Pod Insights Gunfighters Ep. 26: Where the Primeval West Abides | The American West About this episode In the summer of 2019 a small group of us does a 12-day river descent from Alaska’s Brooks Range through the heart of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, experiencing a preserved slice of primeval western America that seems in perpetual danger of being destroyed by humanity’s relentless addiction to oil.
Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west.
MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips
Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US"
Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork
Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/
See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.
0:29 Speaker 01 You ever get that feeling, the walls closing in, the concrete jungle suffocating you? You crave some wide open spaces, the chance to connect with nature, maybe in a spot all your own? Well, head over to land.com. They've got ranches, forests, mountains, streams, you name it. Search by acreage, you can search by location, you can search by the kind of hunting and fishing you're dreaming of. Land.com, it is where the adventure begins. I got in my hand here, it was just clipped to my pocket, but it's in my hand right now, the Montana. It's MKC, Montana Knife Company's first folding knife. Designed, tested, built by actual hunters.
1:09 Speaker 01 The Montana is the first folder Josh Smith has built at production scale with a team of engineers and machinists who could match what he does on the bench. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. These things are great. You are gonna love this folding knife.
1:32 Speaker 02 A trip through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the crown jewel of America's wildlife preserves, reveals a stunning primeval world under constant threat of becoming a national sacrifice. I'm Dan Flores and this is The American West.
2:08 Speaker 02 Where the primeval west abides.
2:13 Speaker 02 What wakes me is a sound I've never heard. Or to be truer to the actual experience, two sounds to which my memory banks cannot assign cause. One is a soft, gentle sort of chuffing. Coming awake to the slanting light out the tent door, I register this one first, an auditory accompaniment to the angled light, which lands in my foggy consciousness as a kind of language I cannot translate. The other sound is almost as delicate but more percussive. It appears to reach from the far away to the nearby, a tinkling with a thousand source points.
2:58 Speaker 02 It's June 22nd, the day after summer solstice 2019, and with my wife Sarah and eight of our friends, we're waking in what could well be primeval America. We're in Alaska, above the Arctic Circle, at nearly 70 degrees north latitude, and on summer solstice that far up the curve of planet Earth, we're experiencing a new cosmic reality. There's a powerful sense of being slightly off the apex of a gigantic sphere, a sphere that's spinning underneath a light source that never switches off. No matter how late you go to bed, or how early you wake up, the light source is there,
3:43 Speaker 02 throwing the same fingers of dawn, sunlight, and shadowing throughout the day and night.
3:50 Speaker 02 To be geographically specific, from our put-in high up in the Brooks Range, we've now spent nine days descending the Hula Hula River. The Hula Hula is named by, or for, an Hawaiian islander who was either on a whaling ship or a ship pursuing wealth in furs here two centuries ago. Nine days from this smallish stream's headwaters, we're now out of the mountains and in the vast coastal plain of America's wildlife crown jewel, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And we've been living with these oblique light angles the whole trip.
4:33 Speaker 02 But this far-away-nearby tinkling sound and its chuff-chuff-chuff accompaniment are new. Both those sounds, it turns out, are emanating from thousands upon thousands of caribou who have been migrating out of mountains filled with denning wolves to gather in the relative safety of the Arctic Plain, where they're coming to drop their calves. Herd after herd is passing by within 100 feet of our camp this morning, conversing in a murmur that audibly rises above the flow of the nearby Hula Hula. That's the chuffing I'm hearing. It's quiet, caribou, road trip conversation.
5:17 Speaker 02 Pulling the tent fabric aside to hear better, my first guess is that the tinkling is the clicking of caribou hooves passing through the stiff, eight-inch-high willows blanketing the riverside tundra. But the more acutely I listen, well, what it actually sounds like is an almost deliberate popping in their leg joints as they walk past.
5:42 Speaker 02 The truth is, we've been paddling downriver among caribou herds for days now. But not in these numbers. Now everywhere we look, they're the only upright things in an otherwise horizontal world. Tan and white bodies rocking along in a kind of slow-motion parade. They seem aimed towards an indistinct assortment of white blocks miles out that we've been seeing for the past couple of days, and I'm now starting to suspect are icebergs in the Arctic Ocean elevated by mirage above the flatness of the plain. But the caribou pulled me away from that thought.
6:22 Speaker 02 On the opposite riverbank, only yards away, herd males with antlers and faces black as squid ink clack over the rocks. There are pregnant cows also with antlers and posses of adolescents. We've already seen wolves, most of them black, along with grizzly bears and dull sheep, but the real wildlife miracle here is in the vast numbers of caribou. I noticed that some herds with brand-new calves, the little guys jetting and pogoing across the tundra, have finally abandoned their relentless march northward from the mountains. They've arrived. Ten days earlier, in Arctic Village on the other side of the Brooks Range, Gwich'in
7:06 Speaker 02 tribal elder Sarah James had told us that the Porcupine Caribou Herd is 300,000-strong these days. Seventy-five-year-old Sarah, with her long, silver-streaked hair, was funny and eloquent and committed. She travels the world fighting to keep oil drilling out of the refuge, a looming threat in 2019 and an even more frightening possibility in 2026. Sarah's got the bona fides for that kind of activism. That tribal name means "People of the Caribou." "Sarah and her people are the modern American equivalent of the bison Indians of the 19th century and earlier.
