CHAPTER 3

The Final Frontier

Along the Old Crow drainage lies a tremendous chunk of wild country, dominated by hogback ridges that top out at 2,800 feet, boggy lowlands, impenetrable tundra, countless creeks, tundra lakes, and ephemeral ponds, which for nearly eight months of every year becomes a vast, navigable plain of windswept snow. At 68 degrees latitude, this is the taiga, a Russian word meaning, “land of little sticks,” the upper limit of the world’s northern forests. Four-hundred-year-old black spruces with trunks no thicker than broom handles and hip-high black spruces, almost a century old, resemble weary, white-robed mendicants. They are bent low by snow and the force of fierce southerly winds. Yet they are survivors, holding on for dear life in only centimeters of soil in the open tundra flats where no other tree can flourish. Along the river and creek beds grow balsam poplar, referred to as cottownwood, head-high willows and alders, and stands of white spruce, reaching up the waterways like God’s fingers.

This is the Frigid Zone, and only ten miles north of here, the names of trees are preceded by the word dwarf, as in “dwarf willow” and “dwarf birch.” Only thirty feet from the rivers and the tumbling creeks, the trees hug the ground, growing no higher than a few feet. Much of the land is tundra, a maze of spongy, waterlogged clumps of sphagnum moss called tussock, muskeg, hummock, or in the vernacular of old-time Alaskans “niggerheads.” Walking on tussocks is like walking on a trampoline while someone is bouncing; it requires extraordinary balance.

Though people have traveled this land for perhaps as long as 10,000 years, few have done more than pass through. Prior to Heimo, there were maybe two or three other trappers who called this country home, and they lived lightly on the land. Before the trappers, small, roving bands of Athabaskan Indian subsistence hunters, members of the Gwich’in Nation, the “people of the caribou,” and coastal Inupiat Eskimos followed the movement of game through this inhospitable land. They lived in caribou tents and pulled snow sleds loaded with their few possessions. Forced by weather and erratic game patterns to be perpetually on the move, they came and went, never lingering for long. For the ancient Arctic hunters, life was both a joy and a struggle, plagued by the twin dangers of hunger and death.

The Gwich’in domain extended from the Yukon River north over the Brooks Range to the Arctic Ocean and east to the Peel River in Canada. The Gwich’in culture is Alaska’s oldest. Its people, anthropologists claim, are close relatives of the Navahos and Apaches of the desert Southwest. When the Gwich’in weren’t fighting off famine and chasing game or warring with coastal Eskimos or far-ranging Inuit Eskimos from the Mackenzie River Delta in Canada, they lived nearer the Yukon River in caribou-skin huts.

Today the Old Crow drainage is still raw wilderness, the ne plus ultra. It is also a region without names. The Old Crow drainage, as much of Interior Alaska, was once infused with Native history and strung together with names recalling significant events or noting prominent features—to the Gwich’in, the Porcupine River was Ch’oonjik (pronounced Ch with the accent on the second syllable), or “porcupine quill along the river,” and the Brooks Range was Gwazhal—which guided Native travelers from river bend to river bend and mountain to hill. But today those names have largely been forgotten, omitted from modern maps and unknown to a generation of Natives who no longer have a need to travel deep into the country on extended subsistence hunting journeys.

Because they use the land, Heimo and his family have names for the Old Crow’s prominent features—Rundown Mountain, Thunder Mountain, Krin Creek—but these have not made it onto modern maps either.

In early January 2002 I purchased two 1:63, 360-series topographic maps at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. When I unrolled them on the long counter at the map office, the dizzying relief lines, the resplendent green, and the sheer number of names confused me until I realized that I’d been given the wrong quadrangles. I was looking at two maps of the Talkeetna area, a fertile, mountainous country just north of Anchorage. When the woman behind the counter returned with the correct ones of the Old Crow and Coleen River drainages, I was relieved to find vast areas awash with white and blotches of green nearly devoid of names. Even the U.S. Geological Surveyors, who superimposed a mathematical grid of six-mile squares over the landscape, refrained from the temptation to name. Perhaps they were humbled enough by what they saw from the air—the area was only cursorily field checked—and understood the meagerness of their efforts to assign names to a land they didn’t know. Only the large rivers and a few of the nearby peaks are spoken for: Yankee Ridge, Horse Hill, Ammerman Mountain. Hundreds of creeks remain anonymous, as do all of the tundra ponds and lakes and the cold, detached spires of the Brooks Range, only fifteen miles away from the Korth’s cabin. Pure, white, and adamantine, these peaks are the apotheosis of this epic landscape, as awesome in their physical presence as their mythic evocations.

