North to Alaska E-BOOK

It all started down in Canada on the Alaska Highway. I stood at the side of the road and waited for a lift north. It was just outside Fort Nelson in British Columbia (BC), the most westerly of Canada's provinces and the most mountainous. I had just come out from Fort Nelson, one of these typical small Canadian towns with some scattered low wooden houses and a wide main street along which all the shops are lined up. There I had bought a new, wonderfully soft felt lining for my boots and some groceries; and then I had been at the post office to transfer 600 C$ back to Denmark.

From Fort Nelson Lee I got a lift from a driver taking dynamite out to a mine 25 km out of town. At one stage we passed a sharp curve on the road and the driver told me: "I milk-truck just turned over here the other day. The milk froze solid instantly so we all had free milk to last us for weeks". 

I had been dropped off here, where a small dirt road turned off down towards the mine away from the Alaska Highway.

It was 24 February. One of these calm, clear days so characteristic of the continental North American wintertime. The sun was shining but it was cold anyway, probably somewhere between 20 and 25 minus degrees Celsius. Beyond the highway a calm and quiet land­scape rose with low mountains and some thin forest cover of birch and spruce trees. All over lay a blanket of snow 1-1 1/2 meters deep. Even on the trees and the bushes the snow piled up inches high, the wind hardly ever blew in these parts.

I wasn't cold, I was dressed for the occasion. And the weather was so pleasant, the land so grand and still, I was actually in fine spirits. I had started out the day before from a small town, Hythe down in Alberta Province. I had worked there on a farm through the winter, but now that spring was getting nearer I wanted to move on - north to Alaska, where I had always wanted to go. So I quit my job on the farm and started hitchhiking north. On the first day I made it out of Alberta to Dawson Creek in British Columbia and from there another few hundred kilometers up though BC. I spent the night in the forests just before Fort Nelson. And now I stood here north-west of the small town and it was only just around 10 am.

There wasn't much traffic on this road. A solitary car drove by in the opposite direction. I greeted the people in the car and they waved back at me. But then another 15-20 minutes passed, I just strolled up and down the road a bit, kicking at the little lumps of ice and looking up the road for the next car to come. It finally turned around the bend and approached: a pickup truck. The truck slowed down as it got nearer, I saw right away that it had US license plates, it was registered in California. So this was most likely an American passing through Canada on his way straight to Alaska.

The pick-up stopped and a man leaned over and rolled down the window. "Is it hard getting a lift here?" he asked. "Yes", I answered, taking off my fur hat, "kind of, there is not very much traffic." "No," the driver wondered a bit about this, "because as you can see, I am a little bit strapped for space. Where are you heading?" "I am on my way to Fairbanks, Alaska". "Well, so am I", replied the man. "I think maybe I can make some room here on the front seat, then you can come along as far as you want to."

A beer fell out of the truck and broke on the road when the driver opened the door. He carefully picked up all the pieces of the bottle and through them far into the woods. 

There really was a shortage of space in the truck. But we got some of the stuff out of the cabin and carried it around to the back. The man lifted the tarpaulin covering the bed of the truck, it was quite a load this guy brought with him to Alaska. The truck was full of boxes of all sorts, an engine was sitting in the middle of it all and at the back was a refrigerator. "Yeah, I am hauling a fridge with me to Alaska, as you can see", said the man with a little smile, "as if the damned place wasn't cold enough already."

We managed to get the stuff from the front seat squeezed down between the boxes, and also my luggage which consisted of a backpack and a pair of snowshoes. 

I felt a bit squashed on the front seat between all the items still left, but I re-arranged everything so that I ended up sitting quite well. I had to wiggle off my big parka coat and kicked off my felt-lined boots. There was nothing wrong with this van's heating system. But then I was finally real comfortable.

"Do you live in Fairbanks?" I asked the driver. "Yes." "And have you been down in California on your winter vacation?" The man turned and smiled: "Right." 

Then I didn't say anything more. The man didn't either; he just sat there and drove the pickup, smiling once in a while to himself. Every time a vehicle would pass us in the opposite direction, he would lift his fingers from the steering wheel as a greeting, although the other vehicle rarely waved back.  

I found this silence rather nice. For that is usually the worst thing about riding thumb, that every time you get into a new vehicle you inevitably have to answer a range of standard ques­tions. Starting with 'where are you from', 'how long have you been here', 'how long are you going to be here', and sometimes extending into 'what do you usually do', 'what do your parents do', 'how many brothers and sisters do you have' etc etc. But not this time, I just leaned back and enjoyed the ride.

The Alaska Highway is the road going from Dawson Creek, Canada up to the town of Delta Junction and on to Fairbanks in the interior of Alaska. A distance of 2,460 km. It was built in 1942-44, i.e. under the Second World War when it for a while appeared as if Alaska would turn out to be of military importance. Soldiers built it in 3 years and it is still the only cross country connection to the state of Alaska. The road is not very wide, but in no places are there difficulties getting past on-coming traffic. And the highway was engineered to run up through all the valleys so that although you have great mountain ranges nearby out in the landscape there is no question of actually driving across the massifs - no steep grades, no tunnels, no hairpin curves. The Alaska Highway is considerably easier to drive on than most Rocky Mountains roads for instance, so you maintain a decent cruising speed of 70-80 km/hr and make good time.

We drove through British Columbia and then into the Yukon Territory. Yukon is the name of the long river which starts in Canada, in fact very close to the Pacific Ocean - only on the eastern side of the coastal mountains, so that it ends up running through northern Canada and all of Alaska before it finally joins the sea at the Bering Strait. But Yukon is also the name of the north-westerly part of Canada, a huge and thinly populated territory - it covers an area about half of the state of California and had only 15,000 inhabitants when I was there; today there are about 36,000. Yukon's southerly border the Canadian authorities have for convenience sake and rather arbitrarily run along the 60th parallel. 

When dusk slowly started coming on, the driver pulled into a resting area - "Do you feel like stretching your legs?" We stopped at the service station, had the van filled up with gas and drove across to park. Then we went into the restaurant and had a T-bone steak.

"I wouldn't mind getting on up there", said the driver, "how would you like it if we drove all night? Then we can make it up to Fairbanks tomorrow sometimes, I think. That way we will also save money on a room." "Sure, that's all right," I said. As a matter of fact I would have liked to spend the night somewhere in Yukon. I was keen to drive during daylight and experience what the countryside was like all the way up the Alaska Highway. But the thought of making it north to Alaska tomorrow already was too tempting; besides I also found that this quiet man who was driving made pleasant company. So I said 'yes-thank you, I will come along' and shortly afterwards we were out on the road again. I had bought two 6-packs of beer that we shared, the driver liked to drive with one beer tucked down near the front door where it kept cool. By then it was getting real dark. 

"Where did you sleep last night?" the man asked. I said I camped in the woods just before Fort Nelson. As I got out then of the car giving me a ride after dark, the D.J. on the radio said that it was minus 24 degrees. I then walked into the woods a bit and found a place to put up my tent. I slept with some of my clothes on, it had been alright except the snow got a little hard to lie on after a while. And it was cold the next morning getting into my clothes which had frozen solid. The boots had not been warm enough but I had already fixed that problem. 

"Do you carry an ax in your pack?" the driver asked. When I said I didn’t, the man said that a small ax was very useful, next time I should cut off some spruce tree branches and drop them in the snow under the tent before I put it up, then the snow would not get compressed and I would sleep softly and warmly. That was a good piece of advice.

It was a clear night, and a faint light was shining from the starlit sky all over the snow-covered landscape we were driving through. The low moun­tains with thin tree cover just went on and on, stretching for hundreds of kilometers. Later in the night, a powerful aurora started spreading across the sky. It was a fantastic band of colored light that lay over the sky in an arc changing shape slowly. I had never seen northern lights before, not like this anyway. Down on the Canadian farm they had something for a few nights during the winter which they called aurora, but this was really something else. I couldn't get tired of just gazing out of the car window at this spectacle. "Yes, it's nice, isn't it", the man at the steering wheel was as calm and collected as always, but I could sense that he was as taken in by this as I was.

"Have you done this trip before", I asked. "Yes, this is the 8th time I drive from California to Alaska", the driver replied. "Every time I say to myself, this here is the last trip; it is too goddamn far to drive. Then next year I find myself out on the highway again anyway." "But it must be a wonderful journey up through the United States and the Rocky Mountains?" "Yes, it's OK." 

Later when dawn started breaking and some sunlight spread across the sky, you could really see how spectacularly grandiose and beautiful the landscape all around was. Up here north in Yukon, the terrain was more mountainous, some of the highest peaks in Canada are in this area. The trees appeared more dispersed, they seemed fewer, smaller and a bit further apart. But apparently the snow here was not quite so deep. We were getting closer to the border to Alaska.

I had been at the wheel for the past 6-7 hours and was getting tired of driving. According to its owner, the van was overloaded by 300 kg - that was before I got on - so it was pretty sluggish to drive. I and the truck’s owner were both getting hungry too, and so was the vehicle, the fuel gauge showed close to empty. It was time for a pit-stop. At that time we were driving past some vast, snow-covered lakes and when we got to a resting area right by one of the lakes I pulled in. Destruction Bay was the cheerful name of the place. 

We had a substantial breakfast meal at the small coffee shop, talking a bit to the only other customer there. He came from Alaska and was heading south. In a curve just before the restaurant, his car had started skidding and he ended up in the ditch. He had some bad bruises on his forehead and was pretty shaken. After a while he composed himself, he had a drink and started discussing with the manager how he should get his car back on the road again. 

I let the man who had picked me up have the steering wheel back after that and we continued towards the north-west. Next stop: The American border.

And suddenly we were there. The first 1,700 km from Fort Nelson had been covered. It was in the middle of the day just before noon, and up there on the hill crest were two low buildings with the Stars and Stripes hanging motionless from the flagpole nearby, the border crossing. We drove up there and got out. It took the longest for me to get inspected and allowed through. A customs officer came out and took a look at the van but he didn't really examine it, the driver just showed him his small driver's license; that was it. They had a chat about life in northern California; the officer seemed to be in no hurry, not too many people came this way, most people going to Alaska would either fly or sail up from San Francisco or Seattle.

But I was of course a foreigner; I had to go inside, and the polite officer meticulously searched through all my belongings. Then he checked my visa, he seemed to be an immigration offi­cer as well. He was a jovial and courteous guy, but I could not help feeling a bit tense anyway. The officer asked how long I wanted to stay in the United States and I didn't really know what to reply but said 'one month'. If I just made it across the border here, I thought I could always get my permit extended later, the officer wrote one month in my passport.

Then we greeted the friendly officer goodbye and drove across the border. It was 25 February 1974. I had come to Alaska. 

The landscape around the highway looked just like the landscape in Canada, naturally, but for me there was nevertheless some­thing special to it. This was Alaska, a land which for me had a romantic feel about it, it was a country of myths and of adven­tures and suddenly I was myself in the middle of it. I didn't know a single soul here, I didn't even know the name of the state capital. But I yearned so badly to get to know the land better, and now I was there and that in itself was a beginning of some sort. 

I had started to wonder about the guy I was driving with, what kind of a person he was. The customs officer at the border check­point who had seen his driver's license had called him Bill so that was apparently his name."What do you actually do?" I asked, "what is your occupation?" "I have a gold mine", Bill replied.

Well, I thought, then the guy is probably rich. Certainly gold is worth a lot of money, I knew that much. "Do you work in the mine yourself or do you have people bringing out the gold for you?" "Both", Bill answered. "I work myself but I always have a few men to help me during the summer." 

I started to inquire about how the work was done. But even though Bill had some Polaroid snapshots lying about in the glove compartment taken up in his gold mining camp, it was really hard to visualize and perceive what it was all about. Seemingly the operation was performed out in a stream; that much was clear.

"Where is the mine and the camp", I asked. "It is in the Brooks Range, about 200 miles north of Fairbanks as the birds fly." "Then you live in Fairbanks?" "No, I live up in the mountains. When we get to Fairbanks I will stay in town only until I get my supplies ready, then I will move up the whole load to the camp in a truck I am going to rent." 

I am interested in animals, so I wanted to know if Tom had ever seen any wild animals up there, bears for instance. "Yes, we usually see a bear or two around camp every year. It is mostly Grizzly Bears in that area but I have also seen Black Bears."

To me this all sounded incredible. Imagine living up in the Brooks Range - that wild, practically uninhabited mountain range which I only knew by name. Staying in a camp with bears and other wild animals as neighbors, digging for gold in a stream. That was how this strong, calm person which I had been driving with for so long was living. In a way it didn't surprise me, because this man didn't seem quite ordinary.

Later on I would get to know Bill better. No, he was no super­man; he was at times moody, unreasonable in his demands towards others - demands that everybody had to be as perfect as he was. But one thing was certain: Bill never flinched; he never lost control, not even in the craziest of situations. There was never a trace of excite­ment or uneasiness in his behavior. He met the problems with ice-cold calm and solved them without uttering a word. But all this was something I would not realize until later on. While we were on the Alaska Highway I was mostly interested in hearing Bill tell about the Brooks Range and the work in the gold mining camp.

Bill patiently answered all my questions. "But how about your­self", he finally changed the subject. "You are not from Canada, are you? You talk funny, are you from England or someplace like that?"

I replied that I was just that - from a place 'like that', I was from Denmark and had spent five months in Canada working on a farm through the winter. Now I had come to Alaska, partly to just see the country but also to try to get work. I wished to work in the oil business, I had no experience whatsoever; I was just attracted to the rough, outdoor life of an oilman or a construction worker. I had heard that work was about to start on an oil pipeline across Alaska, there had to be work to get on such a project. When I got to Fairbanks or another big city I wanted to apply for an American work permit. 

That was the whole purpose of my trip to North America, to see Alaska. The work in Canada had just been a step on the way north. I got the opportunity to fly into Montreal, Quebec Province from Copenhagen; that was last fall. Then I had hitchhiked the 4,200 km across Canada until I got to Alberta where I got the chance to work on this farm, feeding cattle and cleaning out pig pens all winter. I was there throughout the worst of the winter months and that was alright, it wouldn't have been much fun ending up in Alaska that time of year anyway. Not only were the temperatures dangerously low, it stayed dark for most of the day making traveling condi­tions really poor. But now of course it would soon be springtime, the days had already lengthened noticeably. If I didn't manage to find work, at least I would now have a chance to see Alaska, stay for a month or two and travel around a bit, then I would go on back home to Scandinavia once the money ran out. Such were my plans.

"Yes, work on the Pipeline I don't think that you are going to get", said Bill. "The oil companies doing the work bring in their own people, guys from down in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and the other oil-rich states. And when they need local personnel there are plenty of unemployed natives to pick from in Alaska. They certainly don't need foreigners."

That didn't sound very encouraging. But then everybody had told me something like that ever since I set out: That the whole idea was impossible, unachievable, absurd even. That I would never find work; that I would just freeze my ass off up there. I had listened to that kind off talk from the day I left home so I was used to that. I would manage anyway somehow, I always thought. But even then it was a bit disheartening to hear the same thing one more time, especially considering that Bill here really seemed to know conditions in Alaska. 

We wanted to celebrate the arrival to the United States and drove up to a bar near the highway where Tom has apparently been before. He bought a round of beer, I bought the next one and we sat at the bar chatting.

"It is possible I can put you to work here during the spring months", Tom said. "I need a bit of help up in the mine, how would you like that?" Of course there was nothing that I would rather do.

"The thing is, I should really have had my nephew with me up. But he landed in jail a few weeks before I had to leave. Something about some stolen car tires. So I had to go alone, and frankly I am in a bit of a jam because I need somebody to help me up in camp during the spring. You can come along when we move up there from Fairbanks. Your salary will be a share of the gold produc­tion. Then it's a deal? Let us toast to a rewarding collaboration. By the way, my name is Bill." "And I am Morten, cheers!" 

We walked into the room next door and had a meal in the restaurant. Bill was interested in hearing how things were in other countries, and I told him about Denmark and about Iceland where I had just spent two months before coming to North America. I had hiked across the mountains in the Interior and done some volunteer work during a clean-up operation after a volcano eruption on one of the satellite islands, Heimaey. Bill seemed to find this entertaining. He didn't say much himself but listened carefully to everything that was told to him. I in turn wanted to know more about the forthcoming journey up to the gold mining camp.

But it wasn't until a little later when we were back in the truck moving along the Alaska Highway that I started to really realize Bill’s plan. 250 km in a straight line north of Fairbanks was a small village, Bettles. And in Bettles lived one of Bill's old friends, Jerry. He had a large, surplus military truck with a flat bed, all-wheel drive and the whole works.

The oil companies had constructed a winter road from Fairbanks and up to the oil fields around Prudhoe Bay north of the Brooks Range on the North Slope. The road was nothing more than a track which they had scraped through the forest and the snow with caterpillars. It could only be used by four-wheel drive vehicles and only during the winter when the ground and the rivers were frozen over. The road was called either the Winter Trail or the Ice Road. Along this road, Jerry was to drive his truck from Bettles to Fairbanks. Then the three of us were going to load the flatbed truck with all Bill’s supplies. It was also necessary to make a quick round trip to Anchorage, the large city of Alaska down on the south coast; there was some more equipment that had to be picked up from there. And then finally we would have to drive from Fairbanks up north to the gold mining camp in the Brooks Range mountains. It was a lucky coincident that the Ice Road passed up right through just the valley where Bill’s mining camp was located. To cover the last kilometer or so from the Winter Trail and over to camp, the guys would have to make their own road and try to get the truck across. 

It all sounded great. I couldn't get over this luck of mine. Imagine landing right in the middle of such thrilling events on my first day in Alaska. I was going to see the Brooks Range, participate in exciting operations - and I would even get paid for all this on top. Could anyone be more fortunate? I felt ecstatic and exuberant inside with expectations of what was to come. 

The terrain was not so mountainous around here. And the forests were denser. The road conditions were better than it had been in Canada, the highway was blacktop now, not gravel, and it was wider, we passed more houses near the road. I had this notion that Alaska would be wilder than the Yukon Territory and the rest of Canada. But this looked quite neat. We spotted more animals than before the border. Once a Moose was walking near the road, and Bill stopped the truck in front of it so we really could get a good look at it. It was not shy; it finally turned around slowly and rather clumsily headed for the trees. Once it got going it trotted along well, this enormous creature, it suddenly appeared rather elegant in spite of its bulky body and the long, skinny legs. We saw Moose several times, once a cow with a grown calf; at that place the snow was deep, and the two of them had to force their way laboriously through the drifts near the road.  

We made it to Fairbanks that evening around 8 pm. The 2,200 km had been covered in 34 hours. When we got to the first houses at the edge of the settlement we could pick up the local radio station on the FM band. "They seem to play the exact same selec­tion of n***** music as when I left," Bill commented wryly. We drove a detour down main-street in the center of town, 2nd Avenue. "This is where it is all happening," Bill instructed. Fairbanks is a typi­cal American town with approximately 50,000 inhabitants. Most developments are one- or two-story buildings; there are a few taller residential areas in the outskirts of town.

