The Porcupine Caribou Herd calves on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in summer. It is the second largest herd of caribou in Alaska. Photo © George Wuerthner.

By Keith Easthouse
Forest Magazine, May/June 2001

“This wilderness is big enough and wild enough to make you feel like one of the old-time explorers.” —Lowell Sumner, one of the refuge founders

“The primal landscape is the thing. It’s like a museum, a time machine experience that can transport you back before the world was altered.”—Sandy Jamieson, refuge visitor

Sprawling over 19 million acres in the state’s northeastern corner, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge lies almost entirely above the Arctic Circle. It is covered in snow nine months of the year. Most of the ground beneath it is frozen. Huge fields of ice (called “aufeis”) spread out from the rivers in winter. Much of it is treeless. There are no roads. There aren’t even any trails. The only way to get there is by airplane, by boat or by your own two feet. If you were to arrive in November, you’d be facing three months of perpetual darkness, in May, three months of unending daylight. Go in May.

Summers are brief but intense. Warmed by the sun, the ground thaws and becomes one giant bog. Clouds of mosquitoes rise up. Rivers swell with glacial melt. You learn to cross them early in the day before the water has risen. You learn to watch for grizzlies. You learn that this place is quieter and more alive than any place you’ve known.

The Brooks Range, the northernmost arm of the Rocky Mountains, forms the refuge’s backbone. Bristling with rock pinnacles and cut by broad glacial valleys, the range runs east to west in a band seventy-five miles wide. Were you to climb one of its highest peaks and look south, you’d see wide, spruce-covered valleys dotted with lakes. Looking north, you’d see foothills, a flat treeless plain, the arc of braided rivers and, at the horizon, the frozen Beaufort Sea. You’d undoubtedly be struck by the stark beauty of it all. But you might not know that you were staring at what makes the refuge unique.

The remarkable fecundity of wildlife, the refuge’s great secret, is caused by its “compression of habitats,” as Fran Mauer, a longtime refuge wildlife biologist, puts it. In 150 miles, the terrain shifts between boreal forest, the alpine ecosystem of the Brooks Range, the foothills and slopes north of the mountains, the arctic tundra of the coastal plain and the lagoons and barrier islands of the coastline. In the Prudhoe Bay region, those same ecosystems are spread out over a distance of 400 miles or more. At the refuge, they are jammed together, producing an extraordinary concentration of plant and animal life.

How else to describe it but to throw out numbers? One hundred eighty species of birds. Forty-five species of mammals. Thirty-six species of fish. Hundreds of species of mosses, grasses, wildflowers, shrubs and other plants. In winter, polar bears lumber off the pack ice to den at the foot of mountains occupied by Dall sheep. In summer, the coastal plain teems with the Porcupine Caribou Herd, 129,000 strong at last count. They’ve come 800 miles from Canada to give birth and feast on the lush grasses.

The age-old struggle for survival is on full display as well. Packs of wolves stalk moose and caribou, lynx zigzag through forest in pursuit of snowshoe hare, weasels and fox pounce on voles and lemmings, wolverines feed on carrion. “It’s about as complete a natural system as you can find in North America,” Mauer says.

Back at camp, you don’t have a fire going because there’s no wood. Looking around at the summer twilight, you hear the soft rush of the river. What peace.

Forest Magazine | FSEEE