Our paddling trip down the Utukok River takes us to a timeless land. The Northwestern Arctic is like the Great Plains of 250 years ago; the land is vast, with rolling hills, mesas, and plateaus--caribou pour across the land like streams of water. National Geographic Magazine says, "Though National Petroleum Reserve sounds like a massive oil tank that the nation taps in times of need, in reality it contains the largest piece of unprotected wilderness in the nation."It's hard to imagine that anyone could witness thousands of caribou swimming across the Utukok and not want permanent protection for the lands that the caribou depend upon. At least, that's the way we feel, and we're sure you'll feel the same, once you've experienced this landscape.
One hundred and eighty-five miles long, the Utukok River begins in the DeLong Mountains of the Western Brooks Range and flows north and east to Kasegaluk Lagoon on the Chukchi Sea. North of the DeLong Mountains, the Utukok Uplands provide integral calving grounds and early summer habitat for the Western Arctic caribou herd. The area also boasts the highest grizzly bear and wolverine densities in Alaska's Arctic. On past trips, we've encountered thousands of caribou, tiny calves clinging to their mother's sides. We've also seen grizzly bears, wolves, and musk oxen.
After a bush flight across the Central Brooks Range and over the Arctic Divide, we land in the Utukok uplands. The river is braided, shallow and swift. Over the course of 11 days, we descend about 100 miles of the river, taking time and layover days to explore the land on foot. The river has a fairly gentle gradient as it cuts through winding ridges and plateaus. Cliffs provide excellent habitat for a variety of raptors, including peregrine falcons, gyrfalcons, and rough-legged hawks.
This is a truly wild and remote area, free of planes and other travelers. The Utukok is suitable for beginner paddlers, though the wind is a constant reminder that we are in the Arctic.
Unlike the Brooks Range, this land has been ice-free for millenia. Herds of woolly mammoth, saber-toothed tigers, and horses roamed the area when much of the rest of North America lay beneath glaciers. Today, we find evidence of their existence in eroding cutbanks, along with archeological evidence of hunters of the Arctic Small Tool tradition. "Utoqaq" is the Inuit name for "Icy Cape" and
means "old" or "ancient."
This is big country, part of the 35-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, set aside for future mineral needs. Get to know it now, and become a voice for its protection, for it is currently threatened, i.e. BLM (Bureau of Land Management) has plans to lease out the South National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska for coal mining or oil development. We want to keep it wild; you'll see why. Explore Arctic Alaska's Far Western wilderness, in time to witness the post-calving migration of the 300,000-member Western Arctic Caribou herd, and before the mosquitoes arrive. This expedition is all about wide open space and wildlife. You won't be disappointed.
From Audubon Magazine (Jennifer Bogo): Northern Alaska contains the largest coal reserves in the United States--40 percent of the country's supply of bituminous coal, which burns more cleanly than most other coal--and an estimated 400 billion to 4 trillion tons of it are buried beneath the cold tundra of the western Arctic. According to Alaska's Department of Natural Resources, the energy potential of western Arctic coal is equivalent to the oil fields of more than 1,000 Prudhoe Bays. Unfortunately, peeling back the permafrost to expose the coal for mining would not only devastate the fragile tundra ecosystem but also threaten wildlife, including the Western Arctic Caribou Herd. Pregnant caribou calve directly over much of this coal-rich region every spring and depend on the highly nutritional forage that grows here. The good news is that development won't happen anytime soon. Roads needed to transport coal out of the wild, remote region don't yet exist. "We're pretty confident the economics are not there to mine it today," says Stan Senner, executive director of Audubon Alaska. "But we don't know about tomorrow, or when that tomorrow may be--5, 10, 20 years from now. We just don't know."