Bill and I went to a small motel out along the airport road. We were tired after the long drive and did not feel like going in to check out the town. Bill called Bettles where Jerry lived. There was only one telephone there; it was in the control room at the village airstrip. Bill asked the girl up there on duty to walk over and tell Jerry that we had arrived and ask him to call the motel first thing next morning. Then they could discuss when Jerry should come on down with the flatbed truck. 

But already the next morning the trouble started. Around 10 am Jerry called, but I could tell from Bill's reaction that something was not right: "What! What are you saying? Are you in Fairbanks, and without the truck, what the hell is going on!" 

Yes, Jerry had gone to Fairbanks on an early flight that morning. Planes served Bettles twice a week, Tuesday and Friday, and as it happened he was able to just catch one that morning. Now he had gone to a hotel on 3rd Avenue and checked in, Bill wanted to go in and find out what the story was right away. "Incidentally, Jerry didn't sound quite sober," he remarked, "it might turn out to be a little troublesome dealing with him."

It was freezing cold that morning. In California, where Bill had bought the pick-up truck, he had also mounted a thermometer onto the radio antenna, he told about having a hard time finding a type locally that could show minus 40 degrees, dealers thought he was having them on! But now the full scale was indeed needed; even though it was close to midday, the gauge measured minus 35 degrees. On the radio they said that temperatures down to minus 42 degrees had been measured near Fairbanks that morning (as you might know, in a funny coincident: -40° F = -40° C!). The air was thick with frost that hung over the ground like a heavy fog. You almost chocked when you stepped outside, the air was that hard on the lungs when you inhaled it. But the pick-up truck fired up at the first attempt, the motor had been under electric heating all night. You simply run a cable from the 110 Volt mains and connect it up to a heater built onto the engine block. Bill drove straight downtown to Jerry's hotel. Jerry was in his room when we arrived: "Oh, there you are Bill, I am really happy to see you again, I really am, believe me."

They shook hands; Jerry didn't seem to notice me even though Bill tried to introduce me. I was surprised by seeing Jerry, Bill had said that he was pushing 60, but he looked younger than that. He gave a strong impression, fairly tall, broad shoulders and an open, friendly face. But right at the moment it was clear that Bill had been on the mark when he hinted about Jerry's present condition, he was anything but sober. 

"How have you been, Bill," Jack continued in a slurred voice. Bill said true to his ways not so much. "I have had a lousy winter, Bill, really lousy. It has been so cold, terribly cold. I hate it when it is cold. Just look at today. And it was dull in Bettles, all winter and nothing to do. I've been drinking too much too, I think, that is not so good. But then I heard that you had come so I hurried on down here."

"Yes, I can see that," Bill replied, "but weren't you supposed to drive down here in the flatbed truck, so that we can haul that load up to Karen Creek?" 

"Yeah-yeah, but listen now," Jerry said. "I have to buy a pick-up truck today. Yes, Pete in Bettles, you know Bill, that trapper with the half-breed wife who stays in the cabin down at the end of the airstrip, he asked me to buy a four-wheel drive pick-up jeep with a crew cab and drive it up on the Winter Trail to Bet­tles. He will use it this summer when he plans to work as a guide for the big game hunters. He has this little plane, but a jeep ... he needs that. Anyway, I must have some help in Bettles to fix up the flatbed and get it ready so that you can use it. I suggest that we drive up together to Bettles in the pick-up jeep that I am going to buy in a little while. Then return with the flatbed and finally move up to Karen Creek with that load of yours." Karen Creek was the name of Bill's gold mining camp.

"OK," Bill replied, "that wasn't quite the plan, but it doesn't sound that stupid after all. I just have to go down to Anchorage to get a few things done. We'll leave tomorrow, then you can get a good deal on the truck in the meantime. When we are back from Anchorage it's north towards Bettles. How about we go out now and take a look at the town and get something to eat?" 

We did just that. And afterwards we went over and visited a man who owned a gold mine south of Bill's. His name was Andy; he only worked the mine part time during a short summer period, more like a holiday hobby. The rest of the year he worked in Fairbanks and stayed with his family in a house in the suburbs. Andy was one of those people that Europeans consider a typical American: Loud, straight forward, exceedingly jovial, but not so easy to read. I couldn't quite figure out what was underneath all this friendly chit-chat. I don’t know why, I was just not comfortable in Andy’s company and felt a lot better once we were back on the road heading towards town again. But Andy was Bill’s contact in Fairbanks, and before we left we were allowed to unload the pick-up at his place and store everything in one of his garages. Then we didn't have to haul all that stuff around with us all the time, for instance the next day when we were going to Anchorage.

We covered the 700 km down to the coast in 10 hours, arriving in An­chorage just after dark. I wanted to count the number of Moose we saw on the way, but after 20-something the novelty wore off. We also saw another mammal which I thought was a Prairie Wolf, the official name is Coyote; Prairie Wolves had been common around the farm back in Canada. But Bill said the Coyote was rare in Alaska, and when we got closer it became obvious from the fur colour that it was a large Red Fox.

The majestic Mount McKinley National Park (now Denali) was on our right to the west of the road, the peak of the mountain at 6,194 meters was clearly visible. It is popular with mountaineers; some of them have been known to not make it down. It all looked grand enough but it wasn't real wilderness to me – the park appeared somewhat touristy - northern Alaska … that was where I wanted to go! When we drove into Anchorage town I shone the flashlight at the thermometer out on the radio antenna, it showed 10° F (minus 12 degrees Celsius). What a transformation; it was really that much warmer down here on the south coast. 

Anchorage is beautifully located at the bottom of Cook Inlet which at this time of year was more or less covered with ice. Apart from that it was just another dull, international city with rich business people moving about and expensive-looking shops. You can find that sort of thing all over the world; that was how I looked at it anyway. About a quarter of a million people live in this area, that is almost half of Alaska's total population.

Bill and I stayed in a two-story house in the suburbs with some of Bill's friends who lived just like you see wealthy people live on television. I was not impressed. But I did manage to get my visa extended for another 6 months at the emigration office in town; that was a relief. However, I was only really content when we after two days of shopping for supplies and visits to more of Bill's friends again sat in the pick-up truck and watched the thermometer out there dive, as we worked our way back up into the interior of Alaska.

We checked into the same motel on Airport Way as the last time and drove into Fairbanks to talk to Jerry. He hadn't bought any pick-up. But he assured us that he was looking at one. He would get it tomorrow morning.

It was getting late in the evening, Jerry said he felt a bit tired but Bill and I just wanted to go out on the town for a quick beer. So we walked over to 2nd Avenue, Tom declared that this here was the wildest bar in Fairbanks, so that was where we went. Inside it was jam-packed solid with people, a band of dressed-up Eskimos were playing. But the place was nice, at the bar we got talking to some of the working people unwinding here from a hard day at the construction site or driving a truck. Fur coats were the in thing at that time, the more enormous the better, some men wore huge knee-long Wolf furs with parka hoods, others were there in just thin vests and cowboy hats, the boots and belt buckles and drawling southern accents clearly gave them away as oil field hands on leave. 

Bill met several people he knew, including this young native girl who looked like she was either Indian or half-breed. But it soon turned out that she was in no state to be out on her own, and she kept on drinking so when she finally collapsed completely across one of the tables, the bouncers in the bar came over and proceeded to throw her out. When Bill and I objected, I was asked to produce some ID, and when I did not have any we were all re­quested not very politely to vacate the premises.

It was all starting to turn a bit messy, and Bill and I quickly decided that I should run to get the pick-up and drive it up in front of the bar. I sprinted to the van but in the confusion I started going up the wrong way on 2nd Avenue, which is a one-way street, and I had to leave the van 100 meters from the door. The girl was really carrying on and making a nuisance of herself now, so we just wanted to get her out of there and back to the hotel where she could sleep in peace and sober up. 

We never made it though. We literally had to carry the girl, and some guy watching got the wrong impression and went to call the cops. He probably thought we were trying to kidnap the woman or rape her or something. Just before we made it to the truck, the military police happened to come by. Once they were satisfied that neither Bill nor I were in the armed forces, they simply just moved on, but by then two regular police officers had arrived. They weren't at all impressed by Bill's assurances, and in the meantime the girl - who was now incapable of coherent speech - had fallen down on the icy street and crawled in underneath the police car. She was a strong girl and it was a waste of time trying to bring her to her senses. Bill and I had to give up; she resisted arrest furiously, but we could only watch while the police took her away. Bill said he knew her mother from one of the villages in the south of the state where he had been gold pros­pecting once, and he felt compelled to look after her a bit. He called the police station the next morning but she had already been released by then. I met her accidentally much later that summer, she worked in a shop selling topographical maps that I frequented, and she was really a quite nice girl when she wasn't drunk. 

The next morning we went with Jerry down to the car dealer to take a look at the pick-up Jerry had selected. Bill wasn't too impressed, it was a few years old and he didn't seem happy with the looks of it. Jerry insisted it was a good deal. He settled the purchase, but since the dealer had to do up a few little things to the truck before it was ready for delivery, we couldn't collect it until the next day at noon. Bill was getting real impatient with all this, he was keen to get the work started up at the gold mining camp and for that he had to get this whole transport operation over with first. The sooner we got moving, the sooner he could start preparations in camp for this summer's diggings. So we agreed to drive up to Bettles the next day, as soon as Jerry's pick-up was ready for delivery. 

First we went out on the town for a drink. Jerry went along this time; he felt this was his last evening in civilization for a while, so he wanted to make the most of it. He picked up some money in one of the bars, where he always deposited his cash when he was in town. Jerry did not trust anybody and maybe he had no reason to. One of his experiences in life included being mugged just outside Fairbanks by a black man who held a .45 caliber pistol up to his nose. "The nozzle of a .45 looks awfully big from that angle," he would say. 

We found another bar just off 2nd Avenue. Jack had vodka and tomato juice, Tom and I had beer. The waitress was real swift replacing the empty - or almost empty - bottles. Bill mostly talked about his Karen Creek camp; he obviously looked forward to going up there. Jerry talked to everybody in the place about everything, when he got too cocky Bill would remind him about their trip to Mexico a few years back, how he made a fool of himself with the girls and how he almost got thrown in jail for carrying with him a loaded .357 Magnum revolver. Jerry just laughed at it all. He in turn warned quietly about this fellow at the bar, he was a friend of the waitress, worked as a truck driver but was actually an important member of Fairbanks' organized crime cartel. 

Funny enough, this person was the one who later came across to Jerry and told him he had had enough and maybe it was time to leave. Bill and I did not like it, and Jerry was allowed to stay. But when we shortly afterwards wanted to walk out, Jerry could not find his feet. Bill and I carried him between us back to the truck, although it wasn't always completely clear on the way who was supporting whom. And who should we meet there on the frosty street other than just the same two cops who had picked up the Indian girl on the night before. 

"Good evening fellers, can you manage?" one of them said. Then he took another look at Bill and me and exclaimed: "hey, listen, aren’t you the same two guys from last night?" The officers seemed astonished and not exactly amused. 

Bill pulled himself together and explained that we were just helping a friend home. The officers let it go at that, although a bit hesitantly; they must have thought they had come across a couple of loonies doing nothing else but carrying drunks up and down the street every night. All the rest of the way back to the motel, Bill or I just had to repeat the officer's surprised remark - then we all broke down dying with laughter. 

The next morning the fun was over, we were hit by a tragic mis­hap. The telephone rang, it was Andy, Bill's friend who acted as his contact person in Fairbanks. 'Get in touch with your family in California right away' the message went. We all went across to Andy’s place and from there Bill called his sister. She told him that their father had just passed away. Bill took it pretty hard. And suddenly Jerry and I stood there not knowing what in the world to do. Bill's father died after a stomach operation, cancer it must have been. 

Jerry and I followed Bill out to the airport. Bill was driving, rational and collected as always, but when I looked up at him I could see a tear coming out from his eye and rolling down his chin. He was booked on the next flight to Seattle, Washington, from there to San Francisco, California and finally to Sacramento where the funeral would take place.

While we sat at the airport lounge waiting for the plane, Bill gave me some practical advice: "Stick to Jerry, and help him get that flatbed truck down to Fairbanks so that it is ready when I get back in a week or two's time."

Bill was grieving and it affected us all, there was a terrible atmosphere at the airport that afternoon. 

Having seen Bill's plane take off, Jerry and I drove back and checked out of the motel, instead we moved into Jerry's older hotel in downtown Fairbanks. Jerry was by then already well on his way to getting drunk. I found that not very appropriate; I left the hotel, couldn't stand Jerry's company. 

Instead I went for a long walk down along the Chena River which runs through Fairbanks and which was of course frozen solid this time of year. A tripod on the middle of the ice was attached to a timer, and in the bars you could place bets on the exact day and hour and minute the ice broke and the tripod moved away, that was the time spring came to the interior of Alaska. I was just going on and on pushing through the snow and the freezing cold night. I was filled with anxiety about how the next few days and weeks would go.

And it turned out just as bad as I had feared. Jerry was impossible to deal with when he was drunk, and he was drunk most of the time.

Jerry’s pick-up was not ready on the day after Bill's departure. And not on the next day either. It was really some kind of out­fit, the shop where Jerry had bought the pick-up; they were always full of good excuses when we came in for the jeep, but ready for delivery? No, not quite ... ! But then you couldn't exactly accuse Jerry of putting them under a lot of pressure to get on with it either. He seemed happy with finally having some time to himself here in Fairbanks and didn't show any interest whatsoever in moving back up to Bettles.

I tried to make the best of this delay in town. Jerry had a car sitting in Fairbanks; it was a Buick V8, one of those great American cars of that era with soggy suspension, lots of space and an enormous over-sized engine. You don't see cars like that on the congested roads of Denmark. We used that one for drives around town. One day we attended one of springtime's big sporting occasions in Fairbanks, the North American championship in dog sledge racing. At the grounds there were different types of showy winter entertainments. Like snowshoe baseball where the players ran around the field wearing snowshoes - that was actually pretty hilarious to watch. Many of the players naturally tripped and tumbled between bases much to the amusement of the spectators. Another place, groups of Eskimos were competing in who could propel a person the highest by throwing him up in the air from a large Walrus skin blanket.

And finally there was the dog sledge race itself and it was taken somewhat more serious. About 30 drivers started on the route with 2 minutes intervals. The 8-10 dogs in a team were restlessly pulling and jumping about barking and carrying on, they couldn't wait to get going, and the driver and his helpers struggled to keep them in line until the signal to go was given. Then the dogs all got down to business and the sledge shut forward across the hard snow. I wondered why the dogs looked so small and slender, but Jerry explained that this was the way racing dogs were, the working dogs actually in use out in the villages of Alaska were of another race he said and heavier. 

After about an hour when all the race participants had started, there was a break while the drivers covered the track out in the woods. An announcer up in the control tower was in radio contact with stations out on the route and kept the spectators continu­ously informed through the loudspeaker about how the race was progressing and who was passing whom. Luckily it was a cloudy and fairly warm day with minus 12-15 degrees Celsius temperatures, so the hundreds of people waiting about could open up their parkas a bit and think about spring. 

When Jerry and I had seen the winners come in and receive their trophies, we drove back into Fairbanks again. Jerry said he felt like an exotic meal, he knew a fancy Chinese restaurant on 2nd Avenue and I enjoyed having rice that day for the first time in six months.  

Watching the dog sledge racing had put Jerry in a pleasant mood, he started telling about the time when he drove a dog sledge him­self. Jerry originated from Quebec, Canada where he was from a French-Canadian family, his family moved across the border to Maine, U.S.A. when he was little. By now he had long ago become a full-blooded American, and he never used his real name any more which was Jacques as I recall. He had worked as a lumberjack in Maine when he heard of the opportunities in Alaska; that was before the 2nd World War. In Maine he was used to go begging for work at a dollar a day; when he came to Nome, Alaska on the boat from Seattle, the crew bosses waited at the docks offering a dollar - an hour!

"In those days I was strong as a bear," Jerry loved to talk once he got started. "All day long I would carry 100 pounds sacks and at night I would go out and kick the ass of anybody who deserved it. Now my muscles are gone, it happened when I turned 40, sud­denly they were gone, well, they are still there but they are useless. You eat a lot, but not as much as I did then, nobody could beat me in an eating contest. The weather never bothered me; I would work out­side without a coat in 40 below zero. Now my blood circulation is ruined, I am shaking like a leaf all winter no matter how much clothes I put on. Yeah, just laugh, but it's not funny." 

During the war, Jerry was drafted and stationed in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska's south-west; the only place where Japanese forces actually occupied American soil for a while. After that he worked for the postal service bringing mail to remote villages with a team of dogs. He also trapped for furs during the winters and tried prospecting for gold during the summers. Today he worked as a construction contractor doing maintenance work on the airport in Bettles, he had his own pool of heavy equipment and made good money. 

Then finally one day the pick-up was ready. We got the vehicle one afternoon, loaded it all up and sat out the next morning before daybreak. I was by now really looking forward to getting out of Fairbanks and back into the wild. But the trip ended in disaster, we never even made it out onto the Ice Road.

The first part of the road was a public highway, then from the Livengood camp onwards the oil companies had through their joint construction company, Alyeska built the Ice Road as a private road at their own expense. But even the public road towards Livengood was narrow, there were huge snowdrifts on each side of the road and the enormous oversized 18-wheelers coming towards us all the way from the North Slope made driving hazardous. 

Jerry said that he felt he had done enough driving in his life­time, so I was at the wheel when shortly before Livengood on a steep slope down one of these giant trucks came pushing up towards us. Trying to avoid the monster, one of my front wheels got caught in the snow and the jeep ended up in the ditch. The truck just kept on going as it should, if the trucks stop on one of the icy grades they are most likely never to get going again. 

There we stood, in the middle of nowhere, in the ditch. I felt really guilty about the mishap, but Jerry took the whole thing calmly and volunteered to walk to Livengood for assistance. I nevertheless started working on the jeep once he had left. Of course we brought a snow shovel, so I spent almost an hour digging, I found some sand to put under the wheels and with the help of a good pull from a trapper who happened to pass by with a solid frozen Lynx in the back of his pick-up, I got moving again. 

At Livengood, Jerry was wondering aimlessly about, the camp was deserted; everybody was out working on the Ice Road. But just as we were about to set off, Jerry commented: "Hey, you are losing oil, aren’t you?" Sure enough, engine oil was dripping from the motor onto the snow and the pressure was dropping. We had spare oil with us, but we couldn't enter the Ice Road with a massive leak and a defect engine. We pulled into camp and shut off the motor.

Well, a crew of Alyeska hands turned up after 6 pm, they worked a 12 hour shift from Livengood and had to do their own cooking. But there were plenty of bunks in camp and Jerry and I shared a bottle of Scotch with the guys as an appreciation of their hospitality. The next morning Jerry and I caught a lift south with one of the Alyeska trucks, we were back at square one, on standby in Fairbanks, the pick-up was towed to town for further repairs. 

