NP#48 - Kobuk Valley

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Kobuk Valley National Park - Alaska!

 Loading up the Floatplane for our trip to the Kobuk Sand Dunes!

 The weather is a bit frightful! Visibility low! Yet away we go!

 Flying between the mountain peaks!

 Good thing Pilot Jim is experienced!

 We made it to Park #48 - Kobuk Valley National Park!

 First glimpse of the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes.

 Dunes from above. 

 Great Kobuk Sand Dunes.

Another look at the 23 square mile Dune field.

 Amazing to find sand dunes above the Arctic Circle!

 Bill, Jamie, Terry, John and Pilot Jim

Kobuk Valley National Park - our 48th National Park experience!

8/14 – The eve of our Alaska Adventure – I’m studying the NATGEO book about the parks and it has got my blood a flowing! We're about to embark upon a 16-day Alaskan Adventure that will take us to the Sand Dunes of Kobuk Valley, Walker Lake in Gates of the Arctic, a Disco Hike back at Denali, a Kennecott Mine Tour in Wrangell St. Elias and a whole lot of activity at Lake Clark. When our journey is complete, we will have visited 51 of the 59 parks on our Bucket List. 

Transportation for much of this trip will be in small aircraft – floatplanes, bush planes and thrilling rides through mountains and valleys!

8/15 – Phoenix to Anchorage. Our journey begins! We take Southwest Air from Phoenix (PHX)  to Seattle (SEA). A couple of hour break in SEA then off to Anchorage (ANC). As we depart PHX, the temperature is 110°! It will be cooler in Alaska! We arrive in Anchorage at midnight. It’s raining and 54°. 

8/16 – Anchorage to Fairbanks. After a nasty “free” buffet breakfast at the downtown Hilton, we walk about a mile down to the Enterprise Car Rental Center to pick up our Ford Focus. Off to Fairbanks – a six hour drive north in the rain. Traffic is relatively light as we wind our way north. We reach Denali around lunchtime. Today…there will be NO mountain sighting as rain steadily falls. We have lunch at the McKinley Lodge, catch the last two holes of the PGA Championship and head up to Fairbanks.

We’ll be staying at the Hampster Inn – our hotel of choice when on the road. After checking in, we take a side trip to North Pole, AK and sure enough, we find Santa’s home. Unfortunately, all the Elves have gone home for the evening and Santa and Mrs. Claus are on vacation!

Time for dinner. We end up at the Wolf Run Restaurant. (Excellent choice!) Neither Terry nor I are very hungry, so we order only salads; however, their aged rib eye looked incredible!  The server tempts us with a chocolate-coconut crème brulé for dessert. We take her up on the offer. Perhaps the best dessert we’ve ever had!

8/17 –  Faribanks to Bettles. Our flight on Wright Air from Fairbanks to Bettles doesn’t depart until, 1pm so we decide to take a look around town. We end up at the North Star Golf Course – the northernmost course in America – and chat it up with the gals in he Pro Shop. We decide to play 9 upon our return to Fairbanks on the 19^th.

After our visit to the course, we head back to Wright Air to check in. The small terminal is teaming with activity…mostly native Athapaskans and Inupiats heading back to their villages.  We still have an hour before takeoff, so we go to the local Barnes and Nobel for a cup of hot chocolate. Here I find a book I’ve been meaning to read for a long time – Dale Carnegie’s classic How to win Friends and Influence People.

Wright Air is located on the opposite side of the main terminal. They did a very nice job of transporting us to and from Bettles and I would recommend these guys to anyone wishing to head north of the Arctic Circle.

The weather has improved today. It’s 72° in Fairbanks under partly cloudy skies. The single engine prop plane we are boarding will hold 8 people not including the pilot. I get to sit in the co-pilots seat. Terry is nestled between an Athapaskan and her small child. The kid’s nose is running like a river and coughs continuously.

The flight from Fairbanks to Bettles will take about an hour and 20 minutes. Not much to see but vast expanses of tundra, a bunch of small bodies of water, rivers winding through the tundra and an occasional hill.

We did get to see the Dalton Highway and the Alaskan Pipeline. The skies get even cloudier as we make our way northwestward to Bettles, AK. Bettles, the little town we will occupy for our visit to Gates and Kobuk, sits 35 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The only way to get to Bettles is by airplane or in the winter, on an ice road that used to be called the Hickel Highway.

The reason we are heading to Bettles is because that’s where our tour of Gates and Kobuk will originate. I found a company online called Brooks Range Aviation (BRA), which offered day trips to Gates and Kobuk via a floatplane.  I dealt with Judy Jesperson when making the arrangements. As it turns out, BRA is a pretty loosy-goosy operation. The kids who were running the show were ok, however, we saw Judy but once during the three days we were in Bettles.

One would think that when one is spending two grand for a day trip to visit the parks that the person who owns the company and made my reservation would be at least willing to greet us in a warm and friendly manner. Instead, she asked us if another couple could join us on our tour. She said it would lower our cost and it would really help them out! Who cares about “them?” What about us – the original paying customer?

Bettles was founded in 1896 during the Alaskan Gold Rush. The population of Bettles hoovers around 43. The airstrip that serves the community was built during World War II and is now used exclusively for commercial proposes. It serves as “base camp” for hunters, campers, floaters and sightseers like us.

Lots of caribou hunters in town this week. We saw our share of antlers that had been freshly cut off the tops of their kill and many sacks of caribou meat the hunters scored during their trip.

