After their plane wrecked on landing, deputy editor Josh Condon and his guide leaned on survival skills and freeze-dried survival rations for over a week. It wasn't the cold that almost killed them.
“No one realizes just how dangerous bears are,” said McKinney, my pilot and guide for the next week as I went in search of the Western Arctic herd, the massive caribou migration that takes place across Alaska each spring.By his count he’d been charged 15 times, which explained the guns, a .44 caliber revolver and a pump-action shotgun, sitting on the floral bedspread next to the flight tracker and a pile of assorted camping gear.
But there’s a trade-off: the more stuff you carry, the fewer places you can land. So after flight-planning the route north from Fairbanks to the Arctic Ocean—checking weather cameras and calculating distances, fuel burn, potential wind resistance, cargo weight and gas reserves— McKinney began a ruthless culling from our over-grown pile of gear.
Stretching 700 miles across the Alaskan Arctic and into Canada’s Yukon territory, the Brooks Range reaches a peak elevation of nearly 9,000 feet. It’s the highest mountain range within the Arctic Circle. “If I dropped the whole state of New York down there, you could spend the rest of your life looking for it and not find it,” McKinney said through the headset, nodding out toward the endless mountains. There was no sign of life, the small shadow of the plane the only movement below.
She talked continuously as we rolled over bushes and chest-high vegetation. Aikens is a preternatural monologist and a poet laureate of freestyle profanity, but her subject matter is always Alaska: bears, the weather, bird hunting, the Kavic River, bear attacks , homemade remedies for catastrophic injuries, the ceaseless dark of Arctic winters, her garden, how everyone in the pitiable monolith that is “the lower 48” is living life hopelessly wrong, the wildflowers in bloom and bears.
“I’m like the tundra, I just hang around up here,” she said, watching the passing gulls, and I realized that Aikens didn’t mind the adversity or the almost cartoonish dangers: bears, murderous storms, unbroken months of darkness, freezing to death. For her, as for McKinney, and for the aspiring dog musher I met at the gas station at Bettles and for everyone else I had spoken with so far in Alaska, these weren’t challenges in constant need of overcoming.
One day we landed on a small, scimitar-shaped sandbar in the Arctic Ocean. The sand was as dark and powdery as espresso grounds, dotted with pale driftwood and gull feathers, and it’s very likely McKinney and I are the only two people to have ever stood on that exact spot on earth. I leaned into the wind and sun and peered out at the vast frozen plain beyond the farthest edge of America.
We had almost missed it—a clear channel, sunlight in the distance. McKinney made his careful reconnaissance passes, examining the terrain, and the next moment, likeblinking into color from black and white, we were soaring through a sunlit valley awash in green—a hidden microclimate, surrounded on all sides by winter, alone in the full bloom of spring.
Even just over 130 miles south of Kavic, the weather is more in tune with spring—which is to say it’s not snowing—but we’re still above the Arctic Circle. We manage to set up the two-person tent next to a small creek moments before the sun disappears and a brutal wind whips in from the east, tearing out several guylines and bending a handful of titanium stakes; I catch the tent accidentally, standing downwind when the gust slaps the fabric into my chest on its way to blowing into the water.
I fry slices of bread for breakfast alongside a half dozen scrambled eggs with cubes of buffalo sausage. Over the satellite phone, Lana relays that none of McKinney’s plane-owning friends are available to deliver parts: Two have engines undergoing maintenance, one is guiding a hunt and the other is heading to Michigan for a family reunion. “Well, we’ll need an airstrip at some point,” McKinney says to me, taking the shotgun and handing me the pistol, and we walk off in search of a runway.
The next morning, Thursday. McKinney has been up for an hour working on the plane when I stumble out of the tent just past six. More good news from Lana: If the weather cooperates, Pine will arrive at Fairbanks that afternoon and expects to reach us at some point this evening. We squat in the tent, waiting out a torrential rain and scarfing a few protein bars, then grab the guns and head back to the airstrip.
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