The time was now the beginning of March. Weather-wise it was suddenly getting warmer, it was the last cold spell of winter that was now coming to an end, people said. Jerry got word from Bill that he would arrive back up soon. Jerry and I were out at the airport one afternoon to check when one of the planes from Seattle came in. We had nothing else to do. 

"Do you wanna bet 10 bucks that Bill is on that flight?" Jerry asked. "I say he is."" "That's alright, you've got it" I re­plied; after all, the chances of that were pretty slim, a lot of planes arrived regularly from Seattle.

But who should step out into the queue from the plane other than Bill. Jerry lit up like a candle and he got his $10 before Bill made it across to join us.

Bill smiled his typical, little smile and asked us how everything was going. Well, everything was not going very well and the smile disappeared when Bill heard that. "God almighty; isn't the flat­bed truck even ready by now?" he proclaimed. I suddenly felt boundlessly guilty, disgraced, shameful. We had really let down Bill here that was obvious. This was serious business, with this delay he might not get the truck up to camp before the ice melted and the Ice Road became impassable. A couple of twerps, a lazy old fool and a useless greenhorn, that was what Jerry and I were. But Jerry was in a great mood. "No, we didn't get anything done, but then we sure had a lot of time to go chasing after the broads in Chena Bar," he grinned.

Bill didn't talk about the funeral in California and nobody asked him about it. But he was up early next morning and over at the shop to put his foot down hard on the used car dealer. Later that same morning the 'pick-up was ready for pick-up' as Jerry thought it funny to say. We drove across to a petroleum distributor and loaded two barrels of gasoline onto the back which Pete in Bet­tles, the owner of the pick-up, was to use during the summer. "All right, then we are ready to leave tomorrow morning," Jerry said.

"The hell we are," was Bill's reply, "We are leaving now, right now - yes, even if it means driving through darkness all the way up from the Yukon." 

This was no suggestion; it was a statement, a matter of fact. And it didn't stop us that the pick-up broke down once again just outside Fairbanks. It was a piston gasket on one of the cylinders that went. Or that Jerry categorically demanded that we turned back to get it fixed in Fairbanks. Because Bill pulled out a small tool kit and started repairing the damage on the spot.

"How do we get this metal plate straightened out, we don't have a proper surface to hammer it out on," Jerry was whining, he and I helped out the best we could. "How about we use your head," was Bill's reply, he was getting into a better mood, the damage was quickly fixed. Then we moved on, passed Livengood and true enough, we arrived at the Yukon crossing at dusk.

The Yukon River was wide at this point and stretched like a white field several hundred meters across. It was an awesome sight, the gateway to northern Alaska. Alyeska had constructed an icy trail across the river by spraying water over the snow, it was strictly private and company personnel manned a checkpoint here to inspect all vehicles going across and to warn drivers that they were using the road at entirely their own risk. Bill showed our entry permit and we drove across the river in the last dull light of the day. We were on our own now, driving across land where vehicles had never before been able to move and there was still a long way to go.  

Bill and Jerry had done a lot of talking between them on the way up to Yukon about the nature of the road after the river. Was the pick-up strong enough, could it make the grades up through the Ray Mountains, a range of low hills between Yukon and Bettles, that sort of thing. But everything went smoothly; unfortunately it soon turned dark, so I didn't get any impression of the country we drove through. 

This kind of low-gear, four-wheel driving sucked up a lot of gasoline and on one of the steep hills we ran out and the engine stalled. We left the cab and prepared to transfer fuel from one of the barrels at the back. "But how on earth do we get in into the tank," said Jerry. "You mean to say that you didn't bring a hose? Now we are in trouble." Bill faked a worried reaction and let Jerry suffer in his misery for a little while, then he produced a rubber hose from under the driver's seat, "what do you know, there is one right here ... " With a full tank we were soon on the trail again.

At one place there was a construction camp near the trail and we pulled in for a visit. Bill enquired how far the Bettles turn-off was and how we could recognize it, here in the dark­ness it was pretty difficult to navigate and there were no mark­ings or road signs anywhere. We had a cup of hot coffee in the hut which went down really well. 

The Ice Road passed by approximately 40 km east of Bettles on its way to the North Slope and the last bit, the sidetrack into Bettles, was not maintained as well as the Ice Road itself. There were problems with so-called glaciers; these ice formations were real tricky. In Alaska, the word 'glacier' is used to describe a phenomenon where a warm underground spring flows and freezes continuously during the winter months creating large icy fields. It was my job to go out and shine with a flashlight every time we reached one, to check if the ice was passable. Sometimes there was running water under a thin layer of ice and underneath more ice which also could not support the jeep. Then we had to find another way around. But we never got stuck and arrived safely in Bettles around midnight. 

Jerry had a cozy mobile home sitting in Bettles, a large trailer, and we spent the night there. The next morning we got Jerry's flatbed truck ready for the journey back to Fairbanks. We also did a quick tour of Bettles, a small village which only excuse for existence was its airfield, which people here used as a transit port for the large Hercules C130 transporters coming in from Fairbanks with supplies. In Bettles, the cargo was transferred to the small single-engine planes that distributed mail and provisions out to the little settlements and camps out and about in the interior.

Apart from the airfield staff, only a few families lived in Bet­tles. For instance Pete who came over to Jerry's place to view his pick-up jeep.

Bill asked him how the winter had been. "Oh, pretty good," he said. "I got quite a few Beavers, Martens, Lynx and some Wolves. And with the prices we are getting at the moment it is easy to make money. But I had some problems with my machine, and the route I laid out this year is very long, so it takes a lot of fuel to service it." 

Pete flew along his trapping route in a small plane fitted with skis. He landed at each trap to check it, although some he could also check from the air which saved him a landing if there was nothing in it anyway and everything looked alright. He used those kinds of steel traps that clamp on to the foot of the animal when it steps onto the trigger; they are outlawed in many countries but were still used a lot then in the US and in Canada. Otherwise it was most usual for trappers in Alaska to service their routes by snowmobile, or by travelling with a team of dogs – dogs were used by those who didn't trust the modern mechanics out there on the remote trails. Obviously you could cover a larger area by plane, but the operat­ing costs were equally high. 

"But I hear it is a hell of a slaughter house where you are coming from," Pete said later. We had heard no news for a while, but it turned out that in one of the bars in Fairbanks a man had just been shot and killed the night before. It was the bar where Bill, Jerry and I had been on the night before Bill's father died. A man had walked in, sat down at the bar and ordered a drink, then he pulled out a gun and shot the man next to him through the head, finished his drink and walked out. When police arrived the place was empty, and none of the staff could give a description of the killer. 

Funny things happened in Fairbanks, later that spring somebody died when his car blew up as he got in and turned on the ignition. Jerry's talk of organized crime might not be all rub­bish. "Just wait until spring comes and the snow melts," he would say, "a few more solid frozen bodies will turn up just outside town. It is the same thing every year."

I had the impression that the three of us would now drive back to Fairbanks on the flatbed and load it up. But Bill had other plans. It wasn't too far from Bettles up to Bill's gold mining camp at Karen creek, maybe 100 km along the Ice Road. And Bill wanted to go up there and prepare a track from the Ice Road across to camp so that the truck could drive directly all the way in there. And then he wanted to drop me off in camp and let me do a little work there, while he and Jerry picked up the Fairbanks load with the flatbed.

Naturally that was alright with me, so we borrowed Pete's pick-up and drove back east along the sidetrack - back to the Winter Trail and then north. The Ice Road passed through the Brooks Range by following the Middlefork River up into the mountains. Then it continued across the Continental Divide and out onto the flat tundra of the North Slope to the oil fields near the Arctic Ocean. 

But we were not going that far. Just up into the Koyukuk River valley was Karen Creek joining the Middlefork from the west, this was where Bill had his camp. We crossed the Southfork Koyukuk while working our way up through the valley, but eventually ended up on the east side of the Middlefork, which meant that we had to cross over that river to get to camp. That crossing Bill thought about a lot it seemed; when we got near the Middlefork on our left, he studied the ice on it carefully; it was broken up in many places, rough and full of holes. 

We stopped somewhere south of Karen Creek at a construction camp called Coldfoot. Bill knew the manager in camp, the people here where in effect his closest neighbors. He got permis­sion to borrow a large caterpillar and to drive it up to Karen Creek to make a track across Middlefork and up into camp. 

Jerry and I went ahead of Bill in the pick-up. Jerry was sure he remembered where Karen Creek was, but he overshot it and we had to turn back and look again. When we got back, Bill had already been there and made a track through the thin spruce forest down to the river. We drove down there but didn't cross. Bill wanted first of all to walk across on foot, inspect the ice and check out how things where in camp. There was about a meter of snow and it was heavy walking through the Willow bushes once we got to the other side. We got to a large clearing; Bill said this was the landing strip for planes bringing supplies into camp. At the end of the runway, halfway covered in snow, an old maroon-colored jeep and a snowmobile were parked. 

Bill opened the door of the jeep and lifted out a shotgun from the back seat. It had just one barrel, but it also had a clip and it was loaded with the weirdest ammunition I had ever seen: shot­gun cartridges which instead of birdshot pellets were filled with only one, large lead slug. That weapon would only be any good at close range, but then it would also knock down anything that moved. "You never know if there are bears in camp," explained Bill. But there weren't any. The camp was covered in snow; it appeared pictur­esque, peaceful, calm and untouched like something out of a Disney movie. Only this wasn't a movie, it was the real thing. We shoveled out the doors and windows and went into the kitchen hut to boil water for coffee. 

After coffee Bill cleared a trail across the Middlefork and up into camp with the cat. The pick-up still couldn't make it across, the ice was just too rough, so I walked the distance of a kilometer or so and carried my own backpack as well as a few boxes with food and other supplies up to camp. 

By then Bill was through with the track and instructed me in what needed to be done while he was in Fairbanks. Apart from throttling all bears that came into camp and broke anything, I should clear the whole camp for snow, cut all the firewood I could manage and in general do up the camp after the winter. Then I was to make a snowshoe track a few kilometers upstream along the creek so that preparations for the mining work could start up on location as soon as Bill got back. 

"If you start to get lonely you can always hike up to Wiseman and say hello," said Bill, "that is about 5 hour's walk if you follow the river.”

Wiseman was a village with 5-6 people further up in the moun­tains, apart from Coldfoot Camp the only human settlement in this part of the Brooks Range. A few more people live there today, but it is still an isolated place. 

And Jerry also had some good advice for me: "If you get attacked by a Grizzly shoot it in the chest, right here," he said and hit himself on the chest bone. "Never in the head, the bullet will just ricochet off the skull and the bear will keep on going."

I wondered how you could hit a walking or running animal in the chest that way. But Jerry had shot a bear like that during his time as a trapper. He had met it suddenly coming towards him on a trail and when the bear got up on its hind legs he shot it in the chest.

"Did you skin it," I asked, because such a fur would have been nice to have."Heavens no," replied Jerry, "I walked all around the carcass. I was shaking with fear."

Bill left the caterpillar down below the camp and I followed him and Jerry further down to the river. "We will be back in a week," said Bill, "have fun, and be careful." 

It would take not one but rather two weeks before Bill and Jerry returned with the truck. So there I stood, on the middle of the ice cover on the Middlefork River, in the heart of northern Alas­ka. I lifted one hand in farewell as Bill and Jerry drove off. 

The camp at Karen Creek consisted of three cabins plus a large timber structure which was obviously under construction, as the walls were only about a meter high and almost entirely covered under the snow.

One of the cabins was sleeping- and living-quarters. It was built of timber logs using fairly small diameter logs, the cracks were packed tight with rock wool. The roof was slanting and inside the ceiling was insulated and lined with panels. There were two bunk beds and another bed in the room. A large and a smaller table, some stools, boxes, bookshelves and next to the door a gun rack with six rifles and shotguns and two handguns. There was a large stove and a lot of firewood and two windows which were covered on the outside with some transparent plastic for insulation.

The other hut was the kitchen and dining room. It was built entirely from materials brought in, i.e. machined planks and ply­wood sheets. Like in the living cabin, everything was meticulously done, the houses looked like they were built by professional craftsmen. The kitchen had nice built-in cabinets filled to the brim with foodstuffs, there was a gas cooker and a stainless steel sink, the dining table was built into the wall. In the corner was the most important component: the heating stove! 

The third hut in camp was a bit out of line with the other two. It was old, more amateurishly built, looked more like you would imagine a real log cabin with clay- and moss-insulated walls, dirt floor and peat cover on one half of the roof, the two other cabins both had a raised wooden floor and tin-sheet roof covers. This was Bill's old house, hastily built during the first year he was prospecting at Karen Creek. But the hut was never quite finished and was now in use as a repair shop and a store for the gold mining equipment. 

When I was indoors it was mostly in the dining hut, the kitchen as we called it. This was where you went when you had a break during work or simply needed to get warmed up over a cup of coffee. Otherwise I installed myself in the sleeping quarters, the cabin. As agreed with Bill, I cleared the lower bunk bed and simply just slept in my ordinary down-filled sleeping bag which was sufficiently warm, as temperatures in the cabin never fell to below 10-12 minus degrees Celsius during the night. 

It was a wonderful time for me, these days alone at Karen Creek. Spring was approaching; it was getting close to 1st of April. Although the temperature was still down to minus 25 degrees at night, the sun rose so high in the sky during the day that it really generated some heat in the early afternoon, it was almost starting to melt the snow some in places.

I busied myself around camp and spent my time shoveling snow. Everything I could find under the puffy quilts of snow I would uncover: Timber, tools, equipment, vehicles. I cleared the roofs of the cabins, the whole of the new timber building including the floor space in between the low walls and a trail to the out-house.

No new snow fell, because the weather was always the same: Clear skies. During the day, the sun shone constantly from a bright blue sky. At night you could stand outside the cabin in the cold, bone-dry air and see the most incredible auroras light up the northern sky in a subdued cascade of colors. The wind never blew, so the calmness and the stillness of the place was total. 

I had made a list of what needed to be done in camp during the week I anticipated being alone. So each day had its own program. But the work usually was done a bit quicker than calcu­lated, so when I had shoveled snow and cut all the firewood I could find, cleaned up everywhere and the week was coming to an end, I actually didn't have that much to do.

I went searching in Bill's small collection of books and read Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee and Prospector's Handbook, which gave me some idea about how the coming spring's work digging for gold would take place.

I was not completely cut off from the rest of the world at Karen Creek. In one corner of the dining table in the kitchen was a radio, a funny little unit which was connected up to a large arrangement of batteries and fitted with an enormous antenna which extended all around the camp and via the top of the spruce trees all the way down to the landing strip. On this radio you could receive all kinds of radio stations; mostly it was tuned into the most powerful of the FM transmitters in Fairbanks.

Out of the more serious programs, this station had a daily spot called Tundra News. Here listeners could send private messages to each other via the radio, a special service for those who stayed in remote parts of the interior without mail or telephone. I listened to that program every evening. Partly because it was always amusing listening to the many different messages and instructions people would send their friends in remote camps and settlements, partly because Bill and Jerry had told me to listen in before they left. If they wanted to tell me something, this was the only way they could contact me. Especially after the first week passed by I listened carefully to hear if anything had gone wrong down there; as it turned out, there never was a message for me this time around.

But then I heard other news on the radio, and in fact some of it was rather disturbing: The Ice Road would be closed soon. When thaw started setting in, and it would do so in April, the rivers would become unreliable. Especially the ice bridge they had built across the Yukon River, it was very wide and would not be able to withstand any melting. The trucks moving across here were extremely heavy, the policy was not to take any chances, rather close the road too early than too late. Besides, the oil men had already moved lots of supplies up all through the winter so that they now in the spring could get started on the mission of that summer: To expand the Winter Trail and convert it into a permanent all-weather access road with a wide gravel surface and bridges across all the rivers. 

The problem was, if the Ice Road was closed before Bill and Jerry made it up with the truck what then? It was unbearable thinking about it, without these supplies all the work at Karen Creek would be hampered, they would not find very much gold. No, you could only hope that Bill and Jerry would turn up with the supplies soon.

One of the days I spent making a snowshoe track up along the creek. Of course Karen Creek was frozen over, but water under the ice kept on running. Down below the camp a bit, the stream formed a kind of flat river delta where it spread out and eventually joined the Middlefork. Here the warm spring water had continuous­ly poured out onto the old ice creating a huge glacier several hundred meters wide and probably many meters thick since bushes and trees were all covered in ice. The massive ice formations were slippery and free of snow cover. 

But at the camp and further up towards the hills behind where the ground got steeper and steeper, the creek ran a more normal course. The ice appeared very thick but was covered in deep snow most places. At a few exposed spots near the shelter of big rocks, you could actually see the ice under the snow and some places you could faintly hear the sound of running water deep down, but the water was nowhere visible. 

I didn't know exactly where Bill needed the snowshoe track to go, but obviously some sort of trail upstream was necessary. The first time you make your way through deep snow like this it is a real struggle, even wearing snowshoes. Once there is a track however you move with relative ease. Skies are useless under such conditions. I had brought a pair of snowshoes myself for this kind of walking, one I had acquired down in Canada. But Bill had another pair in camp which didn't look so fancy but which was better for making the initial trail, these shoes were longer and narrower, I used those. 

For snowshoe walking, moccasins are the best footwear because the strings from the shoes can be secured real tightly around the soft moccasins so that the snowshoes are like welded onto the feet. I owned a pair of wonderful moose skin moccasins which I pulled out of my bag for this occasion, they were soft as silk and with felt lining inside as warm as they needed to be. On these moccasins you could run about outside in the most severe cold and feel as light on your feet as if you were bare-footed. They didn't work in only light frost above minus 10 degrees however, as they easily got wet. Fitted with moccasins and wearing Bill's snowshoes, I worked my way up-stream along Karen Creek. 

To walk on snowshoes is certainly not like running as a rabbit on top of the snow, you inevitably sink down into the stuff at least when the snow is so light and loose and powdery as it is in Alaska. It is nothing less than a battle making progress, it took me over 2 hours powering along just 2-3 kilometers up the creek. 

Some places there were like traces of a trail on the bank along­side the stream; there I would follow that one. Other places the stream was closed in between canyons of steep cliffs on either side, there I would walk out on the ice. Towards the end, the creek became impassable with cliffs and big boulders and ice formations, I thought that further than that we probably would not be going up to work for the time being. I turned around and backtracked making an effort all the way back to tramp down hard on the snow and to widen the trail.

By now I had developed a taste for exploratory trips out and about in the surrounding terrain. My list of work to be done, which was always lying next to the small radio on the dining table, had been nothing but a bare sheet for the last several days. So I felt it was alright if I went on a small outing. 

I wanted to go up into the mountains to the west, the divide from where Karen Creek originated. I was keen to see what was behind on the other side. And I also wanted to check if it was possible to see the village of Wiseman to the north. Besides, there might be Dall Sheep up in that habitat, they were animals that I would really like to see. Bill had told me that he had seen sheep up there, quite tame had they been, they had approached him to within 25-30 meters; that sounded pretty exciting to me.

