Excerpted from Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder Amid the Arctic Climate Crisis ©2024 by Jon Waterman. Reprinted with permission by Patagonia.
More than 40 years ago, Jon Waterman worked as a mountaineering ranger at Denali National Park. His patrol to the Noatak River in Gates of the Arctic National Park sparked a lifetime fascination with the wild, remote regions of the North. He has since embarked on scores of expeditions to the North, often traveling solo by boat and on foot to document the natural wonders and cultural heritage across Arctic North America.
After a long hiatus from the Noatak headwaters, he returned with his son in 2021, witnessing firsthand the effects of climate change that he chronicled in a New York Times op-ed: “36 Years Later, the Climate Changes at This National Park Stunned Me.” Amid a river now flooded, overgrown with brush, and bereft of once-abundant caribou, he was deeply disheartened by the many transformations.
In 2022, Waterman took a final, extended expedition “into the thaw” with the professional kayaker and photographer Chris Korbulic to carefully document the environmental and cultural changes precipitated by the climate crisis. They covered more than 500 miles on foot and by packraft down the entire river, then up the coast, passing through three different National Park Service-managed lands to meet with scientists, interview Iñupiat, investigate the many impacts of the Arctic climate crisis, and celebrate the enduring wonder of this special place.
Into the Thaw alternates between adventure and wilderness memoir, side-noted with research into climate change and natural history.
The Noatak River
August 1983
Trip Plan: On my first trip to the Arctic, we flew from the village of Bettles in a floatplane to Pingo Lake alongside the Noatak River. We planned to paddle forty-five miles downstream to Lake Matcharak, where another plane would pick us up a week later. I was officially on patrol as a park service ranger, on loan from Denali National Park. But those seven days on that prepossessing river—in the heart of Gates of the Arctic National Park—stretch as a long and idealized vacation in my memory.
I had never been anywhere like it. We were surrounded by snowy peaks that could have been a mile or perhaps five miles off and—when we pulled our paddles out of the river to listen—the aqua-blue Noatak River tittered against the hull of our tandem kayak with unseen and minuscule grains of silt washed down from glaciers hidden above.
To call this place pre-Columbian—as if it simply preceded the colonies— would be a slight to culture and landscape. They span, respectively, back to the Pleistocene and the Mesozoic.
I couldn’t help but feel unsettled, even reduced, by the immense sky and landscape that surrounded us. The map didn’t always help since the glacial river valley stretched so wide with such ice-rounded and flattened-out features that it proved hard to pinpoint our location. A hundred miles’ worth of Noatak River shown on our small-scale map had been reduced to a shrunken curlicue of millimeters. Nor did any of the many wide river meanders seem to match up with where we thought we were when we could locate ourselves on the map.
This was our second day on the river. Ranger Dave Buchanan and I had packed vital tools: a shotgun for bear protection, journals (while he used his notes to write a park service report, I resurrect mine here), and a pair of park service–issue binoculars that Dave wore around his neck. The binoculars were vital to identify strange, minute objects in the distance without the perspective and visual cues of trees (the upper Noatak is all tundra), or people (there were none), or human trails (zilch), or buildings, signs, and familiar landscape features (all absent). The binoculars that Dave passed to me showed that what appeared to be a distant grizzly turned out to be a small brown cliff face fifty times bigger than any bear because a pinpricked-sized bird in the sky—maybe an eagle—gave the whole scene needed perspective.
Bear, Jon? Dave asked.
No, definitely not.
The scale of it all seemed too much to process. If you were unprepared for this vast and isolated valley, with such a momentous sky, it would be easy to feel overwhelmed. Still, if you studied things carefully, if you got down on the ground and examined the dozen different plants that would fit in your hand, you would find the Arctic to be a cornucopia.
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The great naturalist John Muir visited the Noatak delta in 1881 and wrote: “The most extensive, least spoiled, and most unspoilable of the gardens of the continent are the vast tundras of Alaska. . . . As early as June one may find the showy Geum glaciale in flower, and the dwarf willows putting forth myriads of fuzzy catkins.” He then listed three dozen more plants, with their “bright stars and bells in glorious profusion, particularly Cassiope … the most abundant and beautiful of them all.” He waxed on for several more paragraphs about other plants and wonders of the place.
But when the wind blows through one’s layers amid stealthy grizzly bears and fierce clouds of mosquitoes, it’s easy to feel undone. This proved true for S. B. McLenegan who trudged and paddled up the Noatak River in late July 1885. McLenegan was no John Muir. “The landscape was one of the bleakest imaginable,” he wrote. “Not a sign of life was anywhere visible, and the cold piercing blasts which swept across the tundra caused us to realize keenly the solitude of our position and only increased our desire to see the end of the journey.” He and a single companion fled back to the delta in an Iñupiat sealskin boat by early August as the snow began to stick.
When the wind blows through one’s layers amid stealthy grizzly bears and fierce clouds of mosquitoes, it’s easy to feel undone.
In the distance behind our aluminum-framed, rubberized-nylon kayak— a boat composed of more than three dozen parts when we assembled it at the put-in—arose a hollow, chesty bugle call: Kar-r-r-r-o-o-o, Kar-r-r-r-o-o-o, Kar-r-r-r-o-o-o. Then the noisemakers came into view, and we craned our heads back to watch as two massive birds rounded the river bend to fly directly over our heads. Their stretched-out necks and the sound of their wingbeats—like leathery fans that scrunched air— brought to mind pterodactyls.
