It’s 3 am on July 10th and we have just landed our packrafts on the shore of the Arctic Ocean. In this land of 24-hour light, our internal body clocks seem to be following the rhythm of another planet. With no obvious variation in the angle of the sun, just a steady circling of the horizon, each day stretches longer than the last. We lose ourselves in the steady motion of footfall on sand or are hypnotized by the shape-shifting horizon. We feel pushed to keep moving, long past our conventional dinnertime and bedtime, dancing to the whims of the north.
We started our day sixteen hours ago, though it feels like an entire week has passed. Today marked the end of a hellish slog through the Mackenzie Delta. We paddled through this brush-covered maze of sloughs and channels for nearly two weeks, fighting a headwind, mosquitoes, and our own waning sanity. In a giant arctic wetland in mid-July, we quickly learned that mosquitoes rule. We slept, ate, and relieved ourselves at their mercy. They clouded our vision, peppered our food, and laid in wait at the bottom of our sleeping bags until we fell asleep. They found their way down our shirts and up our pants, bit through our shoes, and drowned out the sounds of birds and running water with their steady whine. To savor the moments of relief in the tent, we didn’t bother cooking our breakfast and ate cold, partially rehydrated oatmeal and choked down floating granules of instant coffee. Along the way, beaten down by the misery, we abandoned any pretense of willpower. We were driven by desperation, pure and simple.
This wasn’t what we had in mind when we set out in March 2012 to travel nearly 4000 miles by human power. We knew that our schedule would be ambitious—in order to make it in six months from Puget Sound to Northwestern Alaska by rowboat, ski, packraft, and foot, all without roads or trails, we needed to average more than 25 miles a day. But to think that, after rowing the length of the Inside Passage, crossing several mountain ranges, and enduring months of much more physically demanding activities, a bunch of buzzing insects and sticky mud could drive us to the lowest point of our journey. We knew that the Mackenzie Delta would be trouble. But we didn’t see any way around it. As part of our larger goal, we needed to get from the northern Yukon Territory to the Arctic Ocean. The massive Mackenzie River offered the most logical, if not the most pleasant, passage. We’d learned by now that to accomplish our goal sometimes meant sucking it up and enduring. This was one of those times. It just went on a lot longer than we’d hoped.
But eventually the bushes of the delta gave way to grass flats and, anxious to stretch our legs, we hopscotched along the inviting strips of land—walking when we could, then jumping into our rafts to cross the dozens of remaining ponds and sloughs. We practiced this in-and-out routine for hours, passing a large flock of molting, flightless White-fronted Geese whose movements resembled our own. Paddle, waddle, paddle, waddle, and repeat.