned this trip to waste a minimum of energy on logistics. Ron drove on the Alaska Highway from his home in the southern Canadian Yukon to Fairbanks, where we rendezvoused. After a day of outfitting, we drove north 400 miles along the pipeline highway to Prudhoe Bay.
The drive up took us through snow, rain and fog, but our return trip would prove glorious. The gravel road, round-shouldered and traversed by enormous trucks servicing the oil fields, crosses the Brooks Range and the far northern Continental Divide between Arctic and North Pacific Ocean drainages at Atigun Pass. Hanging cornices of snow overshadowed the approach to the Divide when we drove it in late June, and road signs warned of avalanches that had, indeed, very recently spilled partly across the road. We hurried under, staring upward.
The summit of the pass was cold and windy, but not enough to discourage an urge to contribute to the flow of waters toward two oceans on the crest of the Great Divide. South of the pass the trees began, stunted survivors that quickly gave way to full-grown firs and aspens. Two marble mountains rose above them like a stage set from "Close Encounters", shining half-domes of rock cloven by ancient cataclysm, by tradition the boundary markers between Indian and Eskimo lands.
The road crosses the Yukon River on a wood-planked bridge that angles sharply downward from its southern bank to the northern. The Yukon is immense in its flow at this point, fully realized in its destiny as one of the world's great rivers, muscular in a brown flow that sweeps along whole trees, tumbling them in its current far below our feet.
It is one of the world's great drives, and one as yet little sung to the North American motorist, save for fans of cable TV’s ‘Ice Truckers’ reality show. Yet it’s a fact that anyone anywhere on the continent can back out of their driveway and drive to the Arctic Ocean.
The problem is, it wasn't supposed to be this way. When the environmental battles of the 1970s were fought to make the pipeline as safe and ultimately environmentally innocuous as it could be made, an agreement was reached that this road would not be opened to the public.
Predictably, however, pressure soon developed to open it, the argument being that state funds went to its upkeep, and therefore Alaskans should be able to drive it. Today a permit from the Alaska Department of Public Safety is recommended, because it enables company and state employees to render aid, in case of trouble, on a pay-later basis, and we had one. But it wasn’t necessary, legally, and the original premise of protecting game from poaching or over-hunting is largely forgotten.
Such is the history of roads and wilderness. Times change. Neither Natives nor visitors do things the old ways, close to the face of the land. We drive up the Pipeline road burning petroleum, glad to be able to, then fly here burning aviation fuel, while Natives hunt and play on gasoline-powered snowmobiles and four-wheel-drive all-terrain vehicles that can tackle almost any tundra mountain slope.
Yet the past is still with us here. Over the border in Canada I saw stumps of fir trees, still standing after however many decades, that had been cut with stone axes. The stumps themselves are wonders of the arctic life-drive, a hundred or more years of microscopic yearly rings packed into a stem no wider than two fingers, so slowly does growth proceed here at the limits of the Earth.
So untouched is this land that on Herschel Island off the Yukon's Arctic Ocean Coast, I visited a skull lying atop the tundra from a driftwood burial of centuries ago, eye sockets staring at the circling arctic sun. Most of the Canadian coast is administered by its Inuit Native Nation, even within national and territorial parks, the latter of which Herschel became one in 1987, where I had the honor of signing into its guest book as its first visitor after arriving by helicopter. Canada's government has backed Canadian natives' opposition to U.S. development that might affect the Porcupine Herd, which the two countries share. It is unlikely that a road will ever snake along the Canadian portion of the coastal calving grounds.
Here in Alaska, it seems that everything may one day be changed forever. But it was still possible, when Ron and I walked wide-eyed through an arctic kaleidoscope of encounters with animals and elements, to forget the rest of the world and its concerns, unfathomably far, far to the south of these mountains’ bulwark, and as different as a different planet.
Our last day was fair and calm, shirtsleeve weather for once. We hiked down-valley and around the corner of the mountains to seats with a panoramic view. Kaktovik was insignificant in the vast sweep of plain and coastline, in the eternity of ice, sky and horizon.
We could see the hikers' camp below us, bright modern backpacking tents pitched across a patch of creekside. Over the banks of the creek’s floodplain, in a low spot a scant couple of hundred yards away, two grizzly bears were engaged in play-wrestling. Batting each other with huge paws, they snapped and champed and sent massive divots of tundra flying as they scrabbled and shoved for purchase.
It was a nice day in the Arctic. The tired campers came winding down a side-valley from a hike, some straggling, one or two chatting, oblivious to the bears just over a rise from them. We watched them reach camp and strip off hiking boots and windbreakers, rub feet and spread parkas and sleeping bags on bushes to air. A short sprint away, the two bears jousted and snarled, tearing up the tundra in their mock rage.
Who knows what may have been watching us? No human being has the ultimate vantage in this wilderness. And no one has a crystal ball to peer into its future. The only thing clear, it seemed to me, was that questions about its fate would be decided far from here, by people who have never been here, for reasons having little to do with Eskimos or Indians, caribou, musk ox, polar bears, snow geese or any other native of the North.
Caribou winked as little points of yellow light, their coats catching the sunshine as they turned their flanks on hills so far away it seemed impossible that we could see them. It occurred to me that we were looking out at one of our nation's and our civilization's greatest achievements—that such wild country can still exist, a fortress of nature we have not yet stormed, and that, having it at our mercy, we have not yet followed our all-too-rarely curbed urges as Western Homo sapiens sapiens to finish it off.
But at this moment of highest summer, all was still, unmoving, untouched.
What we do with it now is a test of our true natures.
END
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