By Eric Simons
"Hooooh, bear!"
Our grizzled leader, bundled in plaid flannel against the Alaska cold, sporting the gray stubble of two weeks in the wilderness, with a loaded .44 magnum on his hip and a bottle of Jim Beam in his backpack, was yelling at the fuzzy brown mass of a large grizzly bear.
The bear was about 80 yards away, following a red splash of berries through the dry brown grass of a mountaintop saddle and toward our perch behind a mound of jagged, lichen-covered rocks. It hadn't seen us yet.
"Hey!"
I couldn't see the bear anymore, since I started slowly backing down the mountain once it got close enough for me to pick out individual features, like teeth and claws.
My friend Mark, prickly hair making just the beginning of an effort to shadow his young face, popped up at my side to join me.
Our leader, the veteran outdoorsman, was Mark's dad Dan, who was still yelling and waving at the bear.
"OK, Dad," Mark said. "I think the bear is close enough now."
Dan said OK and continued to wave.
"Dad."
We continued backing.
"Dad."
All we could see now was the lonely silhouette of Dan, the sleeves on his blue flannel flapping with each gust of wind as he stood against the cloud-streaked sky, waving at the bear.
"The bear, Dad."
We could determine the bear's reaction to us by what Dan did.
He reached down and un-holstered his gun.
* * *
In two weeks, we had traveled about 30 miles across the desolate central Alaskan wilderness. From the ridge top, it all stretched out below me - a peak of rusty orange rock jutting off the horizon in front of the golden-speckled foothills of America's northernmost mountain range, down the silvery snake-like coils of the Alatna River, to a clump of green spruce trees clinging to the shores of a lake 2,400 feet below me, where our tents sat.
We landed at the base of the distant peak on Iniakuk Lake, a five-mile long sliver of icy blue water cradled by sharp mountains and located a degree north of the Arctic Circle, in the foothills of the Brooks Range. We were over 200 miles from Fairbanks, the nearest large city (and the last place we would shower for three weeks), and just south of the Gates of the Arctic National Park. The only way in and out was by floatplane, and while the muddy gray riverbanks were pocked with bear prints, human tracks were hard to come by.
Our group - Mark, his brother and dad, and I -- arrived in the tiny airstrip town of Bettles and chartered a plane, a cheery, canary-yellow de Havilland Beaver that creaked and coughed through an early fall storm. The throbbing roar of the propeller drowned out the noise of raindrops splattering the window as we sat cramped in the dark back of the plane, guns over our shoulders and 400 pounds of lumpy gear bags squeezed between us.
The drizzly rain continued into the first evening, darkening the lake and enveloping us in a misty fog as we set out to fish for dinner. We soon landed a 6-pound northern pike, a black-backed and sharp-toothed monster that bore an awful resemblance to a crocodile as it thrashed and snapped in our net. The fish was large enough to eat, but pike are tough and chewy - a taste to match a disposition. We committed to catching some sweeter-tasting trout after dinner, aided by a slight break in the rain. Mark and I paddled our small, two-person inflatable kayak, which we flew in along with the rest of our gear, across a narrow bay to have a go at the trout. We stood on the gravelly banks not catching fish for about half an hour before we noticed a black band of clouds hanging on the horizon, sticking out like a tear in the fabric of the otherwise gray sky. We got back in the boat and started paddling in the direction of camp. The shortest route took us straight across the bay and far away from shore. At the furthest point, the black clouds descended and the storm hit.
My hat flew off in a blast of icy wind. Rain poured from my hair and my knuckles grew icy on the aluminum paddle. Water was firing out of the sky, riddling the lake around us with bullet-hole ripples and filling the bottom of the boat.
The wind howled in our faces, and water splashed and flew from our paddles as we churned desperately into the clouds, which were so low it seemed the lake was steaming. The storm was so thick we couldn't recognize the beach near camp; we missed by several hundred feet. Too tired to paddle anymore, we pulled the boat onto shore and up the reedy bank, tied it to a small bush and hiked back to camp.
We stood around a small fire, which hissed in the rain, sending up a thin column of smoke that blended with the clouds as it wound away into the trees. Mark noted, philosophically, that adventures are never fun while you're having them. In northern Alaska in September, adventures can also come up much more quickly than anticipated.
It rained infrequently during our trip, but when it did, the sky let loose, and it did so without warning. It would be sunny and then, minutes later, thunder would reverberate off the mountains and clouds would draw over the sky like curtains.
Most of the trip, however, was warm during the day, with temperatures reaching into the 70s. The sun on the lake created a kaleidoscope out of the reflections of the powder-blue sky and the vanilla-white clouds and the forest-green trees. The dark spruce forest surrounding us was bursting with explosions of golden birch trees and red-leafed blueberry bushes, the water was gleaming and it seemed as if Claude Monet would appear any moment with an easel and paintbrush.