Apart from the international boundary swath and an aborted attempt to establish a winter tractor trail during the winter of 1955-1956 to connect the Yukon River with Distant Early Warning (DEW) line sites in the Canadian Arctic, man’s presence here has been inconsequential. All this unspoiled space, however, is something of an illusion. Only 115 miles north lies one of the world’s largest industrial complexes, over 1,000 square miles of North Slope oil development, including Prudhoe Bay. But the 5,000- and 6,000-thousand-foot peaks of the Brooks Range protect one’s view north and shield the Old Crow from the coast’s brown nitrogen oxide cloud and also help to shelter the imagination from the ugly truth. The DEW line sites are the result of a military establishment that regarded Alaska as a strategic piece of property in a paranoid superpower game and erected the sites during the Cold War years to warn of a Soviet invasion from the north. But the winter tractor trail and the attempt to connect those sites with Alaska’s Interior failed. Afterward the Air Force, or its civilian contractors, jettisoned much of its equipment along the Canada border. Two trailers, tanks from gas tankers, piles of chains, and tires were left along the Old Crow River. Yet, other than the junk along the border and the tractor trail, whose thirty-foot-incision through the trees and the tundra is still visible today, man has left few signs of his occupation.

The nearest villages are more than one hundred miles away—a two-to-four-day journey by snowmachine if the rivers are frozen solid and the snow isn’t too deep; about the same traveling downriver by boat, much longer going upriver; almost two weeks in summer on foot, three weeks minimum in winter on snowshoes without a trail. Yet for the Korths these villages represent outposts of civilization, reference points in their physical, political, and psychic landscape.

Kaktovik, an Inupiat Eskimo village with a population of 250, lies 115 miles to the north. The Korths are separated from Kaktovik and the small island on which it is found, Barter Island, by the serrated peaks of the Brooks Range and a small swath of coastal plain, a floorboard-flat area of tundra, ponds, and rivers.

Until 1945, when Barter Island became a radar site for the Distant Early Warning system, the residents of Barter Island lived much as their ancestors did. They were whale hunters who lived in sod huts along the coast. Shortly after the DEW site was constructed, however, a school was built in Kaktovik, and people began to settle in town. Today, Kaktovik is part of the wealthy Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, the richest, by far, of Alaska’s thirteen Native corporations, and one of eight villages (Wainwright, Point Lay, Point Hope, Nuiqsut, Atqasak, Anaktuvuk Pass, and the city of Barrow) encompassed by the affluent North Slope Borough, which collects taxes on oil leases. Though the people of Kaktovik still trap Arctic fox, wolves, and wolverines in the foothills of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and still fish and hunt along the coast for waterfowl, polar bear, caribou, bearded and hair seals, and bowhead whales, most support oil development in the refuge. Oil money has brought them a new high school and gymnasium, a swimming pool, a power plant, streetlights, running water, new homes, trucks, ATVs, boats, and countless other personal possessions. Their support for drilling, however, is qualified. Because whaling is still an important tradition, most strenuously object to offshore development in their whaling grounds.

Arctic Village, a Gwich’in Indian village of 170, lies 115 miles directly west of the Korth’s cabin. It is snuggled along the East Fork of the Chandalar River and is surrounded by postcard mountains and little lakes loaded with northern pike. Despite the solitude of its setting, Arctic Village has become a battleground in the fight to determine the fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Residents are courted by environmentalists and oil executives alike. Publicly the residents of Arctic Village struggle valiantly against the threat of oil development on the refuge’s coastal plain, a place they refer to as Vadzaih Googii Vi Dehk’it Gwanlii, approximately “the Sacred Place Where Life Begins,” and the potential disruption of the Porcupine caribou herd’s calving and migration pattern. Privately a few of the villagers confess that the impoverished community, which opted out of ANCSA and the cash settlement for the right to retain their ancestral lands, could benefit from oil development.

