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< NovDec 2000
	Features
Canoeing with Caribou A 1,000-mile voyage to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Ken Madsen

My sea kayak cuts through a chill fog shrouding the Arctic Ocean with its bright blindness. The sea and sky are the color of aluminum foil as I listen to the surf breaking on the shore and try to stay close, but not too close. A beluga whale surfaces and peers at my kayak with a huge eye. Its calf follows like a gray shadow. I hope the fog will dissipate before I’m forced to head to shore. I’d come to respect the Arctic swells. The water burns like liquid ice and the waves break right on the beach. I don’t look forward to blind surfing.

At my last camp spot, four-foot swells angle into the beach. I sit in my overloaded boat, watching the breakers warily. I dig my fists into the sand and try to knuckle-hop forward, but the kayak clings to the beach like a leech. Finally a wave surges up, but as it tears my kayak from the sand it swivels the bow sideways. I brace against the sand and slide backwards into the surf. The next wave pitches me upside down.

I’ve had lots of practice rolling my whitewater kayak in intimidating places like the Stikine, but I’ve never tried to roll a sea-kayak. As my head digs a furrow in the sand, I wrench my paddle to the surface. It isn’t elegant, but I wallow upright and manage to backpaddle through the breakers. Tomorrow morning will mark the sixtieth day of my trip. It will also be the first day that the sun has set since I flew into the coastal plain of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

I arrived in the Arctic at the same time as the pregnant caribou of the Porcupine Caribou Herd. Every year at the end of May, cow caribou migrate back to the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge. There they give birth to the next generation. In a ten-day period, 40,000 butter-colored calves drop onto the tundra. Within minutes of birth the calves stagger to their feet and take their first steps in a life of endless migration.

Caribou are more than the defining species of this immense wilderness. They’re the life-blood of the culture and subsistence existence of the Native people who live along the herd’s migratory path. Both the Gwich’in and Inuvialuit people have depended upon the caribou for thousands of generations.

This wilderness is known as America’s Serengeti, and not just because of the herd of 130,000 caribou. The Arctic Refuge is the most important onshore denning site for polar bears in the United States. It’s the home of musk oxen, grizzlies, wolverines and Arctic foxes. Hundreds of thousands of migratory birds (from every state in the U.S.) converge here to nest during the brief Arctic summer. Endangered bowhead whales, belugas and three species of seals rear their young in offshore waters. Unfortunately for those who care about wildlife and wilderness, oil companies are lobbying Congress for permission to drill in its coastal plain.

Before I started my journey I assumed that most of America’s Arctic coast was untouched wilderness. A trip to Prudhoe Bay smashed that illusion. Dozens of jets and planes land at the airport every day, carrying workers in and out of the oil fields. Giant trucks lumber along the web of gravel roads. Oil slicks and Styrofoam cups float in the once-healthy wetlands. There are thousands of miles of roads and pipelines and hundreds of oil spills every year.

At Prudhoe Bay, oil companies do their best to convince visitors that they’re model environmental citizens. Their rhetoric was a flashback to studying George Orwell’s 1984 in high school. According to the Orwellian Ministry of Truth, War is Peace. According to British Petroleum (BP) and Arco, oil is extracted in harmony with Native people and the environment. According to BP and Arco, pipelines are good for caribou and oil development has no impact on wildlife.

They don’t talk about the oil spills, air pollution and loss of wildlife habitat. They don’t mention that British Petroleum was recently fined $22 million for illegally disposing of hazardous waste at their oil facilities near Prudhoe Bay. They don’t say that the people who depend upon the caribou are adamantly opposed to any industrial development in the Arctic Refuge. The oil development I saw at Prudhoe Bay is just the tip of the iceberg. Ninety-five percent of Alaska’s Arctic coastal plain is already open to oil development. But the multi-national oil companies aren’t content. They want it all.

Paddlers have a special stake in the future of the Refuge. The coastal waters are sheltered by sand-spits, forming a fabulous sea-kayaking route between Demarcation Bay and Kaktovik. Pristine rivers such as the Kongakut, Hulahula and Aichilik lure river-runners from around the world. The watersheds in the Refuge are rare gems in a rhinestone world of dammed and polluted rivers.

