Alaska

Backpacking in Denali

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My summer season job with MICA Guides wrapped up September 10 which gave me just enough time to do an overnight backpacking trip in Denali National Park before the park service stopped running their buses on September 13.  My plan was to rent a car from Anchorage, drive up to Denali on September 11, pick up a permit and camp at Riley Creek Campground near the park entrance. Then I would take a Camper Bus into the park on September 12, camp out in the backcountry, and hike out and catch a bus back to the park entrance on September 13… the last day buses were running, so no being over ambitious and missing the bus!

A few unique things about backpacking in Denali National Park:

  • Private vehicles can only drive the first 15 miles of the 92 mile long Denali Park Road, the only road in the park.
  • Park busses only run from late-May to early-September. (Basically, when snow is not expected.)
  • Backcountry permits are only issued in person at the Visitors Center from 8 AM the day before the start of your trip, so you can’t really make a detailed hiking plan before you get there and you will want to get to the park as early as possible the day before your trip to maximize your permit choices.
  • There are no established trails, your permit is for a Unit or Units that you have a certain amount of time to move through. Based on the quick search I did, there isn’t much information about suggested backpacking routes in Denali NP on the Internet besides climbing Mt. Eielson. But I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be — a true wilderness experience!
  • From the whiteboard behind the permit desk at the Visitors Center, it looked like for some Units the maximum number of people who can camp per night is 4 people, so don’t plan to backpack in a large group.  
  • No trails means assuming you will be hiking at a speed of no more than 1 mile an hour. You don’t know what the vegetation will be like, if the drainages will be swampy, what stream crossings will look like, if a scree slope will be traversable.

In summary, it’s an intimidating mix of needing to plan in advance and then not being able to really plan much in advance. Luckily, I had learned quite a bit about hiking in Alaska — following moose trails, alder bashing, finding campsites, bear awareness — over the course of the summer and felt like I was prepared with realistic expectations. Here’s a good read if you are looking for more information about backpacking in Denali.

The drive to Denali National Park

It had started to get cold and rainy in at the end of August, such that I had started to long for being indoors and having insulation (I lived in a tent all summer), but from Labor Day weekend Alaska was enjoying an Indian summer which brought us back to the warm sunny weather of early July and camping was once again quite pleasant. Parks Highway offered impressive views of Denali (The Mountain) on my drive up from Anchorage, but I didn’t stop to take any photos because I was trying to get to the park in time to pick up a permit. (The Internet said that permit pick up was until 3:30 pm, luckily for me the desk was actually open until 5 pm.) The scale of the scenery on Parks Highway was much bigger than Glenn Highway where I’d spent the summer. The mountains were striped rust red tundra and spruce green with the gold of aspen and alder lower down, their black rocky peaks dramatic against a bright blue sky. It was a bit confusing when I got to Denali National Park. I got a camper bus ticket at the Wilderness Access Center, then had to go to the Visitor’s Center to get my backcountry permit and then Riley Creek Mercantile to get a walk-in tent site. I was glad I had a rental car to run all these administrative errands; I had considered taking the train.

Picking up my permit

The process of getting a backcountry permit worked like this. There is a whiteboard listing Unit availability above the permit desk. You get a form to fill out from the permit desk and the ranger sends you to flip through binders that describe the different Units. I had done a bit of poking around on the park website Unit map so I had a few Units written down as candidates for an easy overnight backpack. Unit 12 Sunrise and Sunset Glaciers on my list was available, so I snapped the last spot up. Of course, after hiking on a glacier almost every day for 3 and a half months, the thing I wanted to do most in Alaska was see more glaciers! Then I watched the required leave-no-trace, stream crossing, bear awareness videos, purchased a USGS quad map of my Unit to study and borrowed a bear canister.

Backpacking in Denali

The next morning at about 7 am, I got on the earliest camper bus for the 4 hour ride to Eielson Visitor Center to begin my hike. We saw a couple of moose and a mama bear and two cubs from the bus. The bus driver would stop to allow everyone to capture the wildlife with their gigantic telephoto lenses. It was cloudy, overcast and windy. When I arrived at Eielson Visitor Center, Denali was hidden behind a shroud of clouds and I nixed the possibility of climbing Mt. Eielson as it was covered with a dusting of snow at the top.

Eielson weather forecast.JPG

Perfect conditions for hiking!

