Vacationing in ANWR yields more work than leisure, but is well worth the effort

When my friend asked me to join her bachelorette party of backpacking and packrafting across the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, I had to say yes. My friend is a particularly wonderful human in a world seemingly short on them, and I knew the trip was a once-in-a-lifetime experience I’d regret forgoing.

If you’d asked me a couple of weeks ago what my expectations were for the trip, I probably would have said none.

The truth is, even though I barely had waking hours this summer to dwell on anything farther in the future than an hour from now, I did have expectations simmering in the back of my mind. Something akin to the Arctic version of Julie Andrews spinning around on her hillside, only in the Arctic.

I pictured soft, mossy tundra landscapes rich with blueberries, long and lemon-colored late sunsets and slightly monotonous yet spellbindingly beautiful days piddle-paddling my way down a river with pure, clear water under that dazzling Arctic sun.

It’s so funny how life repeatedly teaches me that it never stops being itself, no matter the circumstances, but I still keep projecting some magical dreamscape into my future. This dreamscape never involves menial discomforts that threaten to dominate my entire worldview, interpersonal negotiation and conflict, or endless rain.

Our trip began with a five-day delay due to epic rainfall in Coldfoot. The cloud cover was too low to safely fly. Our pilots, trusted and experienced co-owners of Coyote Air, were decisive in keeping their planes — and us — on the ground.

Picture it: five women, some of whom have only just met, on the cusp of our Sound of Music-esque-imagined Arctic bachelorette trip, waylaid day after downpouring day in a socked-in mud puddle off the side of the Haul Road and living out of the back of a truck.

I’d say we made the best of what is a pretty classic Arctic adventure situation, but the best was still pretty tough at times. People we encountered kept asking which one of us was the guide.

While we laughed it off, I quickly realized the role of a guide is not just to point their group in the right direction or set up camp. It’s to make decisions. During the many moments when our group was hashing out how to adapt our course given our ever-changing circumstances, I thought both about how badass it was to have a group of women leading ourselves and how valuable a guide would be in that situation.

Eventually we embarked on an amended version of our original plan, shortening the backpacking portion of our itinerary. Five days after our trip was supposed to begin we flew into Porcupine Lake on floatplanes, clearing the seemingly endless series of jagged, dramatic sun-and-cloud dappled mountains that characterize the Arctic Refuge, before descending to the blue alpine lake.

There, triumphant and a little dazed by the experience of being deposited about as far from a road or cell service as you can get with only our backpacks, we collected our things, picked up our packs and started walking.

We saw:

• Bear, wolf and caribou prints in the muddy banks of streams.

• Hundreds of caribou skittered across a nearby hillside, descending toward water before picking up on our presence and watching us watch them. We stopped on our knees in the soft tundra to pick up binoculars, awestruck and uncharacteristically quiet.

• A vast, intact landscape — unmarked by industry, carved trails or roads — full of color and ever-shifting light under a sky that couldn’t sit still for very long. Brief rain showers alternated with powerful, warm bursts of sun.

• Ground cover filled with the early signs of fall — red blueberry plants full of berries, the tell-tale yellows. Tundra with that unique spongy, bouncy Arctic feel.

• A very happy, and sleepy, bachelorette.

That first night we also experienced:

• A sideways fall into a rushing creek — me.

• A backpack that was brand new, ill-fitting and causing discomfort.

• The nagging feeling that we were behind on our miles.

• A disagreement over where to set up camp.

• And, of course, more rain.

This is just the first glimpse into our trip. I’ll share more about packrafting in the Brooks Range along the Ivishak River, but the great reveal for me was that real life doesn’t leave itself at home even when I’m on a once-in-a-lifetime grand adventure.

When my stuff was wet, I reminded myself I could bear it and it would dry eventually. When I had a reaction to something someone said or did, I reminded myself it was only a reaction and I could choose to focus on the river or a mountain or simply the smell of being out there. During moments when it felt like a sufferfest and the group needed a morale boost, I teased the bachelorette for dumping us into the middle of this insane team-building exercise.

And I reminded myself that a trip to the Arctic is in many ways real life pushed to its extreme, not a vacation. I have to be more “on” than ever. That means I get more extreme beauty and more experience when I’m open and attentive to it. It also means that all of life’s other usual trappings are heightened: the discomforts, my own “edges” and tripping points, the fears.

It was work to have fun, but it paid off.

Alli Harvey lives in Palmer and plays in Southcentral Alaska —and sometimes the Arctic.