From the middle, in our kayak, we could see the entire five miles of lake, the crown of mountains with rocks glowing orange in the sun, the sky, the clouds, all of it perfectly still and hushed, as if even the breeze did not want to disturb the silence.
After the sun went down around 11, the sky got dark enough for the Northern Lights to turn on. On one perfectly clear night, the aurora was bright enough to outshine the full moon and large enough to trace a glowing green path across the entire sky. It stretched in a ring, flowing over the constellations, seeping between the stars and pouring off onto the horizon beyond the lake.
Our plan was to float our two inflatable boats down the outlet of Iniakuk Lake until it met up with a fork of the Alatna River, then take that to the Alatna River and cruise 30 miles downstream to where the bush pilot would later pick us up.
Although we worried the outlet might be too shallow to float -- which would force us to walk miles with hundreds of pounds of gear -- it was 30 feet across, 2 or 3 feet deep, lined with bushes and overflowing with sail-finned grayling. The banks were covered in high grass that quickly gave way to a thick forest of prickly small trees and bright red blueberry bushes. Most of the vegetation was small, because the constant freezes slow growth. In one area that had burned in a natural forest fire ten years ago, the springy shoots of new trees were just poking through the still-charred ground.
When we reached the Alatna River, the water opened up until it was easily 100 feet across. The river was flowing fast and sediment-laden, turning it a gray-green color, like clay. The water level had receded considerably from an earlier time, leaving long strips of dry, pebbly beaches just up from the mud.
We camped one night on the smooth mud of the bank, 15 miles upriver from the spot where our pilot would pick us up. From our campsite we could see the rocky peak of a distant mountain towering over our destination, sticking up above the timberline and the clouds like the spire of a gothic cathedral.
A few days later, on a whim, we decided we wanted to be at the top of the mountain.
It was a 2,400-foot climb through two miles of thick spruce and birch forest. We had to stop frequently and turn around after getting stuck in dead-ends of gnarled tree roots and bushes. Our map was slashed with huge brown marks, where all the contours ran together and fused into a single, sheer slope.
Then there were the steep parts.
As we climbed, fallen trees jutted out off the side of the mountain and grabbed at our ankles and knees. Living trees, mostly green-barked young birch, slapped our faces and whipped our legs, coming back at us like boxing dummies every time we pushed them aside. We found clumps of moose hair stuck to some of the bushes, indicating that even the locals had difficulty with the foliage.
We walked in single file -- Dan, Mark and I struggling up ahead, while Mark's brother lagged behind, clinging to a portable CD player that was blasting the Ghetto Boys "Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta." Gangs of no see 'um midges, evidently resenting our trespassing on their turf, went and got their street friends, who showed up in droves with knives and tiny brass knuckles. A mugging commenced.
I walked covered from head to toe, hood pulled down and jacket zipped to the top, like a refugee trying to escape a gray blizzard of insects. The warm weather, while nice for us, was also nice for the bugs. It took three hours of achingly slow progress to reach the tree line, where the trees and the no see 'ums thinned out. We proceeded to walk across a quarter-mile of treacherous loose slate, picking daintily to avoid spraining an ankle and dying on top of the mountain.
We picked our way to the top ridge, where the ground cover turned to scrubby, motley bands of brown grass and lichen-covered rocks. We could look almost straight down and see the lake and river valley spreading out below us, the Alatna running off into the hazy distance before disappearing behind a distant mountain. From here, it was just a short down and up jaunt through the saddle to the peak. Mark and I started jogging, humming the theme song from "Rocky," and then he stopped.
"Grizzly!" he said.
* * *
We snuck quietly to the ridge and contemplated the bear. It was large. We were upwind, though, and it didn't notice us. It ate obliviously across a patch of blueberry bushes, pausing every so often to look up and sniff the air. Each time it did this we would think we had been found out, but each time it would put its head down and keep walking.
After 20 minutes, it got close enough.
Dan said he would alert the bear to our presence, on the theory it would be better to have it know we were in the neighborhood than have it suddenly be surprised at a closer distance. Mark and I started backing away and Dan started shouting and waving.
"Hooooh, bear!" he yelled. His voice cut off sharply in the wind.
Mark and I, backing away, saw him reach down for his holster, where he kept a loaded .44 pistol reserved for making a big bang in the event a grizzly charged.
I braced myself for a gunshot.
Instead, he turned, put his hands down and started leisurely down the mountain toward Mark and me.
Afterward, he told us he was just checking to make sure he knew where the gun was. The bear apparently didn't care in the slightest that we were there. It looked up from eating blueberries. "What?" it growled. "I'm eating here."
And then it went back to plowing through the bushes.