Natives have a simple name for the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: the calving grounds. If any place is sacred to the Gwich’in, it is here. Norma Kassi, a Gwich’in woman from the isolated village of Old Crow, told me that “looking for oil in the calving grounds would be like drilling in a hospital nursery.” What happens in the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge will affect not only an enormous ecosystem, but the survival of a race of people.

Caribou and polar bears don’t know what the rest of the world is like. They don’t know that the throb of our cities is the heartbeat of the Industrial Beast. They don’t know that the hot breath of the Beast is heating up the Western Arctic many times faster than the rest of the world. They don’t know that the Beast’s sweat is turning our fresh water into toxic soup. They don’t know that its razor-sharp fingernails are scratching at the boundaries of the Arctic Refuge. I don’t want to be the one to tell them.

My 1,000-mile journey is part of the Caribou Commons Project and my task is to photograph the land and its inhabitants, both wildlife and people. At various spots I’ll meet with a group of northern musicians who will compose a soundtrack. We’ll record the sounds of the land and the stories of the Native people. Later, we’ll travel with Gwich’in and Inuvialuit speakers so people across the continent can hear their stories firsthand.

The route I doodled on a map circled through the migratory range of the Porcupine Caribou Herd. I’d hike from the Arctic Refuge across the Yukon-Alaska border to the Firth River. I’d kayak down the Firth, sea kayak along the Arctic coast to the Mackenzie Delta and paddle up the Mackenzie to the Rat River. Then I’d swap my kayak for a canoe and drag it up the Rat. Finally, I’d portage across the height of land and paddle down the Porcupine River to the Gwich’in village of Old Crow.

The coastal plain was a wildflower garden when I loaded my pack and hiked toward the Firth River. I walked along ancient caribou trails and crossed the international boundary. One hot, still afternoon in early July I descended from the British Mountains to the Firth. My musician friends had just flown in and were waiting patiently. After staggering under a heavy backpack for nearly three weeks, I was glad to see my faithful kayak on the beach along with the musician’s paddle raft.

We hoped to witness a great herd of caribou crossing the river, as they often do in early summer. During my hike I had walked in the midst of a herd of 10,000 caribou. We weren’t so lucky on the Firth. We set up caribou watches on the mountains, but aside from a few stragglers the hillsides were empty. “Where do you hide a hundred thousand caribou?” asked Steve Philp, a talented flute and saxophone player. “They’ve got to show up sometime.” They didn’t show up, but we did find their hair. During the summer caribou shed their winter coats. When they plunge into the river, the swift current shampoos the hair from their bodies and swirls it downstream. The river’s high water mark was defined by a thick line of bathtub ring-like caribou hair.

Halfway to the ocean, the Firth slams into a spectacular 25-mile-long canyon. One day as I bobbed up and down in an eddy, I felt a stab of responsibility for my friends. They wouldn’t be paddling this remote river if I hadn’t come up with the crazy Caribou Commons idea. Yet despite my misgivings, we survived the Firth’s rapids, which were straightforward Class IV. We saw musk oxen on sandbars, Dall sheep in the mountains and wolves loping along the shore. After we had been on the river for two weeks, the Firth flowed into its braided delta. We paddled into salt water and crossed to a sand-spit, which doubles as a natural airstrip. A Twin Otter was due to pick up the musicians in 36 hours.

A bitter wind swept down from the polar ice pack as we fortified shelters and lashed our tents to logs. Considering that there are no trees along the Arctic coast, there is a surprising amount of wood here--driftwood that floats down the Mackenzie River all the way from northern Alberta and BC.

I walked up the beach and met Matthew, who had been hiking along the coast by himself. He had a dreamy look in his eyes. “Did you see the little caribou calf?” he asked. I shook my head. “Its mother is dead, and the calf is hanging around her body. I’ll show you.” A snow bunting blew down the beach like a tumbleweed. It fluttered up and over a skinny calf lying lethargically on the sand.

Deprived of its mother’s rich milk, the calf was slowly starving to death. Its ribs were outlined on a withered chest. Its eyes looked like dark bruises. I wondered if I’d seen this same calf in the Arctic Refuge, jumping and butting heads with the other newborn caribou. I thought about the dangers along the herd’s migratory route. Even under normal circumstances, most calves don’t survive to return to the calving grounds.