7:50 Speaker 02 The caribou are in our hearts and we are in theirs," she told us. Now, standing by my tent, surrounded by thousands of caribou moving slowly through a vast, grassy landscape, in a scene reminiscent of the 19th-century Great Plains, or maybe East Africa, I'm as gobsmacked as I've ever been in my life. For the first time, I'm experiencing a version of original America, the continent humanized first marvelled over more than 20,000 years ago. This must be what it was like to experience bison herds to the horizon, or passenger pigeons streaming overhead, and day-long flights that blocked out the sun.
8:33 Speaker 02 Now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, what's required for a primal experience of the natural planet is being in one of Africa's grand game parks, in parts of the Amazon, or in some wildly remote piece of North America, like this Arctic plain up at the roof of the world. In the United States of our present century, this wild coastal plain, in sight of Arctic waters, is one of the last continental places to preserve a tantalizing echo of wild America as it waited across the millennia for its destiny to play out. Here are my firsthand experiences of this place, as kept in my daily journal.
9:18 Speaker 02 June 15, 2019, Arctic Village, Alaska. Sarah James, who travels the world advocating for the Arctic Wildlife Refuge and the native way of life, rides up on her Honda four-wheeler to meet us on the airport tarmac where our group has just deplaned. There are 10 of us Lower 48ers. Our two guides, who do this float trip repeatedly when Brooks Range snowmelt raises waters in the rivers high enough to do it, are from Arizona and Colorado. With one exception, the remaining eight of us are from Santa Fe, New Mexico, most of us longtime friends, several of us writers.
10:04 Speaker 02 Sarah, who is addressing us from the seat of her Honda, looks to be 15 years younger than her actual age, and she is naturally easygoing and personable. As she starts to talk, I notice with some curiosity that of her fellow villagers I can see, everyone is also moving about the airstrip and the village streets on four-wheelers. As we blink in the bright, high-latitude sunlight and swat at the occasional mosquito, Sarah is telling us about her people's situation. I jot down a few notes. "Minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit used to be our normal winters here," she's telling us. "But this last winter, minus 40 was the coldest it got, although the snow was really
10:49 Speaker 02 deep." "Their village, whose name in their language translates to 'village with high banks,' was founded on this spot because of the nearby tree line and the caribou migrations," she says. "They follow the caribou migrations from towers they've built around their country, which stretches from the highest place in the Brooks Range to as far as we can see," she adds. "The caribou migrations are changing, but they still come to this valley and to Old Crow Flats, places with lots of lakes and food sources. We call our herd the Porcupine Caribou, and we've always hunted them.
11:29 Speaker 02 We cease to hunt in June, when the new embryos form in them, and wait until the training of the calves is finished before we resume," she tells us. "At one point, the Porcupine herd dropped to as low as 120,000, but now it's almost back to its normal size of 300,000." "There are plenty of predators other than us," she says, "a great many wolves, and also plenty of grizzlies, and there are lynx and wolverines too, everything living to some extent on the caribou presence."
12:04 Speaker 02 While native people have hunted the refuge long before its official designation, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, dates to 1960, when the Eisenhower administration set aside 8.9 million acres of the Brooks Range and the coastal plain as the Arctic National Wildlife Range. When the Epic Alaska Lands Bill passed in 1980, the Carter administration upgraded the range to a full refuge, expanded to a whopping 19.6 million acres, four times the size of Yellowstone National Park.
12:45 Speaker 02 It overnight became the crown jeweled wildlife preserve of the entire 75-year-old system, a true Yellowstone of America’s wildlife refuges. Ecologist Olas Murray and his wife Marty were famous early advocates for ANWR’s creation and for wilderness designation of nearly 40% of it. But the Alaska Lands Bill left the 1.5 million acre coastal plain, the so-called 1002, open to potential oil and gas exploration. That opening, and the threat it’s posed to wildlife, to the caribou, and to the glitchin’ way of life, is what’s motivated Sarah’s activism.
13:30 Speaker 02 “I think of myself as an educator protecting my way of life, not as an activist,” she insists to us. “Recycle, reuse, and refuse is my motto.” “I first went to the plains’ Indian people because of their history with buffalo, to get resolutions to support us in stopping oil and gas in ANWR,” she tells us. “The National Congress of American Indians has supported the protection of ANWR with a standing resolution. But other native peoples surrounding the refuge, the Koi Yukon, the Cree’s, and the people of Kaktovik Village in the Beaufort Sea, have supported drilling and development.”