One hundred fifty miles to the southwest is Fort Yukon, which sits just above the Arctic Circle at the confluence of the Yukon and Porcupine rivers. The Korths have a summer cabin in Fort Yukon, where they live for one and a half months of every year. Like the generations of trapping families who came before them, they spend June and a portion of July there, stocking up on supplies, reconnecting with old friends, and getting a brief dose of civilization.

Canadian traders from the Hudson Bay Company, who regarded the Yukon Flats as the richest fur territory in all of North America, established Fort Yukon in 1847. Two decades later, the United States purchased Alaska. The British fled, though Fort Yukon continued as a fur-buying center under American auspices. Later it became a stopover for hopeful shoe salesmen-turned-miners caught up in the madness of the Klondike gold rush. Today Fort Yukon is a town of 750, with a large Gwich’in Athabaskan Indian population. It is plagued by the kinds of disquieting problems that haunt Native villages all across Alaska: alcoholism and the attendant fetal alcohol syndrome; rampant drug use; health problems ranging from tuberculosis to diabetes to heart disease; a high suicide rate; and child abuse. Despite a host of alcohol-related problems, Fort Yukon has made a deal with the devil. It is a “wet” village, the most liberal designation in a three-tiered system—dry, damp, wet—meaning alcohol can be purchased in town. Of Alaska’s nearly 250 bush communities, it is one of only seventeen where booze can be bought legally. The town-owned liquor store, windowless and made of corrugated aluminum, with a thick metal door resembling that of a jail cell, is a source of considerable consternation. But even those who oppose the store don’t deny that it brings in a lot of money. The store was closed in 1985, but community revenues dropped so precipitously and bootleg liquor ran so freely that it was quickly reopened.

Fairbanks (population 40,000) lies 300 miles to the southwest, and is the closest city. Downtown Fairbanks is a hodgepodge of bars, dime stores, jewelry stores, greasy spoons, seedy motels, cafés, government buildings, and now a Marriott Hotel with an upscale restaurant offering fine food and wines at Chicago prices. But despite its funky downtown and its natural beauty, Fairbanks is sprawling helter-skelter across the Tanana Valley, fueled by the Sam’s Club, Home Depot, fast-food scourge that has marred cities across the country.

Fairbanks has an accidental quality about it, befitting its history. In 1901, after the Klondike had played out, eager, hell-for-leather miners floated down the Yukon, bound for Nome, on Alaska’s western coast, where gold had been discovered in the sand along the beach. A small group departed from the Yukon and made its way by riverboat up a large tributary, the Tanana River, with the intention of establishing a fur-trading post. When the boat’s pilot mistakenly turned up the Chena Slough, the boat got stuck on a sandbar and the captain was forced to unload cargo and passengers, too. Those left behind on the river’s banks bided their time by prospecting. Some struck gold, and soon after, word got out that another rich strike had been made in a place that was later christened Fairbanks. Modern-day Fairbanks still has that feel of a city dependent on booms, bonanzas, big strikes, and huge sums of federal money capable of kick-starting an ailing economy.

The city, like much of Alaska, compromises outdoorsy, warm, generous, but tough-minded, independent people for whom the frontier is more than a distant memory. In Fairbanks, people build their own cabins and homes. They trap, hunt moose to put up winter meat, tend summer fishnets, mush dogs, heat with wood, live without indoor plumbing. Despite the fact that they live in the populous North Star Borough (population 85,000), many seek to honor values of self-reliance and simplicity. Yet, like Alaskans in general, many have struck an uneasy alliance between their ethic of individualism and their annual Permanent Fund Dividend check, a yearly gift from the state based on interest payments from oil royalty investments. In 2002, each of Alaska’s 591,537 residents (those who could prove they had been there for two full calendar years) received a check for $1,540.76, only the second time in the Fund’s twenty-five-year history that the dividend check was less than that of the previous year.