April was presumably the month where certain other animals would also start to appear: the bears. More than anything else I dreamt about meeting a bear, and this was the time they should start emerging from their winter hibernation dens. Much as I wanted to see one however, I wasn't sure if bears were really dangerous; anyway, on advice from Bill and Jerry I was always armed when I left camp - just in case. 

I had already taken a close look at Bill's gun collection. It included two shotguns which didn't interest me much and an old World War II type of army rifle which I didn't like either, it was heavy and clumsy and had some funny sights. I realized much later that it must have been an M1 Garand riffle, it was still in use when I did my National Service in the Danish armed forces Field Artillery some years later. Bill also had a new high power Winchester Model 70 bolt action rifle in caliber .30-06 with a scope, it seemed like a fine hunting gun but I didn't want to bring it because I wasn't hunting; as a protection against bears, I needed something that was quick to aim, and the scope wasn't useful close­-up. A nice little .22 rifle was obviously useless for this and the same was a little short-barreled revolver in the same cali­ber.

Left was a small Winchester Model 94 rifle with a lever action loading mechanism. That is the kind of gun that cowboys and Indi­ans fight each other with in the old western movies. It also had the caliber .30 inch, i.e. 7.62 mm, but labeled .30-30. Even though I was no expert on these matters, I could look at the ammunition and see that the powder chamber behind the bullet in a .30-30 cartridge was much smaller than in a .30-06 cartridge for example. In other words, the Winchester 94 was not such a powerful weapon. But when they in the movies could kill horses and people at long distances with this gun, I would surely be able to knock out a bear close up if I had to. That was about the extent of my knowledge of ballistics at the time! And the Winches­ter 94 was such a fine weapon, easy to handle, lightening quick to reload. I decided that one was best suited for my purpose. 

I brought the Winchester up with me on the trail along Karen Creek; but the small rifle had one drawback, it wasn't fitted with a shoulder strap. In other words, I had to carry the rifle in my hands and constantly take care not to get snow inside the barrel every time I put it down. It got to be too awkward, and for my long walk up into the mountains to the west I got out Bill's last gun, a Ruger revolver with 6 chambers and the caliber .44 Magnum. This gun was Bill's own favorite.

The caliber .44 Magnum is the most powerful handgun in production. Or at least it was at that time, it was made famous in the Dirty Harry movies with Clint Eastwood that came out in those years. This cartridge was almost as big as the .30-30 cartridge and the bullet on the type of ammunition that Bill used was completely flat in the tip like a dumdum bullet which expands on impact and generates a horrible wound. This was really a terrible weapon. So-called hollow-point ammunition like that is paradoxically enough prohibited in war, but allowed for hunting and self-defense. The revolver sat in a gun belt and was loaded with 5 cartridges; the chamber under the hammer was empty. It was a single action revolver; the hammer had to be pulled back manually before each shot using the thumb or the inside of your left hand. 

I tested out the gun a few times, but though I tried to aim very carefully I was unable to hit the tin-can I had put up on some firewood 10 meters away. But I did discover that the gun produced an absolutely deafening ‘bang’ and a wallop that almost knocked it out of my hand at each shot. With the revolver loaded up with 6 rounds strapped around my waist, I started hiking up towards the mountain summit to the west, Karen Dome. 

I didn't see neither bears nor Dall Sheep on the journey. In fact, I didn't see very much at all. Behind the divide another valley stretched out, just like the Middlefork valley. The moun­tain ranges continued out westward as far as you could see and I just didn't have the energy to go any further. The terrain was difficult for walking, varying between bare boulders and rocks and deep snow-drifts in between. But it looked nice out there west, and further to the north some higher mountain peaks were visible. You couldn't spot Wiseman however, the houses might be hidden between the spruce trees of the forest, or else the village lay further up behind the bend where the Middlefork shifted towards the west a bit.

The Karen Creek camp was clearly visible though, the many kilometers down there seemed like no distance at all when you stood up here and looked down through the clean and dry and crystal clear air. I thought that I would be able to see it clearly if Bill and Jerry should suddenly appear down there on the river ice driving the truck across and up into camp. But of course nobody came. 

While I was sitting here on a rock at the summit resting and looking down over the Middlefork valley lying there in the soft sunshine, calm and still and without any sound whatsoever, I decided that this would not be the last I saw of the Brooks Range. I wanted to see what was out there, in the mountains and in the other valleys. And I wanted so travel out there once summer arrived and the snow melted and getting around got a little easier. Then I walked back to Karen Creek. 

On the next day I attempted to make it up to Wiseman. I followed the river ice north; and even though I felt that I walked very far, I never saw anything like a settlement or any other signs of human habitation. The river just curved on and on seemingly endlessly. I mostly stayed out on the ice; it was pretty rough for walking, but this way I avoided the river banks and the glaciers from creeks joining the river. I was aware of the danger of stepping through thin ice into spring water below, as my feet if that happened would freeze up quickly. 

Finally I gave up and hiked back home following my own track, which must have looked funny from the air coming to an abrupt end like that in the middle of nowhere. I was sure that pilots would notice it, almost every day a helicopter went by flying low over the Middlefork. They were Alyeska people going from one camp to the next. But they probably stopped over at Coldfoot and if they made inquiries it was known there that somebody stayed at Karen Creek. The activity on the Ice Road was not audible on the other side of the river; it was most likely pretty quiet now anyway, in between the winter transports and the coming summer's big project to construct a permanent access road. The only other sign of human activity was the occasional sighting of a chartered Hercules plane flying by high over the mountains on its way to or from the oil fields. 

On my trips out in the terrain I never saw any animals, funny enough. Around camp quite a few rabbits were hanging about. Snowshoe Hare Lepus americanus was the official name for the species, but in Alaska people never called them anything but rabbits. Here in spring they were still in their winter coats and had completely white fur. They were friendly animals. They hopped about on the snow, because thanks to their large feet even the fine powdery snow could support them. They were not shy and during spring more and more turned up around camp, maybe they were attracted to the trails and the patches of open ground that I had cleared of snow. Outside, far from camp, I never saw rabbits and I didn't see Moose or other animals either. Sometimes I saw the deep tracks through the snow where a Moose had plowed its way through. And near camp I saw the tracks of an animal of prey which had walked by putting large paw marks into the snow. It was a Canada Lynx, and I saw that one walking by near camp once. 

Only a few birds can survive the tough winter of Interior Alaska. In camp I saw Raven and Boreal Chickadee, a member of the Paridae family that we call ‘tits’ in Europe, but never use that term while you are in the US – the Americans will totally misunderstand! But my favorite bird in camp was the Gray Jay, the Alaskans call them Whiskey Jacks or Camp Robbers, a member of the crow family, Corvidae. They were absolutely tame and would eat pancake bits out of your hand! And I did do that for fun – feed the jays with pancakes, although Bill had instructed me never to have food out in the open around camp so as not to attract the bears. The jays seemed to have an insatiable appetite, and I was wondering how they managed to eat so much, until I found out that they did not eat the food. They grabbed the bits of cake out of my hand and took off with them, but they did not swallow them, they flew back into the woods a bit and hid the stuff in little storage spaces, then they instantly swooped back down to me for more! 

As I mentioned, I kept track of the dates and my little chores on a notepad in the kitchen. And on the 14th day alone at Karen Creek around noon, I sat in the kitchen again and drank coffee when I heard voices outside. I looked out and there came Bill and Jerry stomping into camp. I hurried out to greet them.

"Oh, there you are," said Bill as I emerged from the kitchen, "we couldn't see any smoke from camp. Don't you have a fire going?" “Not often," I said, "but did you get the truck up here?" I was really excited to hear about that. "Sure," Bill replied, "it's down at the other side of the river. We are going to need the cat for towing it across the ice. But let's now just sit down for a minute." 

We went into the kitchen and I started getting a new fire going, the embers of the old one had sure enough died down. I poured a bit of gasoline over some new firewood and threw a match down into the stove, the fire started with an immense ‘puff’ before I placed the lid back on the oven. "Holy Moses, what is it you are doing," exclaimed Bill. "Oh," I explained, "I ran out of that there diesel-soaked sawdust you usually use for starting fires; since I couldn't find any more diesel I just use a bit of gasoline with the sawdust instead." "OK-OK,” Bill said. “But don't do that anymore. And besides, we've got diesel now by the barrel-full on the truck." 

"So, did any bears visit?" Jerry wanted to know, while we sat and drank coffee in the kitchen. "No," I said, "I never saw even the tracks of a bear." 

"What happened to your jeans?" Bill wanted to know. I had hit my leg once while I was cutting firewood, the ax slipped and struck the shinbone breaking through the jeans and the skin. I had mended the jeans and wasn't too proud of this episode anyway, that was a stupid thing to do, but Bill was so damned observant. 

Naturally I wanted to hear news from Fairbanks. But down there it was nothing but trouble and more trouble, Bill and Jerry immediately agreed on that. Jerry had had problems driving the flatbed truck into town, it didn't have number plates and needed a special permit. Bill had to make another trip to Anchorage, because the small caterpillar which was meant to be on the load had not been delivered in time et c. That sort of hardship. But then Bill and Jerry were also able to tell triumphantly about making it across the Yukon River on the very last day before the ice bridge was deemed so unsafe that the whole of the Winter Trail was officially closed for the year. They cut it close, but they made it.

Now the next job was getting the truck the last kilometer or so across the Middlefork and up into camp. Unfortunately there were bad cracks in the ice in several places, and in the middle quite a bit of water had started running over on top. Overall it appeared that the main ice shield was as strong as ever, and we worked to fill in the gaps with ice blocks and branches. By hooking up the large caterpillar to the truck and letting it pull along, the truck made it across and was able to drive under its own power all the way into camp. 

To unload the truck we backed it up to a small embankment, then we were able to roll off the barrels of fuel, the welding ma­chine, the fridge, the boat, the timber and finally the small caterpillar.

Jerry was eager to get back down to Bettles before it got too late, so when the unloading was done Bill and he settled the bill. Jerry was to have $1,000 for the transport, but Bill reminded him that from there a debt of $100 should be deducted.

"I don't owe you 100 $," said Jerry surprised. "Yes you do, don't you remember back in March, the day before I went back to Cali­fornia, I let you have 100 $ while we were sitting in the bar that afternoon." I certainly remembered that clearly, Jerry was supposed to just borrow the money for a few hours until he man­aged to get some more in another bar where they kept his cash for him. But he had totally forgotten that and he believed neither Bill nor me. Bill just laughed it off and let it go, he never got his $100 back.

$1,000 richer Jerry started walking down to his truck; Bill and I saw him off. "You have a nice camp here, Bill," he said. It was as if he was a bit sad to leave, he was not as talkative as usual. "It is the nicest camp in Alaska."

"Yeah, it'll be alright once we get things sorted out a bit and that new workshop finished," Bill replied. "Say hello down in Bettles. And remember to spread the word that this summer there will be a job opening here for a cook, preferably a female one that is not too bad looking! And if you ever feel like getting started over on Mascot Creek my offer still stands - think about it ... "

Jerry was able to drive back across the Middlefork with the empty truck on his own. Then he was gone.

Bill and I walked back up into camp and Bill started pottering about a bit, sorting things out and putting them away. He was finally home again after a long winter and a taxing spring. He had bought new work clothes and cases of cigarettes and beer and other supplies.

Since 1st of March all costs had been covered as business ex­penses in connection with the gold production later and that included food in camp but not beer and spirits. Beer we paid for ourselves.

It was getting close to dinner time and we walked over to the kitchen to fix up some grub. As always on such special occasions Bill made T-bone-steaks. The meat was first grade and he had fresh vegetables with him from Fairbanks. We dragged the refrigerator into the kitchen and lit it. Like the stove, it worked on bottled propane gas. It was important to get the fridge going before nightfall, not to keep the food stuffs cold but to keep them adequately cool, the vegetables would not be able to stand frosty conditions.

"It's not much that you have eaten during the last couple of weeks," Bill commented while we were unpacking the new grocer­ies and putting it all away. "No," I had to admit that, "but that is not because there is something wrong with the variety. I'm just too lazy to cook a big dinner for one, every day anyway. And I exist perfectly well on coffee and hotcakes." Bill didn't quite understand that. He appreciated proper food at relatively regular hours.

And of course it was nice too with a T-bone steak and mushrooms and corn and tomatoes and salad. And a beer with it. And a glass of Canadian whiskey with the coffee afterwards. I did the dishes and cleaned the kitchen, and afterwards we brought the whiskey bottle with us across to the cabin and put a tape in the 8-track cassette player running off a 12-volt car battery. 

Bill was sorting out some stuff when he suddenly remarked: "You didn't shoot yourself in the foot?" I didn't understand what he meant. "When you use the .44, never load it up with 6 rounds. The cartridge under the hammer can go off if the hammer is knocked." I never thought of that and really wasn't convinced that was actually possible. But it was custom locally as a 100 % safeguard never to load a revolver with more than 5 rounds and of course I submitted to that. 

"And also, it is not necessary always to go dragging a weapon with you every time you go out into the woods. Then you won't be able to run so fast if a bear should happen to come along," Bill re­marked and on a more serious note he continued: "By the way, watch out for the kick of this gun. Always hold it out with a stretched arm in front of you when you fire it. I was once sit­ting in here in the cabin when I saw a mouse run around down along the wall. I took the gun and shot at the mouse, but I held the pistol so carelessly out in front of me that it jumped back when I fired and the hammer whacked me right between the eyes." "Did you hit the mouse?" I wanted to know, but of course Bill had missed it completely. 

We sat and talked in the cabin and the hours went by. The days were long here in April and it wasn't until after 8 o'clock that we had to light up the gas pressure lamp. 

Bill dug out another small radio and connected it up to the camp's antenna system; then we were able to listen to Tundra News inside the cabin. After a while the level in the whiskey bottle had dropped considerably and around midnight Bill turned in. He always lay there and smoked a cigarette or two before he went to sleep. A cigarette was also the first thing he reached out for when he woke up in the morning; once he woke up, he was instantly clear-headed as if he had never been gone, and then he smoked veritably all the time. I wanted to turn off the cassette deck which was playing Bill's favorite tape, some middle-of-the-road instrumental music; but Bill stopped me. The player had an auto-reverse function so it was just playing the same tape over and over again. "But it drains all the power from the battery if it runs all night," I argued. "It doesn't matter, you leave it be," Bill replied. But when Bill was asleep I turned off the tape deck anyway before I went to bed myself. 

The next morning, the working week started at Karen Creek. For the following two weeks we worked in camp clearing up and checking out all the equipment, and we continued construction of the big new timber building. It was not until later in the second half of April that we got started mining up in the creek and I began to realize what digging for gold was all about. 

For the time being there was plenty to be done around camp it­self. We had to clear up the load from Fairbanks, put all the diesel and gasoline barrels in different places and look over the small cat - which turned out to be malfunctioning, the hydraulics didn't work properly. We had to drain all the hydraulic oil out of the system and heat it up over an open fire to separate from it a lot of contaminating water. 

The rest of the machinery in camp had to be checked as well. Most of it worked surprisingly well, even after such a long, cold win­ter. The two tracked vehicles started up immediately as soon as a couple of newly charged batteries were put into them. One was a small, yellow tractor which we never ended up using much. The other was a real peach, an old army surplus transporter which could go anywhere and which turned out to be very useful for moving equipment about. On the side of the tracked carrier Bill had spray-painted in printed letters: 'Karen Creek Limousine Service'. Sure, it was all in fun, but somewhere in his mind Bill was a little bit proud of what he had accomplished. And he had reason to be, he produced wonders here in his old log cabin workshop in the middle of Alaska's most northerly, inhospitable, secluded and largely uninhabited mountain range. 

The motor pool also included a two-wheeled vehicle, a silly little scooter which Bill himself had put together with his father one summer when his father was up for a visit. Now Bill and I pulled the scooter out of the old cabin and had some fun with it, going for joy rides down to the airstrip and back; but that was about the extent of the road network in these parts, so although good entertainment the scooter wasn't really of much practical use. 

Down at the landing strip were still sitting the snowmobile and the maroon-colored jeep out of which Bill had gotten the shotgun when we initially arrived at Karen Creek. 

And Bill was far from happy with that. One of the first evenings after he got back, at a time while there was still a bit left in one of the whiskey bottles, Bill suddenly said to me: "Why didn't you get the jeep and the snowmo­bile out?"

The thing was that before he and Jerry had left, Bill had asked me to get the two vehicles out before he got back. They had been hit by the huge glaciers spreading out from the Karen Creek delta and were sitting in 30-40 cm solid ice. I had dug away all the snow around the site and had worked on the ice with an ax, especially around the snowmobile, but it had been very difficult. I had boiled water and carried it down and poured in onto the metal, hoping it would get freed this way; but the water just froze back up. In the end I had abandoned the project. 

So I now explained to Bill that I had tried, but the ice was too thick, I had been afraid to hit the tires and the rubber tracks with the ax, a few days with above-freezing temperatures would do more good that a whole day's work.

"Hey, listen Morten, I think you have done alright here until now," Bill responded sternly to this. "I was impressed that you didn't complain when we left you here in this God-forsaken place, and I would really like to say to people around here, 'this boy is a real skookum kid'. But when I came back and saw that you hadn't managed to get those two vehicles out I was disappointed. Tomorrow we will each take an ax and we will go down and get those vehicle free - is that a deal?"

Of course it was a deal. And Bill loosened up when I didn't know what 'skookum' meant, so he had to explain it to me. That was typical for Bill, that he always kept quiet while things were going on; then much later, when he got the chance, he would sudden­ly bring up the subject and comment on it. Maybe Bill was a bit annoyed with himself too, in that he had not anticipated that the glaciers would reach all the way to the landing strip and then parked the vehicles somewhere else back last fall. But this I could never suggest; it was no point arguing with Bill, and he tolerated no kinds of criticism. 

True enough, the next morning we were down there at the landing strip, the two of us with our axes and more hot water. And we did get both the vehicles out of the ice, even though it took almost all day. 

We had to deliver back the large caterpillar that we had borrowed down in the Coldfoot camp. I was a bit apprehensive about driving across the Middlefork with it, would the ice be strong enough, would it be safe? There were now large cracks in the middle. But Bill wasn't at all concerned, according to him the ice would last another two weeks. What I didn't know then was that the water under the ice was not particularly deep. Even if the cat should fall through, it would never go under completely anyway. And we made if across without any problems. Bill drove the cat, I followed in the jeep so that we had transport for the trip back home. At one place, one of the many creeks supplying water down into the Middlefork from the hills had made such a mess of the Ice Road that the jeep simply couldn't make it through. There we had to leave the jeep and I rode on the cat a few kilometers the rest of the way.

In Coldfoot we were well received by the pipeline people. And we were treated to one of those luxurious meals that the oil field camps were famous for. Bill told me that for four years the camp had been all equipped and ready to spring into action, but environmental protests had delayed Alyeska in getting permit to build the access road and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. When they were finally given the green light and proceeded to start up the machines, all the engine blocks had frozen up and couldn't be freed, so all diesel engines had to be replaced. 