14:12 Speaker 02 Coastal Plain people are in tougher conditions, she says. Still, we all breathe the same air. We need to help one another. The Republican Congress and Trump administration is really hard, but if we keep working on our goal for seven generations, we'll finally win. We can educate the world in a good way, and they'll get it.
14:37 Speaker 02 June 16, 2019. It's a stunning morning at our first camp on the Hula Hula. We arrived here by bush plane around noon yesterday, after what well may be the grandest plane ride of my life. From Arctic Village north, through the serrated peaks and defiles of the Brooks Range, flying through valleys with knife-edge peaks looming far above us on a perfect blue-sky day. No wonder Olas and Marty Mury, Sigurd Olsen, and William O. Douglas were so bewitched by this country. As for me, it's entirely revising my conception of wild America.
15:20 Speaker 02 The view of our river, the Hula Hula, from the air, a silver thread bisecting an immense mountain valley carpeted in tundra, was as alluring a scene as I've ever witnessed. Looking down on it, the thought repeatedly formed in my mind, "Holy shit, we get to travel down that, through this?" A cold wind blowing from the north off Arctic sea ice last night belied the bright, welcoming sunshine of our arrival in the afternoon. But today is both sunny and quiet. Basically, it's a perfect day for a river trip into the wild unknown. This is our first day of travel on the river, so we got the bear talk from our guides last night,
16:02 Speaker 02 with accounts of blonde grizzlies that know nothing of humans, and especially of polar bears that see you and come knocking on the door. Polar bears mean business, and these days, they come inland. We're just a couple of days away from where other Anwar travelers have had exciting experiences with polar bears. From this put-in camp near the bush plane landing strip, which is little more than a level couple of hundred yards of river cobbles cleared of willows, we've so far seen a red fox trotting along the opposite cut bank from us, and eight, nine dull sheep on the green tundra slopes of the surrounding mountains. From our guides, Arizona Krista Sadler,
16:46 Speaker 02 with whom I've rafted the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, and Kevin Thirsty McDermott, a burly and likable fifty-something west slope Coloradan, we're hearing accounts of caribou herds, herds in the thousands, the many thousands, downriver. Later on June 16th, in evening camp, the river flow commenced today, not just with dull sheep, but also a wolf pack on the slopes above camp as we were preparing to set off. The sheath had been in bunches of ten to fifteen. One of the flocks was above us as we launched our rafts, another was near us at noon. A group of backpackers who were also dropped off yesterday,
17:30 Speaker 02 and camp nearby, though, came to our tents before we shoved off this morning with a one-word announcement: "Wolf." It pulled up everyone in camp. I got about ten seconds of glass time of a black wolf, maybe half a mile away through my binoculars, then nothing. But following a lapse of twenty minutes, again came the cry, "Wolf", and this time we picked up four. This pack included a black wolf that traveled second in line behind a lead brown animal. A silver-gray wolf, hard to pick out against the gray talus slopes, moved in and out of the line, occupying various positions, but sometimes going its own way.
18:15 Speaker 02 Another brown wolf trotted at the rear, usually some distance behind. The group appeared to be moving, stalking would not accurately express their actions, closer and closer to a grazing flock of white dull sheep, but always a hundred yards or so below them, prompting the sheep to move up mountain, always maintaining the same distance from the wolves.
18:40 Speaker 02 This pack howled several times, a faint peeling of canine expressiveness. While it was not my situation, having lived in Montana during and after wolf recovery there, several of our group had never in their lives seen wolves nor heard real wolves howl in the wild. Sadly, that's the case for most modern Americans on a continent where wolves were once the commonest of keystone predators, present here for more than five million years. That's how anomalous the last hundred years of wolf absence has been. This is a paddle trip down the Hula Hula.
19:22 Speaker 02 We're traveling the country in two rafts, a guide manning the rudders of each, with four of us providing the paddle power for each raft. The river is shallow, rarely deeper than three feet, and fast with snowmelt, with numerous braided channels. Looking down at the cobbles in its bed as we slip through its waters, the sight is of a shimmering transparency. But seen from the banks, the Hula Hula's waters take on a mesmerizing green turquoise hue. From water's edge to the crest of the Brooks Range peaks surrounding us, we're above Timberline. The country that rolls up the slopes is pure tundra.
20:04 Speaker 02 This evening, we're in a fine camp among low willows along the west bank. Caribou tracks in the mud are in some profusion only feet from Sarah's and my tent, but we've not actually seen a caribou, at least not yet. I should add that evening is pretty much an artificial construction here above the Arctic Circle a week from summer solstice. The sun circumnavigates our sky at a kind of inclined angle, highest at noon when the sun is due south, lowest at midnight when it's due north, but it never sets. So this is a trip that's actually taking place over a nearly 300-hour-long single
20:49 Speaker 02 day. At least we can tell whether it's morning or afternoon by which side of this mountain valley the sun is in. Mornings, it skims the peaks on the east side of the valley; afternoons, it dodges in and out of the mountains that confine the Hula Hula to our west.