Fairbanks is something of an end-of the-road town—a college town, too, with just enough university types, left-leaning liberals, and libertarian zealots to make it interesting, the kind of place where bumper stickers abound: Alaskans for Peace; Free Tibet; No Nukes North; Secede; Vote Freedom First—Vote Murkowski; Charleton Heston Is My President; Alaskan Girls Kick Ass. While sprawling Anchorage—or “Los Anchorage,” as many Alaskans call it—325 miles south of Fairbanks, looks to cities like Seattle and Portland for its cues, Fairbanks dispenses with the pretense. It has earned the sobriquet “Gateway to the Interior.” Anchorage is protected by the Alaska Range, the Talkeetna Mountains, and the Wrangells, while Fairbanks gets the Arctic’s cold full blast, and winter lows of 20 and 30 below sometimes rival those of Fort Yukon.

 

If it is true that we are shaped by the landscape we inhabit, perhaps this explains why Heimo, from the very beginning, exhibited little of the bravado I’d expected. The Frigid Zone, which lies above a latitude of 66° 33′ North, a theoretical line called the Arctic Circle, is an unforgiving region that doesn’t tolerate recklessness or excess of any sort; it must be approached modestly.

There are few cowboys in the Arctic. An old saw about Alaska’s bush pilots goes like this: “There are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots.” The same could be said about residents of the Arctic Interior. Humility is the first virtue one learns in the high latitudes, a sense of one’s inherent vulnerability, a realization that at any time nature can deliver a bad deck of cards or a fatal blow. In the Arctic one never achieves freedom from fear, because so much can go wrong—Jack London wrote that there are 1,000 ways this place can kill a man—especially in winter. For outsiders, frostbite immediately comes to mind, but few who live in the Arctic worry much about minor frostbite. Most are resigned to it, an ear or a nose or a finger, a little nip each winter.

The prospect of literally freezing to death is more real and is heightened by the combination of extreme cold and distances. But the rules to avoid this fate are axiomatic: Dress in layers; drink lots of water; don’t push too hard or you may overexert and freeze to death in your own sweat; keep your core warm with calories; and beware of overflow, that insidious layer of water seeping over the ice, which is the bane of every trapper’s life. Get caught in overflow, especially if it’s deep, more than a few miles from the cabin, and your only choice is to build a fire, fast.

Another concern is a chimney fire, a creosote buildup in the woodstove’s metal stovepipe that sets the whole cabin ablaze. Consequently, many trappers clean their chimneys compulsively, once every week, and keep a backup tent in which they can ride out the winter in case of emergency.

Snow blindness is a worry in March and April, particularly on open lakes or tundra, when the sun is strong and is reflecting off snow. Snow blindness is hard to treat—the Gwich’in once used boiled Labrador tea to soothe burned retinas. Whiteouts are a worry, too. They can obliterate every landmark in sight. In a whiteout a person only has two choices: Dig a hole in the snow and hunker down and wait or use the wind as a guide and hope that it doesn’t suddenly switch.

Starvation is always a possibility, though less of one now than when the Gwich’in and Inupiat families wandered the land. Trappers haul in staples—flour, cornmeal, noodles, canned vegetables, powdered milk—which should carry them through in a pinch. Yet every bush family worries: Will the caribou come; will we get our moose; will the fish come up the rivers to spawn; will it be a good berry year; will we trap enough fur in winter to make our life possible, to pay the bills?

Cabin fever isn’t talked about much, if only because it’s far more common than people like to think. But cabin fever has been known to undo even the most stable trapper. One trapper told me that it can grip like superglue and suffocate the mind. Though most think of winter as the season when psyches collapse, spring also claims its share of victims. In winter, Alaskans enjoy an ease of travel, providing it’s not too cold to leave the cabin. It is in spring before breakup—a period that may last a few weeks, when the sun has melted all the snow and the land is oozing water, and skis, snowshoes, snowmachines, dogsleds, and riverboats are useless—that one’s freedom of movement is severely restricted and one’s mind starts to seriously wear. Trappers can get very “bushy” in spring.