But now the camp was alive with hustle and bustle, people were milling about and there were vehicles coming and going, mostly to the south. This was a bit of a revival for Coldfoot, because earlier on - way back around the turn of the century - many people had lived here, thousands in fact. They had been lured up by the discoveries of gold around the Middlefork Koyukuk River. This had been the gateway to the Brooks Range, from Coldfoot and onwards it was all uphill into cold and desolate country; a few prospec­tors struck it rich, many just managed to get by, but most quickly went bust and had to return home. At that time, around 1900, Coldfoot was a classic boomtown with shops, offices, bars and whore houses. But the whole thing only lasted a short while, even shorter than in other northern gold mining towns; after just four or five years people abandoned the site. Now just a few remains of old log cabins and a primitive graveyard were left.

The boom that had now taken over from the gold fever was very much different by nature. Nobody settled here today, the men only came in on a four-weeks-on basis to make some quick bucks; then they would return back home to Texas or wherever for their four-weeks-off. And there were no bars and no whore houses this time around; the construc­tion crews were kept strictly in line. In fact, there were no women among the workers and all alcohol was banned. The guys in camp jokingly suggested that Bill and I should smuggle in a few cases of whiskey for them through Karen Creek, but it remained that, a joke.

Instead the pipe-line people gave us a present when we left, a big box of fresh food from their kitchen. They probably thought that gold miners existed every day on melted snow and biscuits, but of course they meant well. Bill and I had a nice walk back to where we had left the jeep; it was a mild day with no wind and a dull sun behind a thin cloud cover. There was no traffic on this section of the Ice Road now, and the snow-covered woods were eerily calm. 

Otherwise, most of our time during this period in the beginning of April, we spent building the new workshop. The large timber building that Bill had started constructing was supposed to be the new repair shop and storage room, a replacement for the old cabin. You could drive a vehicle through the door in one end of the large hall, and this way you could work with maintenance of the camp's motor pool and other equipment even during the winter. The workshop could easily be heated up inside with a stove or two. But for the time being, the main task was getting the build­ing erected and completed.

Bill and I drove out into the surrounding spruce forest and found some tall and straight trees. We cut them down with a chainsaw and removed all branches. Then we pulled the logs into camp with the army carrier. There we removed all bark from the trunks and flattened two sides. That was the hardest part, I thought, cutting the logs so they could be stacked; it had to be done with an ax and it took some practice to learn how to do it quickly and evenly so the logs were smooth and tight when they were stacked. 

Obviously two men cannot lift a huge spruce log, and we did not have a crane, but Bill had figured out a system of ropes and shackles and pulleys that allowed us to guide the logs up into place using the personnel carrier for pulling power. There was an electric power supply available in camp; a generator inside the old cabin provided 110 volts AC, and we would crank that one up whenever it was needed. Like now, when we had to operate the electric drill which made the holes used for bolting the logs together into walls. 

Any gaps between the logs making up the walls were carefully insulated. The frame for the roof we made out of prefabricated wood brought in from Fairbanks. We never managed to finally complete the new workshop that spring, but the main structure was there, the floor was covered in fine gravel, windows and roof were temporarily covered with heavy duty plastic sheets.

As the springtime progressed there was thaw every day. The first day with above minus temperatures was simply wonderful, a com­plete revelation, I had forgotten what warm fresh air felt like. I truly did not mind the winter and the frost, but suddenly spring was there and it was as if I had missed the warmth somehow after all. The air changed completely, there was moisture in it, it became so gentle to breathe in. There were smells again outside, you could sense the soft and fresh scent of spruce trees, pines and willow bushes. But the snow melted only slowly, Bill said that it was not until the frosty nights also stopped in the beginning of May that the snow rapidly disappeared.

I learned a trick for clearing the snow: you sprinkled sand over it! The sand would absorb the heat of the sun during the day and 'burn' its way to the ground. I cleared large patches like that around camp including the proposed plot for a vegetable garden, this way cultivation could start earlier. 

Thawing by day and frost by night created a hard crust over the snow, and Bill said that this was a tough time for the Moose. These heavy animals with small feet still had to plow their way through the snow while their enemies, the Wolves, now could speed across the hard surface, and the Moose were defenseless this way. 

But around camp we saw neither Moose nor Timber Wolf. Only the usual rabbits, which were getting more and more confident and by now had become semi-tame pets. I still harbored this dream of seeing a bear, a Grizzly Bear preferably. Hadn't Bill said that they usually saw bears around here every year? I questioned him further; I wanted to know if Bill had ever shot at a bear. "Yes, I have," he replied, "once while I was on my way down to Rabbit Creek to visit Andy down there, this Grizzly came walking towards me. I know, in hunting tales the bear is always enormously big, but this here was actu­ally a very large individual because I measured its tracks after­wards and other people saw the bear later, it was moving around the Middlefork for some time, it must have been one of the big­gest bears ever seen up here. But anyway, I moved over close to a tree and the bear followed me, he got up on his hind legs to take a good look at the situation. Damn it, he was taller than I was... But he came back down and continued forward towards me and I thought 'that's enough' and then I shot down in front of him with the revolver."

"Why didn't you climb the tree," I asked. "No, the tree I only had in the back of my mind as the last resort. And the bullet struck the ground right in front of the bear, you could clearly see spray from the impact, so the bear spun around and high-tailed out of there, he was really galloping along."

"I could serve up a number of bear stories," Bill continued, "most people living out here can. To mention another one, then a couple of years back when my ex-wife and son stayed here, it was during the winter, this here Black Bear came walking towards me just outside camp, maybe he was a little bit dense since he apparently hadn't made it into hibernation. I got out the revolver and pulled the hammer back and aimed straight at it. But 8 feet from me it stopped, I could almost touch it." "Weren't you scared to death?" I wanted to know. "No, not in the least. The bear was so small, and it just stood there sniffing some, then it walked off nice and peaceful again. But one more step and it would have had its brain blown out, that's weird to think about." "No, if the animals don't bother me, I don't bother them either."

Nevertheless, Bill had shot and killed a bear once at Karen Creek. It was in the middle of the summer that it first turned up. Bill was sleeping with the window wide open and he woke up by somebody sniffing him right into the face. It was the bear, a Grizzly sticking its head in through the window. Later the bear came back and it started making trouble and causing havoc. It tried to break into the kitchen on several occasions; it turned over the propane bottle outside, breaking open the gas pipe. One night Bill sat on guard out in the kitchen. When the bear came he shot it through the window at close range. He used the shotgun with the single projectile slug ammunition, and the bear died instantly. 

I asked if the detonation inside a small room like that had not been painfully loud but that did not seem to have been the case. And Bill also denied keeping the fur. "I just hooked the bear up to the tractor with a chain; then I dragged him a few hundred yards into the woods and dumped him. He is probably still there."

As it turned out, I never managed to see a bear at Karen Creek. Not this time, and not on any of my subsequent visits much later either for that matter. I had that experience coming to me later, when summer arrived and I ventured out into northern Alaska on my own.

Meanwhile, now in April, spring was slowly coming on. And one day Bill felt that it was about time that we got started digging some gold.

Before coming to Karen Creek, I knew nothing about digging for gold. All I had was a vague idea, something about an old man with a long beard sitting at a river with a mule in the background shifting sand around in a pan. Although it wasn't completely off the mark there was still a lot more to a mining operation than that.

First of all, we had to find a place along the creek which was suitable to work in and where the ice was about to clear. Bill obviously knew Karen Creek inside out and he already had some preconceptions about where one could do some early spring work.

Downstream near the camp, the creek still ran underneath some thick ice. To get drinking water a bit cleaner than melted snow - which by now was nothing more than diluted rabbit shit as Bill put it - I had cut through the Karen Creek ice near camp. It had been quite a job, there was more than 1/2 meter of ice to work through with the ax. But now it was done, and I drove down to the hole in the jeep every day to fill up the water buckets. But digging in this section of the creek was out of the question. We had to move further upstream. 

Up near the end of my snowshoe track, just before the creek narrowed down into a steep canyon, the water was now running almost ice free. Bill had been up along the track a few times and decided that this was where we should start work. It was approximately 2 km from camp, but there was some kind of trail most of the way and even though we had some problems on the upper parts of the distance, we were able to drive the small cat all the way up there. 

Using the small cat, Bill cleared a 100 meters stretch of the creek for snow and ice, so that the sun could start to thaw out the bank. And having checked out all the mining equipment at home, we loaded it onto the army carrier and hauled it up to the site. There was not much water in the creek; the snow-melting process had not really accelerated yet. To make the water so deep that you could dive into it - and to slow down the stream - Bill and I pulled on high rubber boots and waded into the water shoveling out gravel for hours creating a long pool. 

After a while I realized that the gold we were after did not lie randomly among the gravel, that if you sat down and panned some of the gravel at the edge of the creek you would find nothing. 'Bedrock' was the key term, all our efforts centered around this phenomenon. The gold was lying on top of the bedrock. Because gold has a specific gravity of 19.3 it is almost twice as heavy as lead and certainly much heavier than all the other gravel and debris in the river. So the gold will work its way downwards when the water moves it along and it will end up right over bedrock, in fact it will tend to be trapped down inside small cracks and crevices in the rock itself. 

Initially the gold will have originated from a so-called 'mother lode' up in the mountains. But in Alaska, most gold is not mined by excavating the ore from inside the rock as is done in South Africa for instance, so-called ‘hard rock mining’. There some of the mines are 3 km deep; huge quantities of hard granite, compact sediments and other rocks are drilled out and crushed, then treated mechanically and chemically to extract gold concentrate. There might only be 1-3 grams of gold for each ton of material in such industrial scale operations, so this type of mining process is very labor and capital intensive. 

In Alaska, another method called 'placer mining' is used and the same applies for the eastern Siberian region on the other side of the Bering Sea in Russia where the geographical conditions in many ways are similar to Alaska. In placer mining, you trace the gold that has been eroded by water out of the mountains and dig down to near bedrock in creeks, mountain streams and alluvial depressions, i.e. former river beds where the gold has been washed out and deposited. So in this kind of open surface mining, two things are important: How deep is bedrock, and what are the chances that there will be gold there when you reach it? 

At this particular section of Karen Creek, Bill didn't think that there would be large quantities of gold to find. But then bedrock was not far down here, so that made it worthwhile giving it a try. And in general, Bill preferred not to discuss how much gold might be where and which sections were promising. He just said that at the moment he was of the opinion that we ought to try this part of the creek, maybe there was something here to find - but naturally gold could be anywhere, he hastened to add. 

Actually this was an important part of the game: To study and evaluate the course of the stream carefully and select just the right spot where the path of the water-flow and the nature of the bedrock hidden under the gravel made it likely that gold had accumulated. This way you did not waste the precious summer weeks digging at an empty spot. But the kind of considerations that went into picking the right location Bill never revealed, this was what gold mining was all about, and a prospector never discloses his trade secrets. 

He also never told anybody how much gold was being produced, and he never elaborated on how other sections of the creek had been. He would make some imprecise remarks when he and I were walking along that this part around here had been 'pretty rich' or that he had worked here for a month without finding 'anything special', a lot of investigations and experience went into a successful operation, apart from the hard work.

It took a long time to level out the bottom of the creek, but as we had finally made a kind of pool and were reaching bedrock, the interesting part started. This was the step where bedrock itself had to be examined. One morning we heated up the cabin in camp well, and Bill went in to change into a wetsuit, he had to protect himself against the cold water. Then we drove up to location and rigged up the gold dredge. The dredge was run by a small petrol-driven engine which activated a pump. The engine and pump unit was floating on an inner tire-tube on the water, and the pressurized water ran through a hose to the dredge creating a powerful suction effect. It was like a big, underwater vacuum cleaner. When Bill dived into the water, he used the dredge to 'vacuum' the bedrock of the last thin layer of gravel. If there was any gold here, this is where it would be. Inside the gold dredge the gravel ran across a grating and the heavier particles, like gold debris, would fall down into a small cavity under the grating. It was my job to shovel away all the filtered gravel, the tailings, as they piled up around the gold dredge. 

Some of the tiny gold pieces Bill could actually see under water before they were picked up by the dredge, often they would stay back on the bedrock as the lighter gravel around them were sucked away. Those Bill picked up manually using a hand pump that looked somewhat like a giant syringe; it had a long, narrow point so that it could reach into cracks in the rock. Both the dredge and the hand pump, as well as most of the other equipment we were using, Bill had manufactured himself.

At regular intervals Bill had to take a break, working inside the water was strenuous. And he also needed a cigarette. It was always exciting for me to learn whether he had found anything when he emerged. But in this part of the creek there was apparently not much to find. In the end we emptied the content of the hand pump and of the trap in the gold dredge over into a pan, and Bill walked out into the water to wash out the gravel. Among fine black sand at the bottom of the pan were some small specks of metal with a deep-yellow, warm color. It was the gold. That we poured into a fruit jar; then we packed up the equipment and stacked it carefully in a neat pile and walked home. 

Bill changed back into regular clothes while I fixed us up something to eat and something hot to drink over in the kitchen. Bill came in and he poured the gold into a small frying pan and dried it on the stove. Gold has a very high melting point (over 1,000 degrees C), so there was no risk of melting the gold that way. Then he sat at the kitchen table and with a pair of tweezers he carefully picked out every single grain of the black sand which presumably was so heavy that it was able to mix with the gold. Then he got out a very delicate set of scales and weighed the gold.

Whenever we talked about gold, we used the American system where there are 20 pennyweights to an ounce which is 31.1 metric grams. That is a Troy Ounce, different from an Imperial ounce (28.3 grams) used in cooking recipes; there are 16 imperial ounces to a pound – all a bit confusing for a European, but I got used to it. But this gold here could not be measured in ounces, there were just a few pennyweights and no nuggets. A nugget is defined as a piece of gold weighing more than 2 pennyweights (3.1 grams). Small fragments that are not nuggets are called dust. Since the price per weight is higher for nuggets, they are the ones you want to find. 

So we didn't strike it rich today, but this gold was special none the less, it was the first of the season. And we could conclude that there were indeed deposits in that part of the creek, maybe we would find more during the next few days.

Bill had worked at Karen Creek for 8 seasons now. With the method Bill employed here, it was only possible to work during summers. In the old days, gold miners had worked during the winter as well. They lit up fires on the ground to thaw it out and dug mining shafts down to bedrock near promising river beds. The advantage being that the frost made the shafts secure so that enforcement works were unnecessary and the tunnels were always safe. The gravel that was excavated just on top of bedrock, the so-called pay-dirt, you left until spring, then you washed out the gold once the river started running. The trick was to let the water do as much work as possible, Bill often said. But that was a laborious exercise, and it was only worth it in very rich areas or at a time when traveling was difficult and many prospectors had to spend the winter on location anyway. Now nobody worked this way.

Originally Bill came to Alaska 12 years back, in 1962. He had first had a camp down south on the Kenai Peninsula. He survived the 1964 Alaskan earthquake, which was 9.2 on the Richter scale and caused over 100 casualties. On that day, Good Friday 27 March, Bill had taken a day off from the work and sat in a bar near Seward, one of the worst hit areas. Bill said: “First there was a little shake and we didn’t think too much of it.” “Then came a big one and we all looked at each other and said, ‘we gotta get out of here’. I made it out before the building collapsed.” Returning to his camp in a steep canyon nearby later, Bill found it covered by a landslide.  

It had been alright prospecting in the south, according to Bill, but like all prospectors he had fantasized about the big strike, and one summer he had ventured up into the Brooks Range to look around; ‘sniping’ Bill called this kind of prospecting, where you visit various sites and take some samples here and there.  

That was long before anybody except a few geologists with British Petroleum and Atlantic Richfield imagined that there could be oil on Alaska's North Slope, and anything north of Fairbanks was regarded as absolute wilderness. But Bill had walked into the Brooks Range with his sleeping bag, ax, pick, pan and the .44 Magnum and had started checking out the creeks. For even though you cannot perform a proper mining operation working with just a pick and a pan, a little 'handy work' in those sections where bedrock is almost exposed can give the prospector some idea about the potential of the stream. 

Bill spent most of that summer in this part of the Koyukuk region, walking through a wide area and prospecting many of the creeks for gold. But he found most at Karen Creek. He was here for a few weeks in 1966; he constructed a basic sluice contraption out in the water and shoveled gravel through it extracting the gold that way. He found a fortune. Every evening when he emptied the gratings in the sluice box and panned the pay-dirt he would find several ounces of dust, and nuggets - big nuggets. If there is anything that can move a person obsessed with gold mining like that it is the sight of a nugget. It is not just the monetary value, the fact that you can go into a bank and get dollars for it. It is much more than that, a nugget is something rare and beautiful which it costs many years of preparations and many days of hard work to dig out. All your aspirations of success are confined and depicted in this little lump of metal, all the hardships you suffered getting there suddenly seem irrelevant. The feeling of satisfaction and happiness that digging out and holding such a nugget can give is probably unimaginable for anyone who has not tried it. 

So Bill decided that Karen Creek was the place for him, this was where he wanted to work. He built a raft and floated down the Middlefork and further on to Bettles, from there he could fly into Fairbanks. And he went to the authorities to get the mining concession for Karen Creek. 

In the U.S.A. it was like this back then, that to get the right to mine a piece of public land you have to first physically mark the area and then apply for a claim. It will then usually be granted, and the fee is fairly small. The main requirement is that to keep the claim you have to put in some work on each block, at that time $100 per year per block. Bill applied for a claim to five blocks from the Middlefork and upstream covering all of Karen Creek. If the blocks are adjacent it is possible to keep the claim to all of them by working in this case for $500 per year on any one of the blocks.

Only Bill could not get the claim to Karen Creek, it had already been taken. Andy, who had his camp at Rabbit Creek south of Coldfoot, also had the claim to Karen Creek. So Bill contacted Andy and told him that he had worked at Karen Creek that summer, he declared how much gold he had extracted and paid Andy royalties of this. Then he asked Andy if he could buy the claim to Karen Creek from him. Henry demanded $6,000 for transferring the concession to Bill, that was a lot of money in the US at that time. The thing was, that since Andy had not worked at Karen Creek for years he really was not entitled to the claim in the first place.

"Why didn't you refuse to pay, that was nothing but pure swindle," I said when Bill told me about this. "And you certainly didn't need to pay royalties of all the gold you had just found - Andy had no way of knowing about this."

"No, I might have won a lawsuit about entitlement to the claim," Bill replied in his usual relaxed fashion. "But one shouldn't adopt other people's dubious methods; if you do you are no better than them. Besides, I didn't want to fall out with Andy. He is not so bad; he has actually been a good neighbor to me down at Rabbit Creek."

It was not clear who Andy had taken over Karen Creek from back then. But this whole area was old gold mining country, and there certainly had been work going on at Karen Creek before. Bill was always very aware of the remnant traces left by the 'old timers'. He seemed to have a lot of respect for them; they had lived and worked here under severe conditions. They dug a lot of gold out of Karen Creek in the old days, but they were just not so efficient; according to Bill there could still be plenty of gold left around those place where the old timers had worked, you could find it if you knew where to look.