21:07 Speaker 02 June 17, 2019. We're about to leave this caribou camp, which we've named such because as we slept, caribou herds began to migrate past us. It didn't take long to get among the caribou. And just now, a single black wolf is on the slope above the path the herds have been taking. There was considerable rain in the night and this morning clouds top all the mountains around us. The days so far have been in the 70s, but without the sun, it's cold enough to put on our Heely Hansen wet suits today, over four or five layers of smart wool and our everyday footwear, mid-calf rubber boots.
21:50 Speaker 02 Thirsty tells us this morning that the wolves den in these mountains, which is why the caribou migrate out to the coastal plain to drop their calves. Wolf dens are commonly on high overlooks so the wolves can spot caribou below. He says he's seen a pack stampede a herd over a cut bank in a move very similar to a bison jump. He also told us that in summer, musk ox descend to the edges of the rivers to sleep and cool off in the shade of the big chunks of permafrost we see everywhere, slewing off the cut banks in the summer warmth. Today is a cold gray day with a north wind blowing steadily up the river and in our faces.
22:35 Speaker 02 This feels like Alaska in the Brooks Range, up near the Continental Divide. Nothing for it but to paddle and look forward to camp and warm sleeping bags.
22:48 Speaker 00 OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.
23:17 Speaker 01 You guys have heard me talk all about Montana Knife Company for a few years now on the podcast. Hands down, these are my absolute favorite hunting knives. Every blade they make is a high-performance durable tool that you can rely on whether you're butchering, hunting, working on the farm, out in the field, doing chores, whatever. And I've got a massive update for you. People have been asking for this forever. MKC finally did it. I've been asking it forever. The wait is over. They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It's going to be dropping very soon. I'm telling you right now, these things are going to sell out fast. If you aren't ready the moment they go live, you're probably going to miss out. So here's what you need to do. Get over to MKC.com right now. Make
24:01 Speaker 01 sure you sign up for their email and text message notifications so you get the alert the exact second the knife drops. Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. I can't wait to check out one of these folders.
24:20 Speaker 03 With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans. Develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule. So you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at ChatGPT.com.
24:49 Speaker 02 June the 18th. It's after 7:00 PM of an absolutely gorgeous day in the foothills of the Brooks Range, and we're just down from seven hours of hiking up to a ridgeline high above the green valley of the Hula Hula. Since we've been making good time, this was a layover day, and we got to watch caribou herds heading north through the valley during much of the morning. We made this camp late yesterday after many miles descending the river and are now in sight of the final canyon and the only cataract rapids on the Hula Hula, which will run tomorrow. A successful run through those rapids will take us out of the mountains and onto the coastal plain.
25:36 Speaker 02 Yesterday was a big descent of many hours of paddling under overcast skies and a cold wind. Aaron, our only Californian, and at 25, the youngest member of our party, got tossed from our raft in a Boulder Garden rapid late in the day. It required nearly two hours after that mishap to find a suitable camp for the evening, but Aaron was an absolute trooper about staying wet for so long. Yesterday was also a two-wolf day. Both wolves black and solitary. The second, a strapping big animal that ran effortlessly across the hummocky tundra
26:17 Speaker 02 before spotting us and squaring up three to four times to look directly at us from only a couple of hundred yards away. We've not seen a bear yet, but watching caribou herds cross this open country produces an emotion that's difficult to put into words. Timeless keeps coming to mind, but you shudder a little bit at that one. As gray and cold as yesterday was, today has been a sunny, blank, blue-sky delight. The clouds still wrapped the peaks as we rose and had coffee, but by the time breakfast was done, the mist had lifted and arctic sunlight flooded the mountains. June 20th.
27:00 Speaker 02 It's 10:00 in the evening in the Arctic wilderness, and Sarah and I are celebrating our fifth anniversary with tequila and uncontrolled substances, and now Earl Grey tea, too hot to drink almost. The past two days have unspooled in a country of such unblemished natural qualities that I'm realizing I've lived a kind of emasculated existence for much of my life. Primeval America is what this is. We've so far seen one native hunting camp, three or four bush planes arcing overhead, and the occasional jet flying from JFK to Tokyo.
27:44 Speaker 02 Otherwise, we're traveling through the world of our hominid origins, or at least one hell of an approximation of it. Today's our third straight day of gorgeous sunshine, which means we ran the canyon and its rapids in beautiful, bright light yesterday. The rapids, including the Hula Hoop Rapid, we slipped through in good morning high water. Other than sticking our raft on a boulder, we had no incidents, and took a long lunch on a sunny, flowery hilltop, where the Brooks Range opened suddenly into low, green foothills speckled with caribou antler sheds. That setting, once we were underway after lunch,
28:28 Speaker 02 was the scene of our most exciting wildlife experience yet. I was in the front of our lead raft, so got the first glimpse of a bulky, furred form rolling along up the right bank of the river. It was a familiar hump shape, a grizzly, which with a couple of bounds was out of sight. As we paddled a river bend towards where he had disappeared, the sound of our voices must have bounced off the low-cut bank where the bear had headed. The result was that our raft was in the direct line of fire when the grizzly came galloping through the willows to water's edge, straight for us. It looked for all the world like a charge,
29:11 Speaker 02 except I could tell the bear had not really seen us. Just as bear paws hit the river's edge, Thirsty muttered something about not wanting to share a river with a bear, and loosed a piercing whistle. The small, black eyes in the grizzly's lovely, symmetrical face suddenly locked onto us. There was a split second "what the fuck" on his face. Then a studied, almost slow turn to his right, like a nonchalant "damn it, I think I may have left the burner on back home." Then like a quarter horse under quirk, he was bounding through the willows at a skate velocity, directly away from us.