I hiked down to the end of the developed trail from the Eielson Visitor Center, and gingerly picked a crossing across Gorge Creek. First real stream crossing ever completed, my feet were soaked but my merino wool socks squished out quickly and stayed warm. I walked along the gravel bar of Thoroughfare River as recommended by the ranger who issued my permit, but got bored and decided to punch up into some tundra to see what I could see. After a short bash through some small trees and wading through shin deep shrubbery, I started to recognize the plant life I wanted to walk on. The red stuff, mostly blueberries, was short, firm and easy to walk on, so I let the vegetation direct my path. Greener vegetation indicated drainages and I learned to follow the moose paths across those parts to avoid ending up in boggy marsh.

Tarn

Beautiful tarn

I didn’t have much of a plan except to camp in the valley along Sunrise Creek, since that was the closest area I was allowed to camp. The problem with Unit 12 is that most of it is visible from the Denali Park Road and you have to camp out of sight of the road. That also makes it a not so wilderness-y experience, but easy access to the road and Eielson Visitor Center made it a fool-proof, if a bit boring choice, for my solo end-of-season backpack.

I came to a small creek before Sunrise Creek where I found I had to backtrack and lose some elevation. Being stubborn I tried to climb higher across a scree slope but I kept falling so I ended up scree skiing down into the gorge and rock hopping across to Sunrise Creek.

Then I tried to walk as far as I could up Sunrise Creek. I was hiking up the north bank when the gravel bar virtually disappeared. Making the silly decision to avoid getting my feet wet, I was attempting to boulder across a short section of the gorge wall when a cinder block sized rock I was hanging on to detached from the wall and fell into my lap. I was lucky to only suffer a bruised thigh. So after a cold crossing, I gave up on following the river and climbed up on the south bank of Sunrise Creek.

It was only 4:30 PM, but suddenly, I was completely exhausted. I had only hiked about 6 miles but I think the fatigue from an entire summer of physical work and little time off caught up with me. My plan to hike up to the bottom of Sunrise Glacier was abandoned for the more urgent need to find a place to lie down. I set up my little tent on the bench below Bald Peak, and sheltered from the katabatic winds, took a nap for 1.5 hours. Somewhat recovered, I made dinner of Idahoan mashed potatoes and a foil packet of lemon pepper tuna and lay back down again reading Into the Wild (Chris McCandless’ ill-fated Alaska adventure having happened not far away) in my tent until the valley came ablaze at sunset around 8:20 PM. I was a less exciting expedition than I had hoped, but I guess the luxury of solo hiking is having the freedom to do things like pull in early to take a nap.

campsite

My campsite view of Sunrise Glacier

In the morning, I left my tent up to dry and set off to climb the saddle under Bald Peak and up a little knoll in front of it. The cloud cover from yesterday burned off over the course of the morning, revealing dramatic white peaks framing Sunset Glacier. As I got to the precipice, the peak of Denali poked up over the ridge behind Mt. Eielson. A pleasant surprise! I’d been hopeful but not at all certain I’d get a Denali view from there.

Sunset Glacier.JPG

Sunset Glacier

Me and Denali

Obligatory Denali selfie

I descended back to my camp, packed up and had an easy walk down the bench and back down to the gravel bar. I planned to simply follow the gravel bar along Thoroughfare River back to Eielson Visitor Center, but the stream crossings got intimidating and I ended up tussock hopping around a tarn and retracing part of my route across the blueberry fields from the previous day. There were still a lot of blueberries good to eat, but thankfully I didn’t see any bears! I arrived back at Eielson Visitor Center by 2:30 PM and first things first, took off my wet boots and socks and put on my Crocs. Yay, camp shoes! I put my name on the bus list and watched a video about climbing Denali before getting put on a bus for the 4 hour ride back to the park entrance.

Bald Mountain.JPG

Thoroughfare River

Denali

Denali with lenticular cloud

Post-hike

It was late evening by the time I got back to my car and I was feeling strangely not stoked about more camping and hiking adventures. I think I was realizing my body just wanted to recover from the summer. I sat in the parking lot feeling a bit defeated and found an AirBnb in Palmer and booked it for the next night. Too tired to make any other plans, I camped at Riley Creek Campground again. I had slept like a log on the tundra, but seemed to have trouble getting comfortable that night. When I got up in the morning to use the bathroom, I noticed that the tenugui I had hung on the corner of the picnic table at my campsite had frozen into a stiff origami shape. The plastic collapsible water bottle I had left on the picnic table was crunchy with ice crystallized across the inside. Ah, that’s why I had trouble sleeping. It was too cold to wait for hot water to boil and percolate my own coffee, so I quickly packed up my things and went to Morino Grill next to the Visitors Center to restore the feeling to my fingers with a cup of corporate-y Starbucks latte. My backpacking night had actually been very comfortable, and it had definitely not been close to freezing cold, even though it was at higher elevation. I had been super lucky with the timing of my trip! As my fingers regained feeling, I felt pretty good about my decision to spend my last two nights in Alaska indoors.

