Lets bounce around a little bit in time and reminisce a bit about this past summer. I had the good fortune to spend much of the summer running guided wilderness trips in Arctic Alaska... in different parts of the Brooks Range. The most memorable was the paddle raft trip down the Hulahula River running through the heart of the disputed 1002 area in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That would be the dispute over wilderness protection vs. oil drilling. The trip included both great scenery and very pleasant clients. Folks on this trip came from a wide variety of back grounds from a high school chemistry teacher to an aerospace mechanical engineer that developed propulsion systems for NASA. For get to the put-in we flew a relatively large plane, a Caravan which seats about twelve folks and small amounts of cargo, from Fairbanks to the small native community of Arctic Village. There we unloaded all the gear onto a small gravel runway by the Chandalar River to wait for Dirk from Coyote Air to pick us up in his Beaver. Dirk's plane in comparison to the first can hold as many as five folks, a raft, and some gear.
From start to finish the weather was exceptional and the mosquito population was almost absent. Dirk made it to Arctic Village around 3pm and started running shuttles over the Brooks range to our put in just north of the continental divide. Our whole group was at the river by dinner. That night was spend at the landing stripe organizing gear and soaking in the solitude. That first night Jim Stoltz was strolling up the river brushing his teeth while getting ready for bed. He was about 200 yards away looking at the movement in the water when we notices a grey wolf on the other side of the river hidden in the bushes checking him out. This went on for about five minutes before the wolf spooked and took off. Jim had no idea the wolf was there until we told him. Jim appreciated the wolf's presence non-the-less. The rest of the trip provided a host of other adventures along the same vein including the very same thing happening to Jim a second time later in the trip.