The first gold miners came up to the Koyukuk region around 1899; 1900 to 1903 had been the rich years. They came in from the Yukon River following the waterways north to the Northfork, Middlefork and surrounding tributaries. That was after the famous gold rush in Klondike which started in 1896 and died out already in 1898. Klondike is actually just across the border in Canada. But at that time the frontier was of less significance, the usual route to the gold fields passed through Alaska, and many of the miners drifted back on into Alaska after working in Klondike. So Alaska - more than Canada - is usually associated with this incredible stampede made famous by Jack London and countless other authors, song-writers and film-makers. 

Throughout the following days, Bill and I worked up at the creek. But progress was slow. The ground was still more or less frozen, there was not much water-flow in the stream, much effort had to be spent just maintaining the pool so that there was enough water to dive in. And when we finally made it down to the bottom and cleaned out the bedrock, there was not enough there to make it worthwhile. After a week's hard work we only had two ounces of gold dust and a few tiny nuggets to show for it. This was less than we had to find each working day if the budget for the summer's activities was to be met. But Bill wasted no tears over this; he never showed any signs of frustrations. That was the way the game was played, he was content by just being out there playing along. 

There were a few other places up along the creek where Bill wanted to get started. We walked upstream to take a look, and it was clear to me that here the way of working would be a bit different. Bill had built a stone wall across the creek to dam up the water and here he had dug several meters down.

"Yes, it's a long way down to bedrock here," he said. "I think there is probably quite far to go yet. But we are going to make it to the bottom this summer, and I have a hunch that there is a fortune hidden down there." There it was again, he had a 'hunch', one of Bill's favorite expressions. 

Bill also wanted to work in one of the tributaries to Karen Creek, a small stream running down from the mountains through some tall cliff walls. But there was a lot of ice and snow up in those parts, especially on the slopes facing north from where that brook came. So that project had to wait a little longer. 

I had the impression that once we made it into the month of May we could really get started with the gold mining. Then the melting of all the snow would produce plenty of water, and the ground would quickly thaw out in the warmth of the sun. But in fact, the first half of May would be impossible to work in, Bill said. "During the first couple of weeks of May, the water in the creek is simply much too powerful," he told me, "just you wait and see, the cascades will come rushing down, it will be a torrent, there is no way you can dive in that, you would be swept away. Besides, the water is dirty as hell in the beginning, full of Porcupine shit from the hills. There is no visibility." I had to accept that.

Another thing, Bill had to make a trip down to Fairbanks soon. He had a police investigation pending and was charged by the courts, it was a case that worried him a great deal. Bill had been married once. It was a few years after he came to the Brooks Range. He met a dancer in one of the bars in Fairbanks. She was one quarter Indian and had two kids. Her name was Betsy. They got together and were married; they also had a child, a little boy. For three years the family lived together at Karen Creek.

They even spent the winters here; during the first one they stayed in Bettles, and Bill worked for Jerry helping him keep the landing strip clear of snow and maintaining his equipment. But the next two winters they spent right at Karen Creek camp, managing somehow in the darkness and the minus 40 degrees temperatures with two children and a baby. That was when Bill had built the cabin. When he referred to this period it was obvious that in a lot of ways it had been a good time for him, but the marriage did not last. Today Bill's ex-wife and his son stayed just north of California in the state of Oregon. 

In connection with the divorce and the economic settlement, Betsy had received a car on the condition that she paid tax and insurance for it. She had not done that, and during an argument over that one summer when Bill had visited Oregon, Bill had walked out and driven the car into a tree. "When she didn't want to pay the bills on that car she couldn't have it, and I certainly didn't want to own it," he reasoned. As the engine was still running after the collision, Bill had backed it up and driven into the tree again at full speed, and this time the car was totally wrecked. Maybe there are no laws against this kind of behavior, but it had happened near a residential area, some kids had been playing nearby, and one of the residents had filed a complaint against Bill for endangering their lives. And now Bill had been summoned to meet in court in Fairbanks one of the first days in May. 

Bill did not like this one bit. He could not be certain about how serious the charge was and what exactly the implications were going to be. He discussed with me what was likely to happen; I knew little the law but did not feel that the case was so worrying, in my opinion the incident would be treated as a minor traffic violation, and Bill was most likely to be let off with a small fine for dangerous driving. We agreed that Bill should contact me via Tundra News as soon as he had been in court. Then I would know if he would be detained in town or could return to camp immediately.

Bill was somewhat annoyed that we had not found more gold during the past week. He could have used some extra cash now, because while in town he also had to go to the Inland Revenue and settle last year's income tax. Besides, the gold price was favorable at the moment and going up all the time. It was then around $170 per ounce. And that was for the dust, which was not really powdery like dust but grainier, like very coarse sand or crushed rice. The nuggets were used directly by goldsmiths for jewelry and they fetched a 50% premium above the officially quoted gold spot-price. 

In those days there was great turmoil on the gold market. Until recently, the price of gold had been fixed at $35 per ounce. The government was obliged by law to sell anybody as much gold as he wanted to buy at this price. Only another law prohibited American citizens from owning gold in melted form! So the whole system was just a somewhat phony guarantee to keep the US dollar valuable and stable. But now the price of gold had been freed, and soon Americans would be allowed through new legislation to own gold, the $200 per ounce gold was just around the corner. That was a huge windfall for the gold producers obviously, including small-time miners like Bill. 

I teased Bill a bit by saying that the market was heading for a bust. Gold would soon lose its importance as a currency guarantee and as an international mode of payment. Once that happened, the Europeans would dump their gold reserves, private American speculators would be left carrying the loss and gold would drop to its industrial value which was ... how much ... $10 per oz?!

"Yeah," Bill just said, "that's possible. But I will still be out there messing about, even at $10 an ounce." Of course it never happened that way; in fact gold acted as a good store of value in the following years and went from strength to strength.  

Bill was really stricken with the gold fever. He could do a lot and was interested in many things, but at the bottom of it all there was this fascination with gold and anything related to gold and gold mining. It was more than an attraction; it was an obsession and an enchantment. He had never really done anything else apart from mining gold. He had learnt the trade in California where there is also gold in some of the hills, especially in the northern part of the state.

Right after high school, Bill worked for a while installing high-voltage electric cables from mast to mast, he was interested in power generation and electrical work. One year he had worked for his brother-in-law as a mechanic on a race track, Bill was in general interested in motor racing and anything to do with motor sports such as the NASCAR races. He had also spent two years doing his national service in the army. That was before the US got an all-professional army but in-between the two Asian wars in Korea and Vietnam, so Bill never saw any action. And he did not think too much of the army anyway.

It was after his military service that Bill had traveled north to Alaska. Most falls he went back south to his family in California, but he had also stayed in Alaska during the winter some years and taken on regular employment. I suspected that might have been after summers where the gold prospecting didn’t fully pay off. Some months he had worked on an offshore oil production platform out in the Cook Inlet - the bay near Anchorage. But he didn’t think highly of his career in the oil business: "I had to walk around in a coverall with a notebook and check some gauges and try to look busy; I couldn't stand that for long." 

Bill wanted to go by mail-plane when he had to leave Karen Creek for that court appearance in Fairbanks. There was a postal service by plane to the camp. The plane that served Wiseman from Bettles flew twice a month, every other Tuesday. And Bill had arranged it such that the plane stopped over at Karen Creek from now on and for the rest of the summer. When the next mail-plane came in on one of the last days of April, Bill would join it, that would get him as far as Bettles and from there he would try to get a lift with one of the larger transport planes for Fairbanks. 

I was standing at the new timber workshop, painting the logs with a protective wood-oil, when the mail-plane came in. It swooped down low over the camp one time to announce its arrival. Bill and I jumped into the jeep and drove down to the landing strip, the plane was already on the ground taxiing up towards us. It was a small single-engine plane fitted with skis; there were no other passengers, so Bill got in on the front seat once we had unloaded the mail and the supplies. With a roar and a cloud of blinding snow the plane took off down the clearing and lifted off across the river ice, steadied itself in the air and headed south. I was on my own again at Karen Creek for a while.

The weather was getting real warm now. In the beginning of May you could walk around in the middle of the day in shirt-sleeves only, temperatures were around 10° C in the shade, much more in the sun. The frost at night had stopped, there was light from the sky all evening almost until midnight. The snow was disappearing, so rapidly in fact that you could see it diminish virtually day by day, especially on slopes facing south.

One day I thought I could hear something, a faint rumbling sound. Until now the silence in camp had been total, but now the stillness was broken. The sound gradually grew louder and louder as the day went on, it was coming from the river. When I walked down there my suspicion was confirmed: Instead of being a lifeless, snow-covered clearing, the river was turning into a real waterway. The water surged forward with irresistible force, the ice had broken up into floes which were constantly shifted around by the power of the water, crashing and grinding together producing that rumbling sound I had head far off. There was once again life, sound and movement in the landscape.

On my way back up the caterpillar track I noticed some funny looking scrapes and holes several places in the open ground. The cat could not possibly have made these. When I saw the prints of big paws nearby, the case was clear: A bear had been here, digging for roots in the cleared patches. The river had broken up, the bears were active, and summer was on its way in Alaska.

This time I had plenty to do during the week I was alone at Karen Creek. I painted the whole kitchen inside and outside, the tin roofs of the cabins were coated with silver paint, all wood works in camp I varnished twice. Then I drove up along the creek in the jeep to a certain place in the woods where some birch trees were growing. I cut the trees up with the chain saw and transported them down to camp where I chopped and stacked the logs as firewood. Birch wood is hard and produces twice as much heat per volume as spruce wood does. There was birch firewood in camp for the next two years once I was through.

Another thing I had promised Bill to do was preparing the vegetable garden for planting. I sprinkled sand and dirt over the rest of the snow, it all disappeared the next day and I started working the top soil over so it could defrost. Bill would bring seeds with him from Fairbanks and after that we could start sowing soon. 

The combination of snow and bright sunshine lasting almost endlessly this time of year was very hard on the eyes. Under some circumstances it was difficult even to keep them open, like the day I had been down at the landing strip seeing Bill off, my eyes were playing tricks on me coming back, and for a while I couldn't really use them at all. I found a pair of sunglasses in the cabin after that and wore them when the glare got too bad. I got sun-burnt too, painful red patches in funny places like under my chin and under my nose and ears - the shine was coming from below reflected by the snow! 

I found out now why Bill was always wearing a hat, it really was useful under these conditions protecting the head against the burning sun and the cold air. I found an old hat of Bill's and wore it a few times during this period, it was an old miner's hat from Mexico that Bill did not use any more, he had brought a new one just like it with him that spring, in fact that hat was sort of his trademark.

Every evening I listened to Tundra News on the radio. And one day the message was there: "Bill wants to let Morten at Karen Creek know that everything is alright in Fairbanks, and that he will be back up at the creek on Tuesday." After some commercial breaks all the messages were repeated and I wrote down the one for myself although it wasn't that hard to remember. So Bill was not detained, and on next Tuesday I should be on the look-out for a plane.

Bill arrived on that Tuesday as announced. The plane flew around camp a bit and did a detour up along the creek before it landed; I was already there with the jeep when it touched down on the landing strip.

"Well, the bears didn't get you," Bill grinned. "No, not yet," I replied, I was cheerful as well and loaded Bill's bags and boxes with new supplies into the jeep.

The plane was one Bill had chartered in Fairbanks to fly up here non-stop, so the pilot agreed to having a cup of coffee and seeing the camp before he went all the way back. Bill knew how to fly and he had a single-engine airplane himself for a while, so he was very familiar with the Fairbanks-Karen Creek trip having done that many times on his own. He told about how he the first time he arrived at the creek in the spring had to fly low across the same spot on the landing strip many times over to make a track that could carry the skis of the plane in the deep snow. That took some skill to do. But he had never had any emergency landings or accidents. He had sold the plane as it got too troublesome and expensive to keep and maintain. Anyway, there would soon be a permanent over-land connection to camp. The fellow who bought the plane off Bill managed to go out and wreck it on one of his very first flights. He attempted to land on a river gravel bank to hunt down a Moose he had seen from the air and failed. He was not badly hurt himself, but the plane was demolished and never flew again. 

When the chartered plane had gone back to Fairbanks there were beers on the table one more time, and Bill told me that everything went smooth as silk down in Fairbanks. All charges against Bill had been dropped once he gave evidence and told the judge how everything was. The Inland Revenue meeting had gone well too; Bill had agreed to pay 10% of his net income from last year's operation as taxes on the spot, and then that matter was settled.

Now there was a break in the diving. True enough, the melting of the snow had completely transformed Karen Creek. The water was just gushing down, you couldn't even cross the creek except in a few places wearing high rubber boots covering your legs up till the crutch. The water was murky and dense with debris and particles.

But Bill wanted me to get started up along the small mountain brook, at that place the snow-melting did not do any harm, on the opposite it made work much easier. Bill showed me the slope he wanted eroded down until bedrock was exposed. There were some remnants of an old log cabin on the top of the hill, and Bill said that the old-timers had built this one long ago, to his best estimate it might be located ironically right on top of an important pocket of gold deposits, unfortunately bedrock was pretty deep here.

Before I could get started breaking down the slope, we had to build a contraption that could filter out any gold that might be hidden in the material I would send downstream. We needed a so-called sluice-box, a long staircase of wooden boxes covered with grating, all water and mud and gravel should flow across this one on its way down. This was actually the classical routine in placer mining: To clear bedrock with shovels, bulldozers and water hoses and then send all material through the sluice-box sieving out the gold. Bill's procedure of diving down into the water and especially checking cracks in the bedrock visually was a more nontraditional, although at times very rewarding method.

For the sluice-box we had to use some material which Bill had stashed in a depot under some rocks further up Karen Creek. Some timber, planks, wooden crates, digging equipment, water hoses et c. And it was hard work carrying it across because you had to do a long detour to a certain place at the creek where it was possible to cross without getting the rubber boots wet. After that you had to climb up along the rocky brook to the slope near where the old cabin was. On each trip you could only manhandle a small load up the steep rock face, so it was necessary to walk up and down many times. 

Bill had told me which way to go, but I decided that to speed up the transport I wanted to make a short-cut across an ice-bridge that was still standing over Karen Creek right below the cache. The first time I crossed everything went well. But when I had to carry two heavy steel gratings for the sluice-box across the ice, I suddenly fell through. 

The ice-bridge was elevated about a meter over the water so I fell a bit before my legs hit the water. They did not touch bottom but were swept away under me by the current as soon as they reached the water. The whole thing happened so quickly that I just found myself struggling down under the ice trying to regain my footing before I even realized what was going on. I got a hold of some rocks and pushed myself back to the hole in the ice, I now stood in the torrent, the water reached my waist, the ice reached my neck, and I held on to the ice trying to keep my balance. Now I could see how thin the ice shield really was, just a few centimeters. 

I called Bill who was standing nearby at the stockpile, in the noise of the water I had to use the top of my voice. I shouted that I had fallen through and had lost the gratings in the creek, they were completely gone. That was the worst part - those stainless steel grills were invaluable for the operation.

Bill came walking across slowly with a big smile on his face. Then he stepped carefully on the ice and held an ax towards me. I thought Bill wanted to help me out of the water and reached for the handle but Bill said quietly: "Cut down the ice around you and see if you can find those gratings again."

I quickly gave up cutting the ice. It was easier to crawl underneath it, dive into the water and feel the bottom for the metal. It was an eerie place under the ice, a faint yellow light penetrated from above into this shallow cave. Sometimes the water was about to sweep me away; but the ice-bridge came to an end about 10 meters downstream, so I was in no real danger of drowning. And I located the gratings; one had been carried five meters downstream under the ice by the current. 

I crawled up onto the ice again and made it across on my stomach, pushing the gratings in front of me. I was really uncomfortable after that in my wet clothes. Bill suggested that I went home and changed, but it was almost an hour's walk each way and I felt I had caused enough disruption for now; I stayed and worked for the rest of the day as if nothing had happened, my clothes drying out slowly in the sun.

To break down the earth wall, we placed one end of a water hose into the stream far above the place where we worked. That created a water supply under strong pressure, and I sprayed the embankment eroding down the mud and the sand; vegetation and large boulders I had to remove by hand and throw down on the other side of the sluice-box.

Every day I packed myself a lunch box at home in the morning and hiked up along the creek to my little brook where I worked till evening came. There was some gold here but not much. But Bill was optimistic, the gold was further in and we would get at it sometime he said. He told me to cut down six long, even spruce trees and cut off all branches. This was only the beginning, during the snow melting season next year Bill wanted to build a dam here for diving and then some timber logs had to be ready by then. I packed a chainsaw in my bag one day and cut down the trees that were required. 

"Always remember to cover up the tree stumps with branches when you are through," Bill instructed, "so that they cannot be seen from the air." He was often a little unsure about how much he could alter the environment around Karen Creek, and he certainly did not want any trouble with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game which patrolled the state stringently, especially during

hunting season. As I understood it, Bill had the right to cut some trees for building cabins, but exactly how much timber he could take out did not seem completely clear to me. 

Bill was also worried that the operations in the creek would produce pollution in the form of debris downstream that could damage the spawning grounds for fish and other aquatic wildlife. This was during a period when the environmental issues in the US were much in the news; they have been ever since really, I guess. The environmentalists had by now created some forceful pressure groups and there was a lot of debate about ecology and nature preservation. Bill expressed a degree of contempt of these here 'birdwatchers' who did not mind living in heated houses and driving cars and enjoying the other benefits of civilization, but who campaigned against the industries and the people who made this lifestyle possible, for example the mining- and the oil-industry. But he also liked nature and had a strong wish to live in harmony with it. There was an unsolved conflict of interests here. 

When Bill used the expression 'birdwatchers' about the people who criticized the oil-companies for their developments in Alaska, I always felt a bit hurt, I was very interested in birds. Especially now that interest had reappeared, it was inevitable - there were birds everywhere. Up at the mountain canyon I every day saw a pair of metallic greenish-blue Tree Swallows, a pair of Ravens were breeding in the canyon below the brook, and at the creek there were American Dippers foraging near the water. Often a Rough-legged Hawk and sometimes a Golden Eagle would come soaring out high over the mountain slope. The migrants had returned and there was suddenly a myriad of song birds out in the terrain: American Robin, other thrushes, warblers, Dark-eyed Junco, White-crowned Sparrow. Birds I had never seen before but which produced a delightful concert of chipping calls, as well as more melodious songs, coming from all over the place. 

The tranquility of winter was over and all kinds of lifeforms generated sounds and activity everywhere. It was a miracle how this silent and frozen void of a few weeks ago had been transformed into a green and busy haven for life.

