North of Fairbanks Alaska

I wanted Karen to see the Arctic Tundra so we headed to Fairbanks in Central Alaska and took the Steese Road north from there. This road was opened 30 years ago to access Alaska’s most active gold mining district. Just before reaching the tree line and the Tundra, we spent the night at a BLM government camp ground, we were the only ones there ! We were approaching the Arctic Circle and enjoyed almost 22 hours of sunshine. The sun barely set at night, dropping just below the horizon for a couple of hours before rising around 2:30 AM. It never really got dark, we never needed flashlights. This endless daylight can be disorienting , you tend to ignore your watch and sleep when you feel like it. I liked the endless sunshine. I fished the nearby river for Arctic Grayling. We decided not to cook fish as the riverbank had fresh bear tracks.

The next day we finally reached the tree line and entered the Tundra. A Marmot appeared in a pullout where we stopped to hike up a ridge . We were too early to see the fall migration but this was Caribou country, where the vast herds exit off the North Slope to higher ground to escape the clouds of mosquitoes that plague them at lower elevations.

I spoke to two hunters who were scouting the area for the upcoming fall Caribou hunt. They each shoot one a year for hundreds of pounds of the finest wild game meat there is. They told me how the wolf packs follow the herd year round, picking off the old, the weak, the unlucky young. I watched the two men disappear into the vast, empty Tundra on there ATV’s .

We enjoyed our visit to these Arctic mountains, no bugs and a cool 55 degrees on a midsummer day. We consider this our furthest point away from our Vermont farm in our long journey to Alaska.