“Sandhill cranes,” said Dave, my companion in the stern. “Heading south.”
We listened until the prehistoric croak calls died out downriver, and then there was only the silt that continued to abrade the stretched-tight rubber hull of the leaky, government-owned Folbot-like swipes of light-grain sandpaper.
Dave worked as a backcountry ranger for Gates of the Arctic National Park & Preserve. My trip required a flight from Fairbanks to the village of Bettles, where Dave lived, then our hour-long floatplane flight into the Noatak. To walk into the park from the Dalton Highway north of Fairbanks, many miles across the soggy and buggy muskeg, would not be “a walk in the park.” Only a few modern-day frontiers-people pull it off without an airplane, mainly because the walk-in demands a huge time commitment that most people would rather spend inside the park.
I first met Dave nine years earlier in the New Hampshire mountains when we rescued a man who had swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and carried him down a steep trail to an ambulance in time to be resuscitated. Two years later Dave and I went to Alaska, where we attempted to climb Denali. Back in New Hampshire, when he left his Appalachian Mountain Club caretaker job at Tuckerman’s Ravine on Mount Washington, I took his place. A half dozen years later, in 1982, I would attempt to fill his double boots as a ranger on Denali, while he moved up to the Arctic.
Dave was serious and dedicated to his work on the river. I initially perceived park service patrols as a boondoggle until the Arctic opened my eyes. Dave helped set the hook for what would become my lifetime fascination with the Arctic. After my fourth season with the park service, I abandoned a government career and glacial mountains for remote wilderness trips that allowed me to immerse myself in northern land-and seascapes.
In our red-hulled Folbot we were at least two dozen miles from the nearest, emaciated trees, which resembled giant green pipe scrubbers, on the other side of the Brooks Range. We were so far from radio contact that a communication device (other than a walkie-talkie to speak to a plane overhead) would have been useless.
We were so far from radio contact that a communication device (other than a walkie-talkie to speak to a plane overhead) would have been useless.
We pitched the tent on a sandbar, several yards above the riverbank piled with glacial-crushed and river-rounded rocks the size of lemons. Dave laid the shotgun between us but left the safety on as we wrote in our journals. We slept deeply and my journal (recorded in present tense) tells about the next day:
I jump up from deep slumber and reach for the tent door as Dave pumps a round into the chamber: Ka-chunk! We hear but can’t see an animal run into the opposite side of river snapping willow branches. I unzip the door and shift back as Dave points the gun barrel out and the animal splashes and pants in heavy breaths right toward us.
We are immediately relieved to see that it’s not a bear but a caribou that shakes off a shower of river water on the shore immediately below with her hooves throwing sand and she breezes past with the smell of wet sweaters and huge, brown darting eyes. All so close.
Jeez.
Dave says, “What’s chasing it?”
Hooves shake the wet ground below us.
“It’s a female,” Dave says.
“How do you know?”
“Cows shed their antlers in spring and bulls keep ’em through the late fall.”
Then another faint splashing as a large, blonde wolf swims the river and charges out of the water next to our kayak. Her muscles stand out in definition with wet fur plastered to her body. She lopes past utterly disinterested in us as Dave lowers the gun and we step outside to watch the chase fade in the citrus light of the early morning sun.
Back in the tent hoarfrost sifts, gathers, and drops off the walls, and my back is already wet from leaning on the nylon as I sit transfixed looking at the low light on the mountains. A bird I don’t know calls huskily and Dave IDs it as a Bohemian waxwing while chickadees “chip, chip, chip” and the river swishes gently below.
I blow on my cold hands and sharpen a stubby pencil with my knife and search for the words to describe it all: Enjoying the reddening bearberry on the valley floor, the vast valley, IDing animal shit and finding chewed willows. The world here matters to me in a way I would never have guessed before this visit because the wolf might mirror my own life: her independence and the effortless manner of surviving in wilderness.
That’s what I want too. Mastery.
An hour later, we pushed our tandem kayak into an eddy next to the wolf tracks. I put my palms next to her tracks on slightly dried mud above the wet riverbank in hopes that I could feel the power of her strides. Dave rolled his eyes with the knowledge that I’d get stuck in the mud. Sure enough, the floury till of rocks crushed in glaciers held me like quicksand and it was all I could do to muscle my feet back onto a rock.
Dave slid into the bow. Since my feet were already wet and muddy, I stepped onto a submerged rock to clean my sneakers in the water, and then pushed us into the current as I slipped onboard. With no headwind, the current pulled us downstream and we steered with our paddles past a raven that croaked like a frog. The river had washed open its sides to reveal dirty gray permafrost hidden underneath, and we could feel the refrigeration of the ancient ice as we glided by the overhung riverbanks.
With no headwind, the current pulled us downstream and we steered with our paddles past a raven that croaked like a frog.
The ridgelines of the Brooks Range ran parallel to the river on either side of us and poked their contours up toward the sky, resembling the hulls of emerged submarines, frosted with early winter. The glacier ice on Oyukak Mountain glistened in the sunlight, while new-fallen snow on the lower mountains showed in vivid contrast against the blue sky. Streams ran in silver ribbons off the hillsides and carved gorges into the broad alluvial plains until they spat out a spray of boulders at their confluence with the Noatak.
Spooked caribou ran into the river with grunts and snorts as if chased by more wolves. They swam out into deep water and held their antlers up with the aplomb and steadiness of waiters en route to the kitchen with full trays above their heads.
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