Epilogue: My AirBnb host turned out to be a super cool fiber and ceramics artist, I had the most comfortable stay, and the house was walking distance from two craft beer breweries (Arkose and Bleeding Heart)!

 

My First Month in Alaska

/ tumeketina / 4 Comments

I am sitting on the deck of the CNB (staff lounge building) eating Moose’s Tooth pizza, finally getting to read Carrot Quin’s blog posts about here Brooks Range Traverse, writing this with a red pen because it was the only one I could find. This is my life in Alaska.

Today is my day off. It’s been a brilliantly sunny and warm day, but a rain cloud has appeared to cast am ominous shadow and the wind is picking up… typical Alaska weather. Earlier today, I ran 3.5 miles down Glenn Highway to Caribou Creek Recreation Area, hiked down and waded to a sand bar in the middle of the Lion Head branch of the Matanuska River, ran back to MICA base, rewarded myself with Moose Tracks ice cream from our MICA Mocha truck for lunch, hand-washed some laundry, video-chatted with a friend in Tokyo, and took a shower in the outdoor solar and propane powered guide shower.

I am spending the summer as an apprentice guide with MICA Guides, a company that primarily operates on Matanuska Glacier, about 2 hours northeast of Anchorage on scenic Glenn Highway. Yesterday, I was checked off as an assistant climbing guide and a few days before that I was checked off to lead treks on the glacier by myself. The glacier is like the Labyrinth of Greek mythology, changing every time you walk on it. Guiding on the glacier is living the duck on water analogy, trying to look smooth and calm on the surface while processing safety considerations and balancing them with the guest experience and not tripping over your crampons while looking back to see if your clients are still alive staying in line.

In the past month, I have learned to ice climb, kayaked in Prince William Sound, slept on a glacier, hiked cross-country over tundra and helped build a house. My experience with MICA so far has been excellent. The first couple weeks of orientation (disorientation?) taught us to roll with the punches and be ready for anything. Which accrues benefits like being able to depart for an overnight backpacking trip with only 15 minutes notice (which is what I did with my last day off).

Talking about Berkshire Hathaway and value investing with guests on a recent work backpacking trip, I thought about the companies I have worked for. Law firms view the size of the pie (market) as limited and aggressively try to grab a bigger piece of the pie from competitors. This culture trickles down to individual lawyers within a firm, manifesting in behaviors such as work-hoarding and back-stabbing. The company I worked for as an in-house lawyer seemed to take the view “Shit! My piece of the pie is getting smaller!… But, we’re just going to either freak out or pretend it is not happening and not change the way we have been doing things”, which breeds a bunch of dutiful but complacent “shoganai” paycheck collectors. The attitude at MICA is to grow the staff and create opportunity and make the pie bigger for everyone. There is, of course, great emphasis on technical training and delivering excellent product, but also a recognition that guiding is a short-term career for most and thus a big emphasis on building better humans with leadership and life-skills in general. It’s really refreshing and I appreciate what Don, the owner, is trying to do here in this little intense, live-together, work-together utopia experiment. This is really a business that you can feel good about patronizing. So, come visit!

As a first-year apprentice guide, I am technically an unpaid intern, but I am getting a lot of training (the most I have ever gotten as a job) and get to go on trips and have experiences that would otherwise cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. The mistakes I made while learning to lead treks were discouraging and ego-crushing at times and neither my phone nor computer recognize my fingerprints anymore (manual labor, plus hours of wet gloves on the glacier, plus washing dishes in scalding hot water and rinsing them in cold bleach water), but this is definitely a great introduction to being a mountain guide, and I am feeling pretty good about my life choices right now.

The Mat

The Mat

Climbing after hours

Climbing after work

Camp near Eagle River.JPG

I got paid to go backpacking!

Lion Head with the Crew

Lion Head hike with the crew

Reflections on Attending the Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) Public Scoping Meeting in Anchorage on May 30, 2018

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I’m in Anchorage from a few days before heading out to Glacier View for the summer. Typical tourist activity, I attended the Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) Public Scoping Meeting in Anchorage and participated in a rally outside.