29:54 Speaker 02 It was a supreme sensory moment. We had been privileged to see a gorgeous grizzly bear at a distance of maybe 35 feet.
30:05 Speaker 02 We camped yesterday, and still are today, at a spot below Kengat Hill, which we climbed today through increasingly larger caribou herds, all steadily pulled northward as if by some throbbing magnet. From here you could see the next river valley to the west, the valley of the Saddle Roach at Mountains, and behind us the Hula Hula's exit through its canyon out of the Brooks Range. This afternoon, another grizzly grazed past our camp barely 100 yards away. Wolf tracks are on the beach behind me as I scribble this. June 21st.
30:48 Speaker 02 Summer solstice in the High Arctic. We're now in sight of the Arctic Ocean from a camp where the Hula Hula's banks have begun to ice up, far out on the coastal plain of Anwar, far into the famous 1002, the part of the refuge that's long been a target of Drill Baby Drill politicians. And to be fair, of some of the local natives and Alaskans who see money as an ultimate value. Looking across this vast tundra, a plain that's bursting with the life of primeval America, the mental picture of Drill Baby Drill here is akin to imagining the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone Park,
31:33 Speaker 02 festooned with oil derricks, tank batteries, pumping units, and litter-lined two-tracks. Try to hold that image in your mind. See if it doesn't fly to escape screaming. We made big miles, last foothills to pass the ice today. We're way ahead of schedule, thanks to great weather that's warm enough to keep snowmelt surging in the river. And glory be, despite temperatures in the 60s and 70s, the mosquito hatch has not yet developed. Two big moments today. The first was pulling over for lunch and mounting the cut bank to find the biggest
32:14 Speaker 02 single caribou herd yet on the opposite bank, something around 600 of them. We are also in musk ox and polar bear country now, although we've seen neither. There's something very powerful, though, about watching big herds of ungulates in open country. If our genes preserve memories, this has to be a visual trigger to that. This is the kind of world we human beings evolved in and where we blinked into consciousness, then lived surrounded by big animals and big herds for 40,000 generations of our existence. No wonder it's so moving on such a grandly sensuous level.
32:58 Speaker 02 The other wow piece of the day was rafting through the ice, a section of the river where ice as thick as 10 feet makes up at least one bank for a mile or more. We stopped and goofed around on blue dripping ice packs for half an hour in sunny t-shirt temperatures. June 22. Only three days of river and ocean travel are left to take us to the island airstrip that will be our takeout, and much of that will involve portaging to an adjacent river to get a straight shot at the island that we'll then wade to a mile or so out across the Beaufort Sea.
33:43 Speaker 02 Weather continues near perfect, 61 degrees on the high tundra just now. Several of us stayed up till midnight last night to watch the sun circle the horizon and to dance its progress on summer solstice. Caribou herds are now in sight constantly, with a vast herd migrating past camp this morning, an entirely Africa kind of scene. The Brooks Range where we started this journey is still in view, although a little smoke shrouded for the past three days. We've now been eight days without seeing any humans except ourselves.
34:24 Speaker 02 June 23rd. Within sight of the ocean. This morning, we finally made it to the caribou's final destination, their calving grounds. And now, there are little ones scampering wildly and joyously across the tundra and nearby snowbanks. Caribou herds presently occupy 90 degrees of our views south of the river. June 24th. This afternoon, we're in a camp amongst sand dunes a mile from the ocean, having left the hula hula after portaging our rafts and gear across about a quarter mile of tundra to this camp.
35:05 Speaker 02 It was a day of paddling a last stretch of a widely braided, cobble-filled hula hula with caribou perpetually in sight. On a midnight hike last night, some of us saw what we estimated was 10,000 caribou from one overlook. Now, we'll do two nights here while we portage all our gear and rafts over to the Opilic River just east of us for a straight shot at the island and its bush plane landing strip. We saw our third grizzly yesterday evening, a bear that was probably three quarters of a mile away, but in the open plain was clearly visible to the naked eye as a dark lump nosing
35:50 Speaker 02 through the tundra. Through our glasses, this bear was a glossy blond behemoth. Turning sideways in the low sun, its fur rolled and glistened with shades of chestnut and a silvery yellow. It was hard to stop watching. With a weather front hitting, it's now down to 45 degrees inside the tent, which is rattling in the wind like laundry on a clothesline.