At this stage, Bill decided that we had worked at the brook long enough. Now it was time to rest for a while and take a break for a day or two. While I had been working at the stream, Bill had been busy down in camp. With the new welding machine he had altered the caterpillar so that it was better suited for clearing gravel out in the creek. He had also constructed a new and larger electrically operated drill. And then he had put an outboard engine on the boat. Now that the river had broken up, Bill was only waiting for the largest of the ice floes to disperse, then he wanted to go for a ride upstream to the village of Wiseman and visit his friends and colleagues up there. Bill had often talked about Wiseman and about different people living there, by now I wouldn't mind a trip up meeting some of them myself.

Bill had never had a proper boat at Karen Creek before. The boat he had brought in now was a sleek, flat-bottom fiberglass craft; I had been with him when he selected it while we were in Anchorage in what seemed ages ago. The motor Bill had taken out of the snowmobile and modified to drive a propeller. It was too bad that we did not have a snowmobile anymore, because that was a fun vehicle that could really push at a considerable speed across the snowfields. But with the snow going and the running water coming on, the change in transport was logical. 

At that time the annual migration of Caribou in Alaska was getting under way. Every spring several hundred thousands of the northern race of the American reindeer move up through the Brooks Range. The winter the animals spend down in the tree-covered interior Alaska where there is food and shelter available all year, then during summer they graze north of the mountains on the endless expanses of tundra along the North Slope, and they have their calves there; in autumn they migrate back south again. Most Caribou migrate through Anaktuvuk Pass north-west of Karen Creek, but some animals cross over the mountains along other passes and quite a few follow the Middlefork valley. While I was on my own at Karen Creek, in the beginning of May, I saw a small heard of Caribou standing below the camp one evening. But they trotted away across the glaciers once they spotted me, and I had not seen any since. Now the migration would get started in earnest Bill said, and he would like to have one animal shot. He used to do that every year if he got the chance. Reindeer meat was not really his favorite food, but it did provide some variation in the camp diet, and he saved a bit on the food budget. Actually you had to have a license to hunt Caribou, but the authorities closed one eye when it was the case of a permanent resident taking out one or two animals for his own consumption. Nevertheless Bill had a somewhat bad conscience about doing it anyway. 

Then one day Bill said to me, "come on, let's go hunting." We jumped into the army carrier and since it was on tracks we were able to just drive across country as we pleased. Bill started up through the woods. I did not want to pretend to be an expert on this subject, I knew very little about big game hunting, but I did try to suggest that we headed down towards the river instead, thinking that the Caribou would follow the low ground and the rivers on their journey. But Bill wanted to go upwards to get a better view over the valley. He had brought a pair of binoculars and the Winchester .30-06 with the telescope. It was a splendid trip up through the thin, sub-arctic forest, from the hills you could look out over the whole of the Middlefork valley. But we did not see any animals, not even tracks. 

That afternoon I picked up the .30-06 and went for a walk down to the river. I did not really go hunting, mostly I wanted to see if I could spot a bear; remember, I had seen those bear tracks down around there earlier in the month when the river broke up. 

But instead of bear I saw a flock of Caribou at the river. I was standing down at the end of the landing strip and the reindeer were walking slowly north along the banks over on the other side. It was pretty far, the distance was about 200 meters. There were 30-40 animals in the herd, some were partly hidden behind some willow-bushes and some gravel banks. The first animals reached a small stream running into the river over there and stopped, hesitating to cross. 

I laid down on the ground and rested the rifle on a small hump; I took aim at the Caribou in front. When it slowly took a few steps forward into the water to cross the stream I pulled the trigger. The Caribou jumped up with a jerk splashing the water high, then it spun around and ran back with its antlers lifted high in the air. It disappeared from view behind a gravel bank. I had missed. The rest of the herd turned around as well and in panic I fired two more shots at two other animals in the flock. But the Caribou were now moving at full speed, the cross in the scope was dancing around when I tried to follow them, and the Caribou I shot at just continued without taking notice. The herd quickly settled down again and stopped, but this time I composed myself and I did not shoot anymore.

Instead I ran all the way up to camp to tell Bill what had happened. As it turned out, I ran straight past a Moose on the way, the first I had seen that spring; it was not shy at all, it just stood there close by at the edge of the forest, sluggish and trusting as Moose are. Maybe that was why I could not make myself shoot at it; it would be like killing a cow on a pasture. Which was a stroke of luck, Bill later said that he did not want any Moose shot; it was simply too big and too much work to handle and we did not need all that meat.

Completely out of breath I busted into the cabin where Bill sat and told him what had occurred. Bill had not heard the shots but he casually walked out to the jeep and we drove down to the river. The Caribou were still standing over there, and Bill sat for about five minutes smoking a cigarette and looked at them, he did not say a word. 

"Go ahead," I said eagerly, "try a shot; I am sure you can hit one from here." "Are you crazy," Bill replied. "There are men working on the road behind over there. Those .30-06 bullets go a long way. And you don't shoot across a river, we don't even know if it is possible to get to the other side." 

Bill demanded that every one of the three empty brass-cartridges from my shooting were located in the grass and collected. Then we drove back home, not much wiser but sporting a number of new mosquito bites, there were now multitudes of these bugs down by the river. 

"We will have to paddle the boat across the river and check if you did hit one of the Caribou after all," said Bill. "If there is a wounded animal in the heard we will set ourselves up over at Jeannie Creek and pick it out when they all start moving north again. I don't think that the two later shots did any harm, but you might have hit the first animal." Jeannie Creek ran into the Middlefork from the east, just opposite Karen Creek. 

But first of all Bill wanted something to eat, so we went into the kitchen and started cooking a meal. Just then I spotted some Caribou standing in a small group out on the ice fields below camp. It was probably a different herd, because although Caribou swim quite well it was unlikely that they would cross the powerful river right here. This time Bill did the shooting. He sneaked down along the edge of the woods, he wanted to get close and took his time about it. When he fired, one of the reindeer tumbled over instantly. Bill came walking slowly back and started messing about with a chain for the jeep.

"Hurry, hurry," I shouted, "we have got to get down and see if the animal has been killed." And in actual fact it had not. I could not stand looking at the Caribou lying there; it was twisting and turning trying to get on its feet. When Bill said that it was deadly wounded and would be finished soon I snatched the rifle and said that if Bill would not kill it I would.

"OK-OK," Bill replied, "run up to the cabin and get the revolver. We have spent enough .30-06 ammunition for one day."

With the revolver Bill shot the Caribou between the eyes. The rest of the herd had settled down further behind on the ice delta and stood there gawking at us.

We dragged the carcass up into camp behind the jeep. The fur was worthless anyway, it was full of some disgusting-looking, grape-sized parasites, mite-eggs they were or something like that. Bill said the Eskimos picked those out and ate them as a delicacy. The reindeer was a poor old thing; its teeth had been ground down to almost nothing, what meat was there would probably be tougher than shoe leather. "I tried to find a yearling calf in the heard, but there didn't seem to be any," Bill apologized.

We hung up the Caribou by its hind legs in a wooden tripod and skinned it and sawed it into quarters. On that farm in Canada where I spent the winter, we butchered our own Hereford calves, so I knew how to help with that. Then we put the pieces into the old cabin for storage. The cheeky Gray Jays came over and pecked at the remains. 

Then the two of us drove down to the river, pulling the boat on a trailer behind the jeep. Bill did not want to risk the new outboard engine with so much ice still in the water, so we paddled across. We started a few hundred meters upstream working our way through the icy torrent landing on the gravel banks on the other side. And there it was, a Caribou lying in the sand, deader than a door-handle, as Bill remarked. Later on - once we skinned the animal - we could see that the .30 caliber bullet had entered at the shoulder and had hit the heart which had been crushed into mush. Without a heart, the creature had turned around and had run 15 meters behind the gravel bank before it fell over. 

It turned out to be a long evening for Bill and me. It was almost midnight by the time we managed to get the Caribou transported across the Middlefork river. We proceeded to skin it at once; it never really turned dark at night this time of year anyway. Around 2 am Bill said that by the way, we never got going with that dinner. So he went into the kitchen and put a couple of T-bone steaks on the frying pan while I finished the job and put away the second Caribou nicely cut into quarters. For me that was the end of my hunting career; I did a lot of target practicing, but I never shot at another living being after that day. 

It was shortly after our Caribou hunting adventures that Bill and I took a trip up to the neighboring village of Wiseman. The ice was rapidly emptying out of the Middlefork River, and Bill had the new outboard engine mounted onto the fiberglass boat. The going was pretty slow up against the current. Bill estimated the speed of the water at maybe 20 km/hour, so if the engine could produce a speed of 30 km/hour we were in reality only doing 10. Sometimes it seemed as if we were not moving at all, a person walking on foot on the bank next to us would have passed us!

It was a day with the most terrible weather. With the warmth of late spring, we had seen more low clouds lately; it did not rain often in the Brooks Range, but when it did like right now for instance it was pouring. When the sky really opened up, we pulled over and went into cover on the bank under a tarpaulin until the skies cleared a bit. 

Wiseman was just a small settlement on a flat and open section of the Middlefork western embankment where Wiseman Creek met the Middlefork. The Middlefork Koyukuk River actually came to an end about here, or rather started just north of Wiseman where Dietrich and Bettles Rivers met. There were something like 20 timber buildings scattered around the village area, but most of them were not maintained and did not appear inhabited. Like e.g. the pride of the town, a two-story log cabin which had once functioned as assembly hall but which now seemed rather run-down. 

Today people lived in just 4 or 5 of the cabins. An old Eskimo lady and her daughter made a living from hunting and fishing. A converted city dweller and his wife were fur trappers. And a few more families stayed here on a more or less regular basis doing some hunting and some gold mining in the creeks nearby. They all knew Bill, and they all apparently had a high regard for him.

But first of all we walked over to say 'hello' to Charlie. Charlie was a retired gold prospector, a small-boned person of around 55 years who compared to some of the giant men we had met at Coldfoot camp had a fragile and kind of intellectual look about him. Bill had told me before we arrived that Charlie knew more about what was going on in the nation than most people down in the big cities, he subscribed to Times and Newsweek and listened to distant radio stations every day. He was now in charge of the air strip in Wiseman, he was postmaster too and handled all communication with the outside world over his two-way CB radio. He stayed in a nicely done-up log cabin with a large vegetable garden. Of course he did not make much money, but he seemed to have a good life.

Charlie had just had a visit from a Black Bear on the night before. It had tried to break into his cabin while he was asleep. He said he had woken up and seen a fury front leg on its way in under the door. But he had just chased the bear away and he had not shot at it.

Charlie owned a small jeep and we used it for a trip up along Wiseman Creek and further north almost to the watershed, to Nolan Creek. Here worked 'the best gold miner in the Brooks Range', according to Bill: Harry - he was 75 years old! When we got to Harry’s camp he was mining away just below his house, he was pushing gravel into a huge sluice contraption with an enormous caterpillar. That was one major mining operation he had here. You would not have guessed that this person was 75 years old as he jumped down from the cat and walked bouncily up to the house to greet his visitors. Bill had brought with him a case of Schlitz canned beer as a present (“Schlitz-Schlitz, gives you the shits”, as Bill so poetically would say). Harry showed off some of the impressive nuggets he had found this spring, a couple were the size of an American quarter dollar coin, probably 1 oz+ each. I could not figure out what he was using all that money he had to be making for. Bill said that Harry only went into Fairbanks once every winter, and then he only stayed for a few days until he had sold his gold and done his shopping. Up here in the mountains he certainly could not spend his money.

Bill had often talked about these two, Charlie and Harry. There was something like a close and natural friendship between the three of them, a sort of bond; although they did not meet very often, you could sense it when they were together. But then, these were three men a bit out of the ordinary.

Harry had some more claims further down-stream at a tributary to Wiseman Creek and those he had leased out to an office person from Fairbanks who wanted to try the life of a gold miner. As it turned out, this was the same guy who had bought and subsequently wrecked Bill's airplane. All four of us now drove down to see how he was doing. He lived in a cabin near the creek with his Japanese wife. He wasn't in, and when we pulled up to the house and jumped out of the open jeep, his wife went inside and locked the door. Bill showed some understanding for her surprising reaction: "We must look like something of a tough crew when we drive in like this," he said. 

Soon the miner turned up and showed us around; he was a private and subdued person who had an unobtrusive way about him, we never were invited into the house to meet his wife. When we drove off again from there, Bill shook his head at the gold mining arrangement we had seen. As it turned out, the newcomer did not find much that summer, I heard later that he left the creek before the lease expired. I always felt kind of sorry for the guy when I thought about him, standing there so quietly at his gold mining set-up which did not work.

Back in Wiseman, Bill and I did a tour of the village and saw the other neighbors. As always whenever people got together in this part of Alaska, the new road and the pipeline was the burning issue of discussion. The folks in Wiseman did not like any of this, and especially not the road. Mostly because they did not know what their own status was going to be now. They hardly owned the homes, where they had lived for years; they had paid maybe $100 for such a house or built it themselves on state land. Could Alyeska just displace them now? When the access road was finished, Alyeska would turn it over to the state for maintenance, it would become a permanent, public road and hunters and tourists would gain easy access to the mountains. The consequences were uncertain.

But not all locals were just victims of Alyeska's developments; many grabbed the opportunity to make a quick buck. Alyeska had to pay large sums in compensation whenever building the road and the pipeline across creeks covered by mining claims, even if they were worthless. Bill had the claim to such a creek, Jeannie Creek opposite Karen; he had not made a deal with Alyeska yet but did not expect to get more for the concession than what it was worth, which was not all that much. But some clever person from Fairbanks had bought the claim to all of Middlefork's east bank, and the locals laughed at him when he every year drove his caterpillar around the banks for a while to keep his claim, because there was no gold there - but he probably expected that there would be plenty in the pockets of Alyeska once negotiations for compensation started. Another entrepreneur had bought the mining rights early to some gravel deposits south of the mountains. As quality gravel for the road was in short supply, Alyeska had been forced to deal with him, although he squeezed them for a fortune and retired a multi-millionaire after that transaction. That was how the stories went in the village anyway, I am not sure how much of this was true.

That evening Bill and I boarded the boat again and went back home. And now we were going down-hill with the current; since we had to run the engine full speed to be able to maneuver, we were doing in excess of 50 km/hour through the bends of the river. I at times felt that the speed was somewhat alarming. Mishaps do happen on the river. Bill had once told about two men from Wiseman who one summer had an accident with their motorboat on the river near Karen Creek. They had lost control going downstream through one of the bends; the boat had plunged into the bank and hit a tree. They had come tumbling into Bill's camp, one had three broken rips, he was in chock and pale as a sheet. He had suffered terribly while Bill went down to Coldfoot to arrange for a helicopter to evacuate them both. I had suggested that Bill kept an emergency supply of morphine, like they do on fishing vessels for that kind of an emergency. But under all circumstances, it was very important to be careful and not get hurt in a place like this. Anyway, we arrived safely back in camp after a short but exhilarating ride. 

Last summer, Bill himself almost got into some bad trouble. He had developed a stomach ache, initially he decided it was just due to some Caribou meat he had eaten being off, but the pain did not go away, it got worse. As he was about to make a trip to Fairbanks anyway, he had quickly assembled a raft out of logs and had floated down to Coldfoot;, once there, he hitched a plane ride to Fairbanks and went to see a doctor. He had been warded immediately suffering from acute appendicitis, the appendix was just about to burst. If Bill had not made that trip to Fairbanks he could have died. 

"Did you have to pay for the hospitalization," I asked, I was interested in how the American social security system worked. "No, not really, they came running with all these forms when I said that I had no money to pay, and if I signed those the state would cover the costs. But I didn't want to sign. I was allowed to owe the money and settled the bill later that fall, once I had sold some of my gold."

Summer had come to Karen Creek. We removed the plastic cover from the windows, put up mosquito screens instead. The snow was gone and the temperature quickly increased to above 20 degrees in the shade. Bill and I started the generator, and we took turns cutting our own hair with the electric hair-cutter, ending up sporting fresh new summer crew cuts. 

I dug up the garden and planted flowers and vegetables in the soil. I put up a chicken-wire fence around the plot so that the rabbits would not jump in and eat the young plants when they emerged. The Red Squirrels had come out of hibernation; this was the American form, different and a bit smaller than the European animal by the same name. They were cute little fellows with long tails and some funny, very jerky movements. They uttered a sudden sneezing call when alarmed, and they were alarmed a lot! They too soon got very bold; they would even jump all the way into the kitchen on their constant search for edible matter. Bill shot at them with the .22 caliber rifle, they chewed the electric wiring in camp to bits he said, but he never hit any. A bear trampled right through the garden one day, devastating my nice little rabbit fence in the process; but it happened while Bill and I were sitting inside the kitchen and we only saw the tracks, never the bear. 

Then one day high over the camp I spotted a formation of geese making their way north up through the mountains. "Look at the geese," I said to Bill, "they are on their way up to the tundra." I myself was longing to go up there. I was yearning for the north; I wanted to see what it was like on the other side of the Brooks Range. I wanted to see the tundra where no trees grow, the Arctic Ocean; I wanted to go as far north as it was possible in Alaska, see what critters lived there. 

The deal between Bill and me was that I should work at Karen Creek until spring. In June, two divers would come up from Anchorage and help Bill extract gold from the bottom of the creek. Bill's sister and brother-in-law were also due to arrive up from California, so he would have plenty of help. And I was keen to venture out into northern Alaska and look around during the summer months; I also wanted to photograph some of the Arctic birds if I could - bird photography was a hobby of mine. 

But I had not forgotten my promise to myself: to see some more of the Brooks Range mountains, the vow I made as I sat up and enjoyed the view from Karen Dome earlier in the spring. So I told Bill that I preferred to quit the work at the creek on the 1st of June. Then I intended to walk through the mountains across to Anaktuvuk Pass and from there catch a plane to Bettles and on to Fairbanks. 

Bill thought that was a poor idea: "In the early summer all the mountain streams are filled with water, you will have some real problems crossing many of the creeks, let alone the major rivers. If you want to you can come back here for a while in the fall, you should walk the opposite way. Psychologically that is also better. Anaktuvuk Pass is nothing - just a collection of rotting Eskimo shacks, that place makes a poor target for a long hike. If you do the walk in the beginning of August, maybe then I can use a bit of help here at the creek before you are off again."

So Bill came up with a better idea for my departure. He himself liked to travel on the river, and he suggested that I do the same thing. There was a small inflatable rubber dinghy among the equipment in camp, and I was welcome to borrow this one, Bill said. Then I could float downstream on the Middlefork River, into the Koyukuk River and further on into the Yukon and all the way to the Bering Sea for that matter, if I wanted to. 

I appreciated Bill's consideration and the interest he showed in my travel plans, and I agreed to these suggestions. Sure, Bill laughed a bit at me when I sneaked around camp with my camera trying to capture some little bird on film, but he respected my intense interest in the natural world and the wildlife of Alaska, and he really made an effort helping me experiencing as much of the state as possible.