There are also snowmachine problems. The most likely scenario is that a snowmachine becomes mired in overflow or bogged down in a wind-packed drift. Though Heimo carries a come-along, sometimes called a power pull, to winch his snowmachine out of deep drifts, in much of this country, a come-along is worthless; there are seldom any trees large enough for him to chain up to and crank out a 400-pound machine. Another possibility is a drive belt problem; a drive belt can break just about anytime. At 40 below or more, a whole assortment of things can go wrong. Steel can snap like kindling—a ski, perhaps; an axle; a clutch; bearings; a shaft—even the snowmachine’s handlebars.

That’s what happened to Heimo in mid-March 1990—things went wrong when he was driving from the cabin on the Old Crow drainage to the cabin on the upper Coleen River. It was spring and time to move again. A bush plane had already transported the girls and Edna and all of their belongings.

In an effort to let the land and its animal populations rebound from their seasonal presence and to ensure a steady supply of fur, the Korths are seminomadic, moving each spring to one of their three cabins in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and each summer to Fort Yukon. They do this not for a change of scenery or for recreation, as someone who escapes to a summer home, but out of necessity, employing a practice of land stewardship once common among small farmers in the Midwest—letting a field lie fallow. They relocate even when they feel like staying put.

Heimo’s job was to bring the snowmachine overland, a journey that would take him across a 2,500-foot divide that separates the two drainages. Though Heimo had assured Edna that there was nothing to be concerned about, privately he knew that the reality was different. At the divide, southerly winds had lathed the snow into three-foot drifts, which were, for the most part, as hard as pavement. What Heimo had to watch out for were the soft spots where a heavy snowmachine could break through and become mired. Though black spruce circled the mountain at lower elevations, on top there would not be a tree in sight other than whip-thin dwarf birch and alder, so his come-along would be ineffective.

Heimo set off early in the afternoon. He brought a book of matches, his ax, his snowshoes, and an extra drive belt, just in case. At first, he traveled comfortably on a meandering creek bed, and he dreamed of the cabin on the upper Coleen, the one he always referred to as “home.” He dreamed of breakup and May waterfowl hunting on the newly exposed gravel bars; of the taste of a white-fronted goose slow-boiling in a cast-iron pot; of sweet, cold river water; and of the return of the songbirds. He made it to the mountain and the dense spruce forest without incident and resisted the temptation to relax. Instead, he stood up on the machine and supported himself with his legs, as a horseback rider preparing for a log jump, and carefully maneuvered through the narrow alleys between the trees. The land was still in winter’s bitter grip, and mounds of snow clung to the boughs of the black spruce trees, bending them double under their weight.

When Heimo reached the divide, the sun was shining brightly, and he stopped long enough to enjoy its light and to rest his legs and his throttle hand, which had started to cramp. He looked back at his trail and noticed how the hard-packed snow had easily supported the weight of the machine. Then he gazed off into the distance, across the radiant white tundra to the dark outline of trees that marked the Old Crow drainage, and said good-bye. He would not be back again for another three years. He pulled the hood of his parka and the wolverine ruff tightly around his head and face and gave the snowmachine some throttle.

On the far side of the divide, with the tall white spruce of the Coleen River in sight, he flushed a covey of willow ptarmigan. White as the snow that hid them, they burst from the ground clucking their disapproval. Suddenly the machine fishtailed, and Heimo struggled to keep it from going over. When it fishtailed again, he took pressure off the throttle, and the machine lurched, throwing him. Heimo landed in a sitting position with his legs extended, buried up to his chest in snow. He could only watch as the snowmachine tipped over on its side and stalled. He struggled to get out of the snow, but with nothing to hold on to, he was unable to stand up. So he rolled onto his belly, dug his arms shoulder high into the snow, and pushed. Eventually he got to his knees. Then he rocked back and forth until he was finally able to stand up. He brushed himself off and cursed his luck. Approaching the machine, he wondered if it would start again. Then he pulled the manual start, and to his surprise, the machine responded. He was fighting to muscle it back onto the trail when the handlebar snapped like a thin twig. His handlebar had broken before. In the past, though, there had been a stem to which he could attach a vise grip so he could still steer the machine. Not this time. He would have to leave the machine and come back to get it another day, when he had the tools to fix it. Heimo was fifteen miles from the Coleen cabin, and it was five in the afternoon. He knew that he had no other choice than to strap on his snowshoes, whose bindings he had remembered to repair the previous evening, and set out for the Coleen. Normally, a fifteen-mile trip would be nothing to be overly concerned about, but under the conditions it was bad—he would have to struggle through the deep snow, breaking trail for almost the entire way in the dark. And he would have to hustle. Edna would worry, so there was no way he could split up the trip into two days, walking half the distance, building a small snow shelter, and finishing the hike to the cabin the following morning. What with Rhonda, who was four, and Krin, who was not even one yet, Edna had her hands full. It wouldn’t help matters for her to have to be concerned about him, too.