When I originally spoke with Judy last March ,I asked her about accommodations in Bettles. She said “Not to worry. Call back in May and we’ll get you a place to stay. You can stay in our bunk house or in the hanger!”

Terry wasn’t too keen about sleeping in a hanger for a couple of days so she made arrangements for us to stay at the Bettles Lodge. Good choice! The people at the Lodge were terrific and the accommodations much nicer than an airplane hanger!

Perhaps the most gratifying experience we had in Bettles was the people we met during breakfast and dinner. At dinner on the 17^th, we first met a couple of gentlemen from Lawrence, KS who had just completed their float down the John River in hopes of catching fish. They got completely skunked!

Next, we met three film producers from Burbank, Ric Serena (Producer), Jen Serena (Producer and Still Photography) and Jason Fitzpatrick (a bear of a human who also shares the title of Producer). The three of them had just concluded a two week float down the Noatak River in Gates of the Arctic National Park filming a couple of 70+ year olds who have been floating Alaskan rivers for years together.

While chatting with an FAA agent who was making an inspection tour of Bettles, Andrew Thomas and his wife Debbie overheard our conversation about Wrangell. Andrew was quick to tell us that the “infamous” road from Chitina to McCarthy wasn’t all that it is made up to be. He and Debbie drove it with no issues. A few bump here and there as the road was built atop an old railroad line and the railroad ties still remain!

We invited them to join us for dinner and learned they were from Australia. They had just completed visiting their 57^th and 58^th National Parks having spent a week camping in the outback of Kobuk and Gates. They too are on a mission to visit all 59 of America’s great treasures. Their next stop, number 59 – Denali – The Great One!

Andrew is compiling a photo journal of all 59 parks and hopes to have it published in the near future. We gave him some ideas about Kickstarter and what it takes to publish anything…and make money doing it!

The final couple we met were Bill and Jamie Goldmann from Estes Park, CO. Ironically, they are on the same mission as the Thomas’s and Binkele’s – visit all 59 major National Parks. They were the couple Judy asked us if we’d share the plane with….which we did. For Bill and Jamie, Kobuk and Gates would be Park numbers 53 and 54. Like Andrew and Debbie, they would be heading to Denali for number 55.

We were placed in room 15 in the Aurora Lodge. Nobody else in the place! Skeeters are plentiful and the temperature is in the high 50’s under cloudy skies. The Lodge crew had mentioned that the Northern Lights had been visible the past couple of days, so I set the alarm for 2:30 am to see if we could get a glimpse of this phenomenon. A little after midnight, a steady rain all but washed out our chance to see the Lights!

8/18 – Gates and Kobuk Valley National Parks. Today is the day we are scheduled to make our trek to Kobuk and Gates. And today, the skies are cloudy and douse us with a gentle rain. Yet, the tour will go on! Now Judy with Brooks Range Aviation may be a service duck…however, Jim McClain, our BRA pilot is a topnotch eagle! This fellow has been flying all his life. Flew big commercial jets for many years. Now, he’s an Alaskan Bush Pilot…and a good one at that! He had to be considering the conditions we were about to fly into!

Clouds cover most of the Brooks Range as we depart Bettles from the float pond two miles outside of “town!” I get to sit up front with Jim for a first look at the gloom we are about to fly into! The good news is Jim has a modern  flight instrument that shows us the elevation of the surrounding mountain peaks.

We are flying at 1100 feet above sea level. Bettles’s elevation is 630 so we are basically skimming just above the tundra below working our way through the valleys between the mountains! The surrounding mountain peaks average more than 7000 feet so we are well below their peaks!

The two and a half hour flight to the Sand Dunes at Kobuk Valley takes us over several meandering rivers cutting through the dense growth of Arctic tundra.  Tundra comes in three varieties – Arctic, Alpine and Antarctic. Since we’re flying above the Arctic Circle, we’re experience the Arctic variety that is characterized by areas of stark landscape and frozen grounds. The soil up here is typically frozen year round from between 10-35 inches. Trees do not grow in this environment so the landscape supports only low growing plants and mosses. Not much in the way of civilization out here! This is true wilderness.

Off in the distance, we spot one of the three sand dunes of Kobuk Valley! The three active dunes in Kobuk are the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes, The Little Kobuk Sand Dunes and the Hunt River Dunes. We’ve come to experience the Great ones, which lie a couple of miles south of the Kobuk River. These dunes cover an area of over 23 square miles. It is said that at one time, the dunes spread across 300 square miles!

After circling the dunes for several minutes allowing us to take pictures of this unusual landscape, Pilot Jim touches down on the Kobuk River. By this time, my aged bladder is full and as soon as I’m on shore, I dash to the tundra to pee!

The sand bar which we’re on is filled with all sorts of animal tracks. We are treated to bear, moose, wolf and caribou tracks indicating this area is filled with wildlife. Unfortunately, the Dunes are too far in the distance given the time constraints we have on this leg of the trip so we’ll have to forego a hike to the sand.

It’s a little after 1pm when we prepare to depart Kobuk and Jim asks us if we’d like to have lunch here on the sand bar or when we get to Walker Lake in Gates. Terry and I assumed that for $2000 for this excursion, we’d at least get a sack lunch as part of the deal, so we did not pack anything. No water, no food. Unfortunately, this trip turned out to be a BYOF excursion. (Bring your own food) It would have been nice for someone, Judy or any of her young help, to mention that we might want to pack a lunch for the trip!

Graciously, Bill and Jamie shared some of their goodies with us! Off to Gates!