My takeaway from listening to the testimony of stakeholders and the public at the public scoping meeting was that framing the issue of whether to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil and gas development as a question of “What is more important: the environment or economic development?” is completely incorrect. One of the speakers at the rally outside Dena’ina Center organized by Defend the Sacred AK said, “Nothing is sacred when everything is for sale.”

When I heard that, it clicked for me, and I think I understood the disjunction between what Gwich’in advocates were there to say and the EIS process as a whole. The coastal plain of ANWR is sacred to the Gwich’in people. Therefore, no amount of oil reserves, no amount of oil and gas tax revenue, no amount of job creation and infrastructure development can justify opening up even a de minimis portion of “The Sacred Place Where Life Begins” to oil and gas exploration and production.

For my law school folks, this sounds like the “market inalienability” concept. Cynical law students, we laughed at Margaret Radin’s outlandish idea that some things have to be “market inalienable” to promote “human flourishing” when we learned about it in Property Law. As Radin defined it, something is “market inalienable” if it cannot be sold or purchased. “Human flourishing” sounds cheesy but it’s just a scholarly term for some essential value to keeping our humanity that cannot be valued by a market. She argued that things that are essential to personhood should be made “market-alienable”; in other words, we can and should protect those things by making laws to prevent their purchase or sale (she’s a legal scholar).

The Tax Cut and Jobs Act does the opposite of this. Literature from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from the public scoping meeting states that the purpose of the EIS is to “properly balance oil and gas development with existing uses and conservation of surfaces resources” which completely misses the point. As more than a few of the persons who gave testimony asserted, oil and gas development in ANWR is a human rights issue, maybe not as “human rights” are usually legally defined in relation to some international treaty, but at the most visceral, basic, plain-language level of concerning personhood.

The Gwich’in people have made it clear that the coastal plain in ANWR is essential to their personhood; it’s sacred and nothing can justify its economic exploitation. I would argue that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is also essential to the personhood of all Americans and it should be sacred to all of us. For better or worse (racist and expansionist and all those things that it was), the concept of “wilderness” is baked into our national identity, and ANWR represents the last of that great wilderness America has left. As Wallace Stegner put it:

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed … We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.”

There were a lot of people at the hearing in support of drilling testifying that with modern technology the footprint of the drilling would be small, that American environmental standards are high (a weird reverse NIMBY argument, questionable at best), similar development has been done elsewhere with minimal impact. And those arguments kind of sound reasonable, but if we view the remaining wilderness as sacred, they’re all besides the point. It may sound radical, but at Martin Litton is quoted as saying in The Emerald Mile:

“People often tell me not to be extreme… ‘Be reasonable!’ they say. Buy I’ve never felt it did any good to be reasonable about anything in conservation, because what you give away will never come back — ever. When it comes to saving wilderness, we cannot be extreme enough.”

ANWR is federal public land. It belongs to all Americans. The Public Scoping Meetings for the Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program EIS are only focusing on soliciting comments from Alaskan communities, but due to the shady nature of this most recent attempt to open up ANWR to drilling, most Americans have not had to chance to express their concerns. BLM literature states the “scoping period provides an opportunity for people who could be affected by the proposed action to express their views and concerns, and to offer suggestions.” “People who could be affected” is all of us. So here is a call to action. Please submit your comment by June 19, 2018 to blm_ak_costalplain_EIS@blm.gov. Here’s the BLM site for more information.

From the cynical lawyer perspective, this is the least we can do to help protect the Arctic. The BLM is required to review all comments even if they decide to lump them together or determine they are irrelevant, so let’s do a tiny part to stall the process of opening up ANWR to drilling. Hint: Scoping comments are should address what the scope of the Environmental Impact Statement should be — alternatives to explore, impacts to assess — and if we want to stall development we need to argue that that scope of the EIS should be as broad and far-reaching as possible, e.g. the EIS should address the global effects of climate change.

Hearing members of Gwich’in and other indigenous Alaskan tribes speak, it struck me that it is so unethical to impose an inherently unsustainable economic system and way of life on peoples who trying to preserve their right to live a sustainable one. Even if we (Industrial America) purport to be offering them the conveniences of modern, industrialized, commodified and commercialized life, the current global economic system built on extraction of non-renewable natural resources is, by definition, doomed. We should be questioning our economic model of growth for growth’s sake and try learning from them instead.

Resources:

  • Follow Defend the Sacred AK on Facebook
  • I’m a big fan of Carrot Quinn’s beautiful writing and this summer she is hiking and kayaking across Alaska to raise money to support Defend the Sacred AK. Read about it here. Supporting her campaign and following her blog will be a fun way to learn more about ANWR and what’s at stake.