Charlotte goes to Coldfoot: The Gol-Darn Bloody Skeeters are Freaking Me Out! (Report 5)

Sukakpak from the NW with wild sweet pea blooming in foreground.

Are the mosquitos driving me out of my mind?

Geared up to hike in 80 degree weather in the Arctic

No, not really. Okay, maybe. Yes, really!!!!! This is requiring all I’ve learned in a lifetime of practice: focus, positive thinking, self-distraction.

DEET really does work. No longer worried about bearing mutant children, I lather up with the repellant. Unfortunately, I’m still a mouth-breather so I inhale the little buggers as I bike and hike. They also get up my nose. The ones I hate the most are the five or six that fly into the safety zone of my cabin on my shirt tails when I come inside. In the middle of the night they wake me up with the lightest buzz and touch. The choice is to either ignore them or spend half my night chasing them around with the fly swatter.

Otherwise, life is fantastic. Tex, aka Jeffery, a server from Coldfoot Camp, and Christie, a Yupik nursing student from Oregon, hiked up the mountain behind camp with me. It was their first mountain so I got to relive the wonder and power of seeing the whole world from such an elevated perspective. He has biked 12,000 miles in the past three years and she is a star basketball player so they had no problems other than the slide down the steeper sections of sphagnum moss.

I also got to play hide-and-seek with a snowshoe hare research team. First we had to find the grid and then the plots and lastly get down on hands and knees and search for the hare pellets. Since the hare/lynx cycle is at an ebb, my partner and I only found one pellet in two days of searching. I was ready to capture a hare, hold it over the grids and squeeze the pellets out.

Jenna hunting for bunny poop.

Not to worry, researchers, it was only a fantasy. Fantasies become much more elemental in the boreal forest.

Did I mention we had a 19 year old sharpshooter girl whose job it was to hold the shotgun and protect us from the grizzlies while we concentrated on the ground?? After the seeking, the counting, the sweat and mosquito swarms, we got to relax on the gravel beaches of the Hammond River, wading, splashing, rockhounding. The mountain ridges and the rivers are places where the wind can blow unimpeded and purify the air of mosquitoes. I really, truly appreciate a good stiff breeze here.

Another day outside was spent picking up trash along the highway as a team. Ted won the prize for most trucker pee bottles found. I found the remains of an old car wreck. We celebrated afterward at Coldfoot Camp. I will work for root beer floats most any day.

K. likes to keep us happy so Wednesday when there were free seats on the NATC flight to Anaktuvuk Pass, Caylon, Christie and I got to go. In an eight passenger plane we flew over the Gates of the Arctic National Park and between what Bob Marshall called the Gates: Boreal Peak and Frigid Crags. The North Fork of the Koyukuk flows between them.

Anaktuvuk is a 350+ self-governing Eskimo village within the National Park. Unlike most villages which are on the coast, it is smack dab in the middle of the mountains, located there because the caribou herd flows through on their way to calve on the coast. The Numamiuts are Inupiat and until fifty years ago, nomadic. Harriet, a native and mother of six, escorted us through town and took us to the Simon Paneak Visitors Center. She didn’t mind being called Eskimo even though the more politically correct term is Native Alaskan. There are also Athabaskan Indians in Alaska who are not Eskimo in the least. They live in the Interior or southeastern Alaska.

Because it was a last minute deal I didn’t have time to bike home for my Dramamine. Baaaarf! The paying passengers were not impressed with me.

The next morning was Summer Solstice so Karen, Chinook the sled dog and I drove up over Atigun Pass to Roche Moutanee, the drainage just south of the famous Atigan Gorge. The scenery was breathtaking but between the skeeters and the 80 degree heat, we were miserable and only lugged our backpacking gear in a few miles. Once we had erected the tent, our evening walk was more enjoyable. We found a complete dall sheep ram’s skull with nearly complete curl. The wild flowers carpeted the entire drainage and the streams were overflowing, making it hard to cross. The bugs were so bad we had cold cereal for supper and threw ourselves into the tent. A storm blew in, cooled us off and swept the bugs into Canada. The next morning was heaven: stiff wind, cooler temps, no bugs and the space and scenery I needed to fill my soul.