36:19 Speaker 02 June 25, 2019. Tonight, our final camp is situated on the shore of the Beaufort Sea. Walls and chunks of white ice inhabited by harbor seals are in view. It's a thing you never think you'll see. The day was another form of adventurous ordeal. We'd been captured in the tents for 24 hours while a freeze held up water from flowing down the oak pillock. Its final two miles became a wide mud maze that required portaging our raft while a barefoot Krista dragged the other raft through the mud with a rope line.
37:02 Speaker 02 It was a cold, hard-working day, but tomorrow we exit the river and wade across to the island, a long strip of sand and ice out in front of us. We saw no caribou today, but there were long-tailed jaegers and huge and noisy trumpeter swans constantly overhead. This was the final camp of our 12-day passage through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and on this, our last night, our guide Thirsty stood and made an unexpected, impassioned speech. Thirsty's granddad was a hard rock miner in Colorado. He's married to Darla, his high school sweetheart.
37:46 Speaker 02 His education ended with high school, but simply and directly, he begged us to do whatever was in our powers to save this place from despoilation. "Long before we arrived on the scene, the ages had been at work on it," he said. "Nothing we could do here would improve it." A present-day coda.
38:13 Speaker 02 In October 2025, as part of his American Energy Dominance Agenda, President Trump proclaimed that he would reinstate seven oil leases owned by the state of Alaska in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and was now taking bids for future drilling contracts in the refuge's coastal plain. Because of fear of public backlash, oil companies have so far been uneasy about bidding on leases in Anwar. But Trump's Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum has proclaimed that with this announcement, Alaska is open for business.
38:58 Speaker 02 Petroleum geologists estimated that total reserves beneath Anwar might satisfy America's thirst for oil for perhaps one and a half to two years.
39:11 Speaker 04 OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.
39:42 Speaker 01 You guys have heard me talk all about Montana Knife Company for a few years now on the podcast. Hands down, these are my absolute favorite hunting knives. Every blade they make is a high-performance, durable tool that you can rely on, whether you're butchering, hunting, working on the farm, out in the field, doing chores, whatever. And I've got a massive update for you. People have been asking for this forever. MKC finally did it. I've been asking it forever. The wait is over. They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It's going to be dropping very soon. I'm telling you right now, these things are going to sell out fast. If you aren't ready the moment they go live, you're probably going to miss out. So here's what you need.
40:22 Speaker 01 To do, get over to MKC.com right now. Make sure you sign up for their email and text message notifications. So you get the alert, the exact second the knife drops. Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. I can't wait to check out one of these folders.
40:45 Speaker 03 With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans. Develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule. So you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at ChatGPT.com.
41:15 Speaker 05 So Dan, in this script, you're you're tracking this float trip through essentially the North Slope, Anwar.
41:27 Speaker 05 And it brought to my question that I wanted to ask you sort of about your scholarship more generally. You made your, you really made your name with the Buffalo article in the Journal of American History. And I was thinking about it. That's probably one of the few pieces I've read from you where you don't have, you don't mix your historical analysis with some story from your own life about being on the landscape yourself. Yeah. And clearly, it's, it's, that shapes your thinking as a historian. So I wonder if you can talk for a little bit about the relationship between your research and writing and your
42:11 Speaker 05 adventures, for lack of a better term, across the West.
42:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, I think one of the reasons that I've done a good bit of writing where I appear usually fairly briefly, but at least some, as a character in some of these stories, probably harkens back to the fact that I got my start as a magazine writer. And I did that, I wrote for magazines for six or seven years before I ever got a PhD and ended up getting professorships and began writing for academic journals like the Journal
42:59 Speaker 02 of American History or writing books for university presses. And so, I mean, one of the things that I think probably has made a podcast like this and scripts like this possible is the fact that when I retired from the University of Montana 10 years ago, I kind of reverted back to that sort of writing and the books I've written since, American Serengeti, Coyote America, Wild New World, things like that, have all been sort of moving more back to the sort of writing that I did before I became an academic. I mean, I think with something like that Buffalo piece in the Journal of American History,
43:43 Speaker 02 you know, I mean, historians don't do that kind of writing very much. They tend to do more the social science kind of, the author stands back as a disinterested observer.
43:59 Speaker 05 Yeah, you're not a, you don't really take a clinical approach to your subject.
44:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. So, it's that kind of, so, I mean, I think probably what I've done is for a venue like that and for the sort of audience that I knew that the Journal of American History had, you know, I wrote a piece that I was not involved in at all, other than as a sort of stand back and let the evidence show what this story was. But I think it's probably for a different kind of audience, for a more general audience, it's maybe useful to do this kind of writing where the author at least appears some because it provides kind of eyes and feet for the reader to be able to see the
44:46 Speaker 02 world. I mean, I try not to do this too much, but I generally try to get at least a story or two into any given piece where I'm actually trying to translate the points I want to make into being on the ground and seeing this play out in the world.