Despite the high death rates, enough caribou make it back each year to ensure the herd’s survival. The caribou, however, have never had to face industrial oil development in their birthing grounds. Matthew, who is too creative to dwell on calf survival rates for long, wrote a song in honor of the calf. He sang it for us that night, as the wind howled around our frail shelters: Relentlessly, the Arctic Sea resounds upon the shore; Mew Gulls court the waves report, just as ten thousand years before; Coming through, the caribou renew the ancient round; And as they do, a chosen few return their bodies to the ground; It is tragic, it is pure; To survive is to endure; And all is just as it should be; The Coastal Plain, the Arctic Sea.

The twin-otter arrived on schedule and carried the musicians back to the bright lights of Inuvik. The pile of equipment left behind on the beach looked too big to fit inside my kayak. It was. I had to lash dry bags to the deck. My boat looked more like a garbage scow than a kayak.

I paddled eastward along the coast of the Beaufort Sea, stopping along the way to visit the abandoned whaling station on Herschel Island, now a Yukon Territorial Park. The beach was scattered with bleached Bowhead whalebones, a legacy of the Arctic whaling days a century ago when Bowheads were butchered to the brink of extinction. Bowhead whales are still an endangered species, although they are making a gradual comeback. A lone whale surfaced just offshore while I was camped on Herschel Island and I saw the distant spout of another as I kayaked east toward the Mackenzie Delta. Every day I paddled with belugas, and although most seals move north with the retreating pack ice, scattered bearded seals lay on the shore like mottled chunks of driftwood.

I spent much of my time along the coast hunkered down behind makeshift wind shelters, waiting for winds and waves to subside. The gales usually blew themselves out after three or four days and then I dashed down the coast. My maps showed several points and inlets that should have been safe landing spots, but they proved to be illusions. Over the years the Mackenzie River’s heavy silt-load has drifted along the coast, filling in the channels and lagoons.

I paddled back into fresh water three weeks after leaving the Firth. The Mackenzie Delta is a labyrinth of marshes, sluggish river channels, bushy islands and mosquitoes. One hundred and fifty upstream miles later I reached the village of Ft. McPherson and met up with two old friends, Rachel Shephard and Devon McDiarmid. I traded my sea kayak for a solo canoe and we headed for the mouth of the Rat River, a historic route from the Mackenzie to the Yukon interior.

The current in the Rat was anything but sluggish. I couldn’t make any headway so I tied my bow to Rachel and Devon’s tandem canoe. I paddled furiously while they jerked me upstream. When we reached the foothills of the Richardson Mountains the current became too swift for any of us to paddle against. Tracking canoes can be precise and elegant: an upriver excursion leading your canoe like a well-trained dog on a leash. It didn’t work that way on the Rat. The shoreline was stiff with willows, as thick as the jungles of Costa Rica. So we jumped into the river and waded, often up to our waists in icy water.

For 10 days we slogged upstream, inching toward MacDougall Pass--our “Holy Grail” at the top of the watershed. We slithered through steep, rocky rapids, clutching our canoes for balance. The boulders were round and slicked with algae, like greased bowling balls. Twice I lurched and fell hard, slamming onto rocks with my left knee. When I staggered into camp that night my knee was the color and texture of an over-ripe avocado. I had now been out for 80 days. In Jules Verne’s novel, Phinias Fogg made it Around the World in Eighty Days. I poked the swelling around my knee and wondered if I would ever reach Old Crow.

One cold wet afternoon we saw a Gwich’in camp in the distance. Smoke curled lazily from a pipe poking out of a wall tent. We dragged our canoes up the beach. An old woman wearing a purple dress, scarf and mukluks sat on a bench behind a low table, surrounded by Arctic char. A sharp knife flashed in her wrinkled hands as she cleaned the fish in preparation for drying. “I heard on the bush radio that you were coming,” said the old woman, plucking a fat char from the ground. “My name is Caroline Kay. There’s hot soup and biscuits in the tent. Go have some tea and something to eat.”