Shortly after he set out, he was up to his thighs in snow, despite the snowshoes, trudging across a mountaintop that he knew few people in the 10,000-year human history of the region had ever seen. Fortunately, the wind had shifted earlier in the day and was now at his back. Once he got off the mountain and into the treeline, the snow was shallower, only knee high. Although the temperature was well below zero, the sweat was draining out of him. Ice crystals had formed on his beard, eyebrows, and eyelashes. Two hours into the hike, the sun set, and Heimo was tired and wet. He managed to stay calm, though; he had been in tough situations before.

Not long after the sun slumped below the horizon, Heimo recognized Arcturus, a red giant of a star, and he regarded it as a good omen. Three hours later, the aurora came out, too, illuminating his way. Heimo watched it build in the west, lighting the sky with its shimmering braids of color, and then slowly it vanished. By the time he reached Doghouse Creek, which flowed into the Coleen, he checked his watch again—nearly 11:00 P.M. Still five miles from the cabin, he was soaked in sweat and nearly falling over with fatigue. He knew he was in trouble. He’d broken one of the cardinal rules of the woods—never overexert.

He cleared out an area in the snow and gathered kindling from a copse of willows and chopped down a dead black spruce with his ax. The kindling and the tree were dry and when he set a match to them a fire crackled quickly. Then he pulled another spruce tree out by its roots and threw it onto the fire. Crouching down, he blew on the fire until it snapped and popped again. Once the fire was blazing, he ate two biscuits that he had brought along. Thirsty, he resorted to melting snow, holding his cupped hands as close to the fire as he could without burning them. Then he drank the few drops of water that had collected in his cupped hands. Though he was tired and drowsy, he resisted sitting down because he knew that it would be hard to get up again. Instead, he stood by the fire, hopping up and down to keep the blood flowing and stave off hypothermia, but he was still shivering. His core temperature had dropped so low that the fire failed to warm him, and he knew that he would have to keep walking to stay alive.

Heimo walked on the tundra. Though the snow was deep there, it was even deeper where it had accumulated in the creek bed. He pumped his arms and legs as if he were marching, in order to get the feeling back into his limbs. Still he was shivering. “Don’t stop walking! Don’t stop walking!” he repeated to himself. Since the creek ran into the Coleen above the cabin, he didn’t have to worry about finding his way in the dark. He knew that he wouldn’t find water, though, because the creek was frozen solid to the bottom. Once he made it to the river, there’d be water, but by that time there’d be no sense in stopping; the confluence of Doghouse Creek and the Coleen was only a half-mile from the cabin.

Heimo arrived at the cabin at 2:00 A.M. the following morning, chilled and vomiting from exhaustion. The last half-mile had seemed almost impossible. By the time he reached the cabin, Heimo was dangerously hypothermic, shivering and slurring his words. Edna helped him out of his clothes, wrapped a sleeping bag and a caribou skin blanket around him, and set him by the fire with a cup of hot tea and a bowl of moose broth. Then she led him to bed, where she held him until the following morning, when she could feel that his body temperature was finally beginning to rise. Heimo got up briefly, long enough to sip some of the soup. Then he fell asleep again. Waking in the early afternoon, he saw that Edna had crawled back in bed with him. She was nuzzled against him with Krin cradled in her arms. Rhonda slept on the other bed, snoring softly. The cabin was warm and smelled of fresh fry bread. Heimo walked to the stove and put more wood in. Slipping back into bed, he realized just how close he’d come to freezing in a snowbank like some dumb greenhorn. He kissed Edna on the forehead. Then he held Krin’s tiny hand and watched her until she and Edna woke.