45:05 Speaker 05 Yeah, but it's clear that that that sort of deep experiential process shapes how you think about these places.
45:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, it does. I mean, and so that still goes into whether I tell a story of my own presence, walking through Badlands, or floating down the Hula Hula River through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, whether I tell that story through my own eyes or not, there's no question because I'm sort of one of these people who has always liked to be out on the ground and out in the world, not just in a library. Those experiences very definitely have played a role in what I've written.
45:50 Speaker 05 One of the key threads throughout this piece is sort of this looming threat of energy extraction on the North Slope. And I think one of the things that you point out several times is that it's not simply a story of outside interests coming in and extracting oil and gas, but there are people, there's disagreement among native people. And you highlight that a couple of times, that it's not just native people are the guardians of of this place and outside interests are trying to, you know,
46:32 Speaker 05 Take advantage essentially of their resources. But there's disagreements between different communities over how this landscape should be managed, which I think highlights a thread we see again and again in in Western history, that native people aren't some monolithic block.
46:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
46:48 Speaker 05 And that's true, you know, as true as it was 200, 300 years ago, as it is today when we're talking about Anwar.
46:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, and that's just the reality of the world we live in. I mean, some people have a take on how the world should be used, where the idea is we need to exploit it and help our own communities raise their standard of living, participate more in the sort of global economic world. And there are plenty of native people around Anwar who who expressed that particular sentiment. I mean, when, as I describe in the the account of this,
47:39 Speaker 02 when we arrived at Arctic Village, which was the spot where we were taking our bush planes into the headwaters of the Hula Hula in the Brooks Range, one of the people who we had already decided we wanted to hear from was Sarah James, this woman who is a spokesperson for the Gwich'an people, the people of the caribou, who have for thousands of years hunted caribou and sort of feel about themselves. And I think I feel about them this way, too. They're the modern analogs of the buffalo people of the 19th century. And so we wanted to hear what she had to say. And she met us on the tarmac when we flew into Arctic Village
48:22 Speaker 02 and talked to us for about half an hour or so about the concerns that she had. But she was also quick to point out that this was not the universal position on the part of native people in this part of the world. And and it's not. And so that's something I think, as you're, as you pointed out, Randall, and you're exactly right about this, this is true in the past as well. And you can't think of native people as just sort of everyone uniformly has this particular kind of idea about about how things should play out. So Arctic, the National
49:03 Speaker 02 Arctic, I mean, the ANWR is kind of a perfect modern day example of something that's been going on in the West for a long time.
49:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, you you point out several times that this is sort of primordial, it's a primordial landscape, and it feels like sort of the most ancient landscape that you've been on in North America. And it occurs to me that this is the first, you know, it's one of those places where if I'm lucky, I'll get to see that place as an American. But this is the first America that anyone saw, really.
49:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
49:42 Speaker 05 So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how Alaska has fits into the environmental story, the environmental history of the United States. We sort of see it at the beginning of our narrative of the West when we talk about peopling this continent. And then it sort of seems like it bubbles up again with Russian colonization and extraction. And then we kind of lose it until Jimmy Carter and the lands bill, right?
50:13 Speaker 02 Yeah.
50:14 Speaker 05 Can you tell me a little bit about how you think of Alaska as part of the Western story?
50:19 Speaker 02 Well, there's no question that Alaska is central to to the Western story, because as you point out, this is the first part of the world in North America that humans got to. So it's the first place on the continent that human eyes are going to see. And because of its location, as far north as it is, it's ended up kind of doing a disappearing act from time to time. And I think one of the reasons I wanted to tell this particular story is I wanted to remind people interested in the West.
51:03 Speaker 02 That Alaska still probably preserves more of the frontier, old west character than any other part of America. I mean, Montana makes a good stab at it. Wyoming makes a stab at it. There are some other parts of the Lower Forty-Eight, to be sure, that begin to look something like what you imagine the frontier did. But Alaska, there's no question, I mean, the last frontier is, it's Alaska. And it's the place that I think, in the mind of Alaskans, they, they believe this. And they think of the place that way. But with something like, like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,
51:46 Speaker 02 I mean, you really do have an opportunity if you, I mean, and to be sure, this is a rare thing to get to do. Not many Americans are going to get to go to the, to Anwar and see this kind of world. I mean, we floated for 12 days down the Hula Hula River. We never saw another party. We saw one native hunting camp just as we emerged out of the Brooks Range. But other than a group of backpackers who flew in the same time we did and headed off in a different direction, we never saw anybody else. And that was the first day we were there. So it's a thing that is not an easy adventure to have.
52:30 Speaker 02 But on the other hand, when you do it, you can't help but come away with this kind of feeling that you've been privileged to see something of original America. That this is what the continent looked like. And that, I think, when you see it, instills in you a kind of a horror that something like what happened to the Southern High Plains might happen to this particular part of the West. I mean, Anwar is four times the size of Yellowstone National Park.