The wall tent smelled of wood smoke and forest. The earthen floor was covered with spruce boughs and caribou skins--Caroline’s sleeping mats and blankets. A pot of soup bubbled on the wood stove. A radio in the corner hissed articulate CBC voices from a studio in Toronto. They talked about spirituality and John Lennon. I poured a mug of tea and spread thick blueberry jam on warm biscuits. Then I limped back outside and asked Caroline how long she’d been in the camp. “I come here for as long as I can every summer,” she said. “I’m 84 years old and I’ve lived in the bush all my life. All winter we eat caribou meat and dried fish.”

After she told me what it was like to grow up in the bush, she asked about our travels. I told her what I had seen in the calving grounds, about musk oxen and whales and the caribou herd that surrounded me. I told her about the Caribou Commons Project. Sitting in Caroline’s camp beside the Rat River, the concept of travelling across the continent with musicians, sound systems and slide projectors seemed bizarre. “Oh, you’re working for us,” she said with a laugh. “Now we like you! Now we like you! It is always good to welcome travelers, but now we like you!”

Caroline was happy to feed us under any circumstances, but I was glad she liked us. And she was right; I was working for her. My musician friends and I launched a concert tour the following winter. Then we continued with an eight-month slide-show tour though the U.S. Lorraine Netro, a woman from Old Crow, was one of the Gwich’in speakers who traveled down to work with us.

Lorraine spoke at our slide presentations in Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. Our last engagement was in Oil City--the birthplace of the North American oil industry. We visited the place where the first oil well was drilled. We walked in the first corporate headquarters of the Rockefeller Empire. We smelled the dense smoke from an aging oil refinery and heard stories of toxic sludge bubbling up from the Burger King parking lot. Lorraine spoke little. Her dark eyes were troubled.

That night Lorraine spoke to a crowd of 300 people in an old theater. “I’d like to share a story with you;” she said. “It happened when I was about 10 years old. Home was a wall tent with a floor of spruce boughs. One day when my mother was out on the land with my older sisters I stayed home to look after my youngest sister. I heard a noise, so I crawled quietly to the doorway and lifted the flap--150 caribou were walking across the lake, making their way up to the Arctic Refuge, the place we are talking about. For me that moment was normal and natural. I never realized that one day it would be at risk.

“Our Elders know that the lives of my people lie in the hands of another country, in the hands of people who have no idea who we are. That’s why they have asked us to tell the outside world about the caribou and our way of life.”

Back on the Rat River, Rachel, Devon and I waved goodbye to Caroline Kay and struggled toward the headwaters. When we finally got to the top of the river, we portaged our canoes across the carpet of vivid red-gold tundra between the Arctic and Pacific drainages. As we walked back to fetch our last load, two big bull caribou trotted past us: the vanguard of the herd, migrating toward their winter range.

As we paddled down the Porcupine River toward Old Crow we met more and more Gwich’in on the river, searching for caribou. I had now been out for 100 days. I was relaxed and comfortable with the land. Yet at the same time I could feel my “normal” life rushing toward me at warp speed. Soon I’d be drinking a glass of wine, eating pizza and soaking in a steaming bath. I’d sort slides, schmooze with funders and send hundreds of messages into cyberspace. I’d get serious about planning concerts and slide shows, working for Caroline Kay and the caribou.

The Gwich’in we met along the river knew that only part of me was here. I was a visitor. They were home. When I was long gone they would still be on the shores of the Porcupine River, waiting for the caribou, as their ancestors have done for more than 10,000 years.

The Fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
The Arctic Refuge has been spared from oil development by the efforts of many individuals and groups, but the coastal plain of the Refuge is still at risk. Even though polls show that more than 70 percent of Americans oppose oil development here, the oil lobby is using its influence to open the coastal plain to drilling. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will only be fully protected if Americans write, call or e-mail their federal politicians. The Gwich’in people and the hundreds of groups in the Alaska Coalition ask for your support. Here is what you can do: First and foremost, contact President Clinton and ask him to use his executive powers to make the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge a National Monument. Like Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and the Everglades, the Arctic Refuge is an important part of our national heritage and must be protected for future generations (contact: President William J. Clinton, White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., 20500 FAX: 202-456-2461 e-mail: president@whitehouse.gov). Bills are currently in front of the House of Representatives and Senate that would designate the Arctic Refuge as Wilderness. Ask your Senators and Representative to co-sponsor legislation (S 867 in the Senate and HR 1239 in the House) to permanently protect the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (House: U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., 20515; Senate: U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C., 20510).

--km