We went to bed last night suspicious that the weather would clear enough for a pick up, it was so cloudy and rainy yesterday! However, we woke to absolutely blue bird skies! Man the weather up here changes so quickly! We started putting out all our gear to dry. Before long, the campsite looked downright like a shanty town with expensive outdoor clothes hanging off of every guy line and trekking pole. We sat in the sun to dry ourselves out, watching the many ground squirrels in the area pop up, down, and move around.
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| Drying everything out |
Eventually 11:00AM rolled around so Matthew called Kirk to get an update on pickup time. Kirk said he was at the head of the Jago and will be touching down in five mins. FIVE MINUTES!!! Rob, Mat, and I start to frantically stuff all our spread out gear into our backpacks, Matthew, Matt, and Krista helping out as much as they can. They were getting picked up after we get dropped off so they had more time to pack themselves up. Luckily we had most everything packed up by the time Kirk hopped out of his plane, we left the rest for the others to pack up. Quick group photo and off we went, flying up over all the terrain we just walked in fog yesterday. Kirk flew a large circle to gain elevation and we could see the dark line that is the Beaufort Sea of the Arctic Ocean! The winds out of the south were too strong for Kirk to gain much elevation so we took a more circuitous route over a lower pass to the east into the Aichilik River drainage and then south into the Kongakut River drainage before cutting southwest back to Arctic Village.
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| Glad to see that plane! |
Landing in Arctic Village, Kirk took off to go pick up the rest of our group. Kirk had talked with Wright Air: fortunately there were enough people interested in a flight out of Arctic Village that they tacked a stop-over on the afternoon flight to Fort Yukon to pick us up. Rob, Mat, and I had some time to kill. We chatted with another person there, Erik Gearhart, who has been guiding and educating in ANWR for 20+ years. He was a really interesting and knowledgable fellow. We also walked into town to buy some sodas and chips (a bag of doritos was $8!), we headed over to the youth center for some hotdogs but the cook had already left for the day. We chatted with a number of locals who came up to us and asked about our trip and told us all about themselves. One young guy name Justin was hoping to come to Anchorage to perform his music and become famous; his stage name is JustinSane (get it? Just Insane?).
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| Our pick-up point was 50 miles south of the Arctic Ocean, seen from the plane on our flight out |
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| The Jago river: we walked down the right fork and hiked 2.5 miles up the left fork to cross |
We walked back to the airstrip and soon the other half of our group arrived. They said their flight was bumpy from the winds and were feeling quite airsick. They were on the ground maybe 20 mins before the Wright Air plane landed. Pretty uneventful flight back to Fairbanks. There were some clouds building up but the flight wasn’t all that bumpy. There was one oil worker guy from Fort Yukon riding with us, I felt bad for him because we stank so much. We landed in Fairbanks at 5:00PM, we didn’t have to pay any "flight change" fee; Matthew thinks it's because of Kirk’s influence, we were grateful for that. Rob had to catch a 5:55PM flight out of Fairbanks International Airport to Seattle, though, so we rushed to the car and drove around the large landing area to the main airport were we dropped him off. Poor guy didn’t get a shower in so he’ll be smelly for that long flight. We regrouped and decided to hit up Chena’s Alaskan Grill for dinner. We gorged ourselves on delicious food and libations. Got a text message that Rob made his flight although was held up by security for having soylent in a bottle.
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| Stinky flight back to Fairbanks from Arctic Village |
We had thought about getting a hotel room to shower and rest before driving the six hours back to Anchorage but it's high tourist season and all the hotel rooms were $200-$300 so we decided to caravan back to Anchorage with the midnight sun and candy to keep us awake. We rolled into our driveway about 1:30AM, had a pack explosion, showered, and climbed into bed just after 2:00AM. What a fun trip, definitely in the top five with so much beautiful scenery, excellent wildlife, little bit of adventure, and fantastic, funny, interesting people to experience it all with!
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| A trip of a life-time!! |
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