53:09 Speaker 02 It's almost 20 million acres. It is a gigantic landscape. And you just, just don't have the opportunity to be in places like that in the modern age uh very often. Yeah, I mean, it was the, it was the wildest place I've ever been. And it's probably an experience in my life that uh is right up there in the top one or two or three of the things that I've ever gotten to do was to see that particular, that particular part of America.
53:45 Speaker 05 In this piece, you, you mentioned the Muries and their work in Alaska. And I feel like the Muries are sort of overlooked as a first family of American conservation. I wonder if you can give the, the audience a little bit more context around, you know, Olas and Adolf and um trying to remember the, his, his wife's name.
54:10 Speaker 02 Marty.
54:11 Speaker 05 Marty, yeah.
54:11 Speaker 02 Marty Mury.
54:12 Speaker 05 Marty Mury.
54:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, uh so Olas and Adolf were, were the brothers.
54:17 Speaker 05 Mm-hmm.
54:18 Speaker 02 Uh both trained as, as biologists. Uh and I mean, I've talked about them uh in some of the uh recent episodes, particularly the, the one on, on wolves, uh a couple of episodes back, where these two guys in the 1930s were, I mean, one of them was working for the Park Service, Adolf, and Olas Mury was working for the Bureau of Biological Survey. And they both got sent to do the first scientific studies anyone had done about coyotes and then in Adolf's case, about wolves. And so Adolf is the first of the two brothers to get to visit Alaska.
55:02 Speaker 02 He goes to Mount McKinley National Park uh in 1939 and spends about three years there studying wolves and of course writes that great book, The Wolves of Mount McKinley. And so these two guys, I mean, they really were, along with Aldo Leopold, I think, the premier ecologists and conservation-minded ecologists of the middle of the 20th century. Both of them ended up leaving the services that they worked for and primarily worked for the Wilderness Society for most of their lives. And Olas and Marty, of course, became figures who were, I mean, they're all over the West. They're in Jackson Hole.
55:47 Speaker 05 Right.
55:47 Speaker 02 They're in Yellowstone. They're, they obviously play a huge role in getting this particular place set aside, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is designated by the Eisenhower administration. And they also played a role in getting much of it, about 40% of it, designated as wilderness. I mean, they, Olas Muri is the primary mover behind the Charles Russell Wildlife Refuge in Montana on the Missouri River. So, yeah, these are people, and I keep looking for somebody to write, you know, a major sort of book, kind of like Doug Brinkley did about Teddy Roosevelt a few years ago, Wilderness Warrior. Someone needs to do a book about the Muries and the role they've played in the American West.
56:32 Speaker 05 Yeah, I feel the same way. I feel like whenever I read about wildlife and wild places in the 20th century, their names are gonna mix in somehow. And the Craighead Brothers as well.
56:43 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
56:44 Speaker 05 They're the sort of undersung heroes of 20th century conservation that, that are behind the scenes oftentimes, that don't maybe get their time in the, in the spotlight.
56:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, and they should.
56:57 Speaker 05 Yep. Well, Dan, appreciate it.
56:59 Speaker 02 Thank you, Randall.
57:00 Speaker 05 Thank you.
57:00 Speaker 02 Great fun.
57:19 Speaker 01 You ever get that feeling, the walls closing in, the concrete jungle suffocating you? You crave some wide open spaces, the chance to connect with nature, maybe in a spot all your own. Well, head over to land.com. They've got ranches, forests, mountains, streams, you name it. Search by acreage, you can search by location, you can search by the kind of hunting and fishing you're dreaming of. Land.com, it is where the adventure begins.
57:47 Speaker 06 Whether you're hiking in before first light, or crawling back into camp after a long day of field, a hot meal, or a strong cup of coffee can make the difference. The Jetboil Flash boils water in minutes and packs down small, making it an easy addition to your hunting kit. A lot of times on a hard hunt, I'll take a Jetboil with me, even if I'm not staying overnight, just because I want to have a midday coffee break, or have a midday hot meal when I bring some dehydrated food. Fast, compact, efficient. Jetboil helps you stay fueled for whatever the day brings. Use code Grease at jetboil.com for 15% off your order. Some exclusions apply.
58:28 Speaker 01 When you're in the backcountry, don't forget your own backcountry. Keep it pristine and confidently clean by bringing along Wet Extra Large Dude Wipes. Just like your truck gets muddy out in the wild soaking your butt, you'd never clean your vehicle with dry paper towels, so why would you clean your butt with dry toilet paper? Wetter cleans better. So ditch the itch and switch from TP to Wet Extra Large Dude Wipes. Dude Wipes, it is the best clean pants down. They're available at Amazon, that's where I usually order mine from, but you can get them at Walmart nationwide. Fantastic product. Proud to be doing ads for these boys at Dude Wipes.
Previous Ep. 25: Thinking About Big History in One Western Place | The American West Next Ep. 27: Messages From the Past - The Rock Art of the American West | The American West Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated