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“Watch out—it’s going to get a little bumpy as we descend through these clouds here.” Our bush pilot, Jesse, had been flying above the Arctic Circle for more than a decade and was one of Erica’s favorites, a fact she made clear by proclaiming that we were the luckiest tour group in the world that week to have him on our team.
The small plane jolted from side to side as we neared the Arrigetch Valley, a steep gorge of granitic rock set high in the far-north Brooks Range. Instead of clenching my muscles in pinned anxiety, I tried to relax my insides and simply let the rocking be. It actually helped. I pressed my nose against the window and gazed out at a dynamic landscape that was quickly shifting into its fall wardrobe, glorious mountainsides of garnet-tinged shrubs and flame-yellow birch trees growing ever closer until we landed on a thick strip of gravel wash on the bank of the Alatna River. This was it. Gates of the Arctic.
Tossing our packs out of the rear cargo hold, Jesse fired up the propeller and was gone in minutes. The three of us would be alone for the next four nights with only the stuff we could strap to our bodies. In the middle of fucking nowhere. The farthest I’d ever been from civilization.
“Welp, I’ve gotta pee before we start.” Erica ran behind a stand of thin spruce trees as Adam and I just looked around, stunned by the silence.
As soon as she returned, we heaved our tremendous packs onto our shoulders, buckled our bear spray belts, and started hiking uphill and off trail with only a vague idea of where to go. We crossed two frigid streams as Erica encouraged us to keep our boots on and willingly soak them for stability.
“Everything you own is about to get wet anyway; you might as well do it intentionally.”
I couldn’t argue with that logic.
We zigzagged across uneven ground as we passed through a forest dotted with conifers and soapberry bushes. We laughed as our boots trampolined against an earth that was spongy with mosses and reindeer lichen. We sat in patches of tangerine-hued shrubs and ate our snacks. Then came the tussocks.
The tussocks, which are tricky to walk on and even trickier to walk between, seemed built to sprain or break an ankle. These solid, foot-high lumps of grass and muck soon dominated the once pleasant tundra as we ascended higher into the valley.
“Ugh. This sucks!” Adam wailed. We were all thinking it.
I wobbled in the high grass, catching myself on my trekking poles as I fell off an unruly clump of dirt. “And I thought I had good balance!” My patience was wearing thin.
“Oh my gosh, a trail!” Erica spotted a faint strip of dirt that had been carved into the slope by the area’s infrequent visitors. “This’ll be like strolling up a wilderness highway now!”
The going was certainly faster but still slow as we bushwhacked through saplings and adolescent aspen trees that occasionally whacked us in the face with their whiplike branches. The natural world was unforgiving. Two-inch-deep mud sucked at our boots. By the time we made it to camp and pitched our tents on an uneven bed of squishy moss, we were all starving. Erica fired up her little stove and boiled water for herbal tea so that we could warm our insides before feasting on pesto pasta and falling wearily into our sleeping bags.
The next day came and went in a similar manner, the far-off spires of frosted white peaks growing tantalizingly closer the more we hiked. We passed a dollop of grizzly bear scat on the side of the trail that made my nerves do somersaults. We soaked our boots again on a perilous stream crossing. My love for Erica’s persistent smile began to wane. Damp and cranky inside my small tent, I wrestled into a set of dry thermals and bedded down in a meadow beneath the dark granite towers of the Arrigetch Peaks, which stood watch over our sleeping bodies like ominous daemons.
In the Inupiat language, “Arrigetch” roughly translates to “fingers of the outstretched hand,” and I often felt held by some supernatural force as I moved through that valley toward the great fins of rock that seemed to claw up from the bowels of the earth itself.
Our third day in the Brooks Range was all about exploring. “I want to go out for a long time today,” Erica declared over coffee. “I want to come back tired.”
A night of rest had rekindled my enthusiasm, and her proposal sounded awesome. Up we went, hanging a left into the stunning Aquarius Valley in search of a series of pristine alpine lakes virtually untouched by modern humans. We passed through fields of swaying gold willows, each one shedding its leaves as we brushed past and exploding into a burst of marigold confetti. It was as though the trees were celebrating our arrival, saying, “Congratulations! You’re here. We’ve been waiting for you.”
With a rushing stream to our left, we ascended a steep incline of lichen-covered boulders interspersed with a thick carpet of tundra flora. Our trio crept slowly upward into an increasingly magical realm of autumn color. Blood-red bearberry shrubs and golden dwarf birches fell away behind us the higher we climbed into the rocky cliffs. We took short breaks to hunt for the last of the season’s blueberries, each one deep purple and tart as a Meyer lemon. I felt like the rock-hopping would never end and carefully watched my feet as we leaped from boulder to boulder to be sure I didn’t snap an ankle and have to hobble back to the plane in shame.
When the first of the Aquarius Lakes sprang into view, we all stopped dead in our tracks. It was the stillest lake I had ever seen, glassy water reflecting the sharp red mineral stripes and jagged edges of its neighboring peaks.
The three of us paused to eat a luxurious lunch of tortillas, smoked salmon, and brie at lake number two, and we craned our necks to take in the immense granite walls that surrounded us. Seeps of water spilled out of the escarpments here and there, creating sinister black stripes against the smoky gray of the cliffs. As we sat and chatted, Adam realized that the canyon produced a remarkable echo the moment any of us raised our voices above a normal pitch. We shouted as loud as we could into the abyss: “One . . . two . . . three . . . Banana!”
Moments later, three distinct voices could be heard shouting the silly word back at us. Maybe it was the exertion or the mind-splitting solitude of the Arctic, but I hunched over and laughed until my sides were sore. I wolf-howled in glee and found an invisible wolf girl howling back at me from the rocks across the water.
How could we not go on? Each lake was more stunning than the last. We traversed under huge flakes of rock jutting out of a near-vertical cliff face and boulder hopped for half a mile to reach the southern edge of the next lake. Climbing up and over a soft, mossy slope, we reached the shimmering turquoise gem of lake three.
A series of smooth granite slabs bisected by a trickling waterfall brought us to the fourth lake, which was perhaps the most spectacular of all. Behind it was the most picture-perfect alpine cirque I had ever seen—thick shards of rock leaped into the sky in a way that would make Yosemite Valley cower. It was an earthbound coliseum.
Tired and cold, we decided to turn back instead of continuing on to the final two lakes. Our group scrambled back down the immense boulder field, and as we hiked, we discussed the concept of trails. Of how we generally feel entitled to them and how it’s strange that someone gets to tell us where to go and what to do in wild spaces. We are so used to bending nature to our will, and yet, in the Arctic, nature was the one bending us. I hadn’t thought much about it before, often taking the trails that crisscrossed the mountains beyond Los Angeles for granted.
“Who decides what connotates the best view or the best way to get from point A to point B?” Erica lit up as she spoke. “I think that trails take away an essential part of the wilderness experience—meandering.”
I tried to let go of my desire for order and certainty as my knees creaked and my legs wobbled on the long descent back to camp. When we arrived at our tents, pitched in a quiet meadow, Adam and I built a fire while Erica boiled water for macaroni and steeped herbal tea to warm our tired bones. I fell asleep sated and blissed out.
Excerpted from FERAL: Losing Myself and Finding My Way in America’s National Parks © 2023 by Emily Pennington, out February 1. Reproduced by permission of Little A, An Imprint of Amazon Publishing. All rights reserved.