I told about how I planned to go to Point Barrow and to St. Lawrence Island before returning to Karen Creek via Anatuvuk Pass. Bill replied that he had never been to any of those place; but he wouldn't mind going some day. The furthest north he had ever been was to Umiat some distance north of the Brooks Range. He had been there a few times while he had his own plane, and he had been offered a job in the village as manager of the airfield and communications, which he of course had politely declined. 

Bill urged me to stop over at Mascot Creek when I did my walk through the mountains, I would pass right by it. Bill had the claim to that area also and he kept a cabin there filled with supplies, I was welcome to help myself to some if I needed anything by then. 

But 1st of June was still a week or so down the road, and for the time being it was everyday life at Karen Creek. The mail plane came in one day, and for the first time it was on wheels instead of on skis. It was always something of a special occasion whenever the plane came. Bill shaved and put on a clean shirt; and once the plane had left again, the rest of the day was spent reading the mail, cooking some fresh food and drinking beer and whiskey. As it was, the spirits we bought always disappeared so quickly that most of the time the camp was bone dry.

Then Bill was always in a good mood and turned talkative, otherwise many days could go by where he would say almost nothing, just a few practical words. We discussed world affairs or the situation at Karen Creek, Bill praised me for doing a good job whenever there was plenty of hard work to do like chopping firewood or shoveling gravel, but he said that it annoyed him that I did not show more initiative in getting projects started myself and always waited for Bill to tell me what to do. Of course he was right as usual; when I later on started as a trainee in the oil business, I kept that in mind and made an effort to be more proactive. 

Bill was interested in conditions abroad, especially if gold was found there! I told him a little about conditions in Iceland where I had traveled. I mainly went to photograph birds, but I also crossed the barren interior on foot and worked as a volunteer freeing a town on Heimaey from layers of ashes after a recent volcanic eruption. Bill said he would not mind going there or to Siberia where you could also do placer mining, or to Sweden where his father had come from and where they also had gold deposits. For some reason I had this feeling that he would never get going. 

We had a few visitors in camp during this period. Andy from down at Rabbit Creek dropped by to let Bill know that he was up now for the summer's work. He came in a plane he had chartered in Fairbanks. And then he wanted to borrow a gun so that he could walk into his camp armed, in case a bear was there. Bill let him have the old army rifle but grinned later after Andy had left and added: "I forgot to tell him that the sights are all wrong on that old gun. I once fired eight shots against a Moose at 50 yards without hitting once. I don't hope that Andy will ever really need that thing." I could not help thinking that it was kind of weird that the Moose did not move off after the first noisy shots. 

It was not all empty talk about the bears being dangerous. One day we heard on the radio that a wildlife photographer had been found killed by a Brown Bear down in southern Alaska. At that time, the Brown Bears were considered a different species or sub-species to the Grizzly Bear, the experts couldn’t  really decide, today I think they are considered one taxon. They live down in the denser forests of the south and generally have a reputation of being less dangerous than the Grizzlies. They are big, good-natured creatures, often pictured standing around the southern rivers catching salmon. But this particular Brown Bear had not been so good-natured after all; the radio even mentioned in a nasty detail that the man had been almost completely eaten up by the bear. A hunting party was out looking for the bear to put it down before it made a habit of this diet.

In another news at that time, a tourist met a bear while fishing near a lake; the bear did not attack him but the man panicked anyway and fled into the lake trying to swim out to a boat; he never made it, he died of a heart attack in the water. His wife sat in the boat and witnessed the whole thing.

We were also visited by the police. Early one morning we were woken up by the loud, chopping noise of a helicopter landing on the clear patch right below the camp. Two police officers came up and asked if we had seen the fur trapper from Wiseman. He had gone berserk and had shot and killed all his dogs; he had a team of dogs for pulling his sledge around the trapping route, or rather he did not any more. He had also made threats towards his wife who had escaped and had gone to Charlie who had called the police. Now the man had left Wiseman heading south, he knew Karen Creek so it was quite likely that he would seek refuge here. Bill and I had not seen him but assured the officers that we would be on guard. The officers quickly left with a friendly warning that the man was armed and might be dangerous.

When we came back later that day from some work up the creek I said half jokingly: "Well, let's see now if the wanted man is sitting in the kitchen having a cup of coffee." "Goddammit," Bill replied, "he might just do that," and he took the revolver which we always carried with us on the back seat of the jeep and searched through the camp. 

But the trapper was not there, and he never turned up. Later on we heard that he had crossed the river and had walked down to Coldfoot camp; he turned himself in and went down to Fairbanks. It was not clear if he had actually broken any laws or was ever prosecuted.

1st  of June arrived. I started up the electric washing machine and washed all my clothes, I checked my gear and packed my backpack. Bill gave me plenty of groceries to take along, among others some of the Caribou meat which we had cut into strips and dried in the sun, because there was not room for it all of it in the freezer. That was Caribou jerky; it did not taste very good, but it was lightweight and nourishing and regarded as traditional Alaskan trail-food. 

It was a bit sad for me to leave Karen Creek, but I was starting to look forward to my journey out into northern Alaska. And I would be back at the creek 1st of September if everything went according to plan.

Bill drove me and his rubber dinghy down to the river. "Keep to the middle of the stream where the current is strongest," he advised. "And down at Coldfoot, take the river branch on the right; it has always got the most water in it."

I got into the small float and Bill shook my hand. "Have a good trip, I'll be seeing you," he said and pushed the dinghy off the embankment.

The current grabbed the boat and I rushed down the river. On the bank Bill stood and looked after me.

The rubber dinghy that I had borrowed from Bill was not very big. I could just barely fit into it; I sat squeezed into one end with my backpack stacked in the other end as a counterweight. I had my backpack tired onto the float which was inflated in two separate compartments so that if one section should spring a leak the other one would support the pack while I swam ashore. I could then always reach the nearest village on foot. And Bill had provided me with a rubber repair kit to fix smaller holes that might develop in the dinghy. Nothing could really go wrong. 

As oars I used two home-made paddles which were tied on to the edges of the boat. They were far from efficient and could not really propel the boat forward very well. They were mostly intended to be used for keeping the boat in the middle of the current or for rowing onto shore. Otherwise I relied on the river moving so fast that it would transport me along at a reasonable speed. 

And so it did - up here in the mountains anyway. I was swept swiftly along and soon passed by Slate Creek just before Coldfoot; the camp itself was not visible from the river. But a chopper spotted me from the air, and I did feel a little silly when it swerved back around and the pilot took it down close to me to have a look. There I sat in a tiny rubber raft rushing along in the middle of the fierce Middlefork River; but I decided to act like that was a completely natural thing to do and waved up at the pilot who waved back and jerked the chopper back up, disappearing close across the trees. Most of the Alyeska pilots were army veterans from the Vietnam war, and they still flew around as if this was enemy territory. 

The river ran in a very regular pattern, and this got more and more pronounced during the following days as I left the Brooks Range and entered the interior. It was constantly twisting along in large curves. On the outside of the bend the water was deep and fast, eroding right into the woods so that there was a steep bank where chunks of dirt and roots and large spruce trees were about to tumble into the spring floods. On the inside of each bend, the water was shallow and slow, there were large open areas with deposits of sand- and gravel-banks which were only partly covered with new growth of grasses and small bushes.

It was on one of these gravel banks that I spotted the first Moose of the trip. It was a female with a tiny little calf. They were both lying down on the gravel near the water but got up and walked away a few meters while I flowed past. 

Funny enough, exactly the same scene was repeated just a few more kilometers downstream. But this time the Moose and her small calf were walking along the edge of the other bank, the steep one. Here I could get real close to the animals and I paddled back as hard as I could to stop the raft, even then I only managed to slow it down some and I continued drifting along past the Moose. The small calf could not be more than a few days old and it was not very sturdy on its legs; as it tried to move along to find a place to climb up the bank it took a wrong step and plummeted half way down into the river. The old cow did not like this, she became restless and took a step out into the water towards me uttering an unusual, rumbling sound; but by then I was already past them, the small calf got back on its feet, struggled up the embankment and was soon trotting along the edge close behind its mother. 

Already on the first day I was gradually moving out of the mountains, the drop of the river was less steep now, the pace of the water was more leisurely, the journey was getting slightly more sedate. Even then, I was moving at a speed of about 10 km/hour, it was still much faster than walking, and it was certainly more comfortable.

I had promised Bill to stop at Tramway Bar, a camp about 40 km (in a straight line) down the river below Karen Creek, it was probably double that on the water, and say 'hello' from Bill who knew the owner of the place, I cannot recall his name. The camp was situated shortly after I passed Chapman Island, right at the banks of the river, so it was impossible for me to miss it as I got there. 

I dragged the rubber dinghy up onto a gravel bank and walked over to see if anybody was in. Somebody was, not the owner himself, he was still on his winter vacation, but another family. They were really happy to get a visitor; they were a man, his wife and their daughter, an active and cheerful little girl.

This was a family from down in the 'real' United States, the 'lower forty-eight' as the popular term was in Alaska, with little regard to the fact that Hawaii was declared an independent state shortly before Alaska, so that there now were 49 American states to the south. This family had come to Alaska to escape the pollution and the stress of the big continental cities. They had first taken work on a farm in Matanuska Valley in the south, which is the only major agricultural district in Alaska. Then they got the chance to come up here, and during the past winter they had stayed at Tramway Bar hunting and trapping for furs. The man had made a trapping route which he had serviced with his snowmobile.

The whole thing sounded pretty idyllic all right. But somehow this little family did not come across as quite content. Their little girl was a sweet and joyful child but the grownups scolded her often in a tone of voice that was not very pleasant. Then they complained a lot about different things that had not been going their way: The farmer they had worked for in the south of the state had cheated them out of their salary. The winter had not been very good hunting wise. The man had caught a number of larger animals of prey like Red Fox and Canada Lynx, even a Wolverine which is a pretty rare animal. But the hunt for smaller fur-mammals like Marten and Stoat had failed; the man had experienced a lot of technical problems keeping the snowmobile going. 

Now he was talking about getting himself a sledge and a good team of dogs for next year. At least dogs do not break down and fail to start out on the middle of the trail in winter darkness and 40 below. But a team of dogs was expensive, not just to buy but also to keep and feed all year around. The family had a small dog that winter, a pet which they brought with them from the city. The wolves got it they claimed, it had disappeared and they grieved over that loss.

As a replacement for the dog they now had acquired another pet, a young Moose. They had found him as a big calf last fall and had him tied up in camp for a while. Now he was roaming freely around and only came into camp when he felt like it. He came in visiting that evening, it was about a year old now, not quite fully grown yet but still an impressive animal and completely tame. Unfortunately Moose cannot be used as riding mounts, that was attempted by the old-timers and it just does not work. 

The camp was extensive with a lot of different huts and shacks. But the style was more like you would expect from a village in the north country, many buildings were quite primitively put together, there was not the persistent adherence to craftsmanship perfection that I had become used to from Karen Creek. The owner, Bill's friend, was due up on location any day. They were planning to do some gold mining in a creek in the area during the summer; but it was a bit far, so I did not get a chance to view the operation. However, they also had another mine here which was useful: On the other side of the river, near some cliff formations, there were open deposits of coal. From there they got all their fuel for heating and cooking. 

Even though the small family had their personal problems, here it was still a nice place to be a visitor. The people were very friendly and helpful to me and when they offered me to stay in their camp overnight I agreed and thanked them. 

The next morning I once again sat in my little rubber-boat flowing down the river. As you went further and further down into the interior, more and more tributaries joined the main river which got bigger and bigger, but unfortunately also slower and slower. Middlefork, North Fork, Wild River, John River, countless others - in the end they all formed the Koyukuk River. I had originally intended to float along the Koyukuk all the way down to Bettles that second day - the village of Bettles was positioned right at the Koyukuk. But because going was so slow, I had to stop 10 km before the town and set up camp; I did not want to get into Bettles late in the evening.

But the next morning I was there. Everything had changed around here, now that the meter deep snow-cover was gone. I could hardly recognize Jerry's trailer, but Jerry was in and I was well received. The two of us drove down to the airport control office, a large timber building which also doubled up as a hotel during the hunting season, Jerry wanted to speak to the management about some work and collect some payments. I took the opportunity to buy a six-pack of beers at the adjacent provision shop, a gesture which went down real well with Jerry. 

I walked across to a log cabin near the river and met the postmaster of Bettles to collect my mail. I regularly got mail while overseas, mainly from my mother back in Denmark, and I wrote back to her in turn about once a week. In those days I didn't think of calling home; during my one year+ in Canada and Alaska I never spoke to anyone on the phone in Scandinavia or anywhere else; it simply never occurred to me that might be possible. 

The postmaster’s name was Jeannie, she was an Eskimo lady. According to rumors she was very beautiful, and she did indeed turn out to be quite attractive and a pleasant person as well. 

Jeannie had a side-business tanning furs and making clothes out of them. So she asked me why I didn’t settle down here in the Koyukuk region and started hunting for fur. It was easy to get a trapping license, she said, and it did not cost much. There was good money to be made if one worked hard. I had to disappoint her however, hunting and trapping for fur did not really appeal to me all that much. 

Jeannie wanted to know how Bill was doing; she seemed to have more than a casual interest in him. He had offered her a job as housekeeper in his camp for that summer, she said, but she did not want to go. To me Bill had said that he was looking for a cook, but he did not want Jeannie in camp, even though she was very keen on coming up. Something here did not quite add up. 

I spent the night in Jerry's trailer, and Jerry was in a fine mood. He turned out to be a first grade chef and cooked up a delicious beef stew full of fresh ingredients. He obviously enjoyed that summer had arrived and apparently expected getting a lot of jobs working for the airport management who were expanding operations in Bettles. Jerry had some kind of monopoly on all kinds of construction undertakings around Bettles, and he was not shy to take lucrative advantage of that. But this would not last forever, he was well aware of that. Once the Ice Road became a permanent highway, his competitors could move in freely and establish themselves. He planned to pack up then and buy a nice small house near Fairbanks and retire. 

"Bill wants me to drive my cat up to his claim at Mascot Creek and mine gold up there. He says that there are millions to be made in that place. But if that is the case why doesn't he go up there himself and work?" "Well, he cannot be two places at once," I defended Bill, "and there is no proper landing strip at Mascot Creek, so I have heard, the place is a bit isolated and not suitable for a permanent home. But if Bill says that there is gold in the creek I am sure there is." "All right, maybe there is gold there," Jerry replied, "but I just don't feel like messing around with gold mining again."

When I told Jerry about the route I was planning he found it really interesting. I was among other places heading for Nome. That was a town that Jerry felt closely affiliated with. At the time when he first came to Alaska and worked there at the docks, he had for a while lived together with an Eskimo girl, in fact they got married in the end to protect their reputation in town. But the girl got sick. "They came and picked her up one day," Jerry said, "she died quickly. I never saw her again."

Jerry told me about the time later on, when he worked as a dog sledge postman and fur trapper. About how he had once been caught out on the trail in some of the lowest temperatures that have ever been recorded in Alaska, 58 degrees below (that was in Fahrenheit = -50° C). He had stayed in his tent for several days and spent all his time keeping a small stove he had going, not daring to venture outside. How a pack of wolves had encircled him and his dog team one night and how he had shot one of the wolves even though he only had the glowing eyes in the darkness to aim at. Jerry ensured me also that I was certain to see bears when I continued down the river. There were lots of Black Bears in the Koyukuk country, and they often moved about near the river. 

But Jerry was worried that I did not carry a gun. Bill had offered me the use of the .30-30 Winchester when I left Karen Creek. But I had politely refused; I felt that it would be too awkward carrying a rifle around - even a small rifle - for three months when chances that I would ever use it were minimal. But a pistol powerful enough to knock down a bear was maybe a good solution.

And Jerry just happened to have such a thing: His old Colt Automatic cal. .45 M1911 Government issue, which he had kept as he got discharged from the army after the Second World War; it always hung over one of the posters on his bed - loaded. Even though the caliber was one hundredth of an inch larger, the powder charge in the cartridge was smaller than in Bill's revolver. But the .45 was certainly still more than powerful enough to terminate a bear. And if was self re-loading, had 7 shots in the clip and was something of a classical handgun all together. 

"This one the Japanese didn't like down at the Aleutian Islands," Jerry proclaimed dramatically holding the gun out in front of him. "They only had those sorry little 9 mm pistols. The Japs fell by the dozen when we met them with our .45s." 

Jerry had actually never been in a firefight himself during the war, although it was easy to get that impression when he told about those days. At least that was what Bill had said, that Jerry never saw a single Japanese while being stationed at the Aleutians. 

As it turned out, Jerry had recently bought a small caliber .22 revolver and it was actually better suited for protection against these-here god-damn natives as he would say, you never knew what they were up to. So I was allowed to borrow Jerry's Colt and 20 rounds of ammunition - on the one condition that I drove down to the airport office building and bought 2 more 6-packs of beer.

The next day I was once again on my way down the Koyukuk River in my freshly re-inflated rubber dinghy, Jerry's .45 automatic had been added to my outfit. Two kilometers further down and on the other side of the river was Bettles. The thing was that officially Bettles was called Bettles Field, although this name was never used in everyday language. The original town of Bettles was situated on a spot that had been deemed unsuitable for building an airplane landing field when that need developed. So the old village was abandoned and a new one erected at the present site. As it happened, the village was also now on the right side of the river, the eastern bank, for a land connection to the south. 

I made a stop when I got to the original Bettles town and looked around. The houses were built close to each other in two rows here, just like in a town from the old west. But they had all been abandoned long ago, the whole area had grown over with weeds and bushes.

And now there were a few days travel of 40-50 km each until the next settlement. It was great sailing on the river; I had to agree with Bill now. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, I sat comfortably out here in the middle of it all in my floating easy-chair and moved gently and quietly through the interior of Alaska. I never saw another boat or raft or vessel on the water, except a few small motorized canoes near the native villages later on.

There was a wonderful birdlife around the river. I spotted Osprey, Great Gray Owl and a large, American kingfisher species, Belted Kingfisher which built its home many places into holes in the steep sections of the river banks. The mosquitoes did not bother me much out on the water, but during the evenings when I made camp they could be pretty bad. 

Because it was early summer and the spring floods filled the river, the water in some places spilled over into the woods. It was necessary in those places to watch carefully as you moved along, you had to follow closely where you were going on the map and make sure you took the right turns when the river appeared to split up into different branches. 

On one occasion I found myself in the wrong section of the river; before I realized I was going the wrong way, I had been pulled into a detour to the left when I should have stayed on the right. That bypass took me into a dead end: Sure, the water was swift in the beginning, but soon it came to a complete stop and the branch emptied out into a flooded lake in the middle of the forest. I had no choice; I had to get out into the cold water and spent the next hour or so pulling the dinghy back up into the main stream. 

At another place, the landscape suddenly changed character, the river ran through an open area many kilometers wide with a moon-like scenery, there were sand dunes and gravel banks all around and no forest except for some dying trees that had probably been inundated many times over. The river spread out into a shallow delta, the dinghy touched bottom even at the deepest place. There were large flocks of Canada Geese resting here and I saw a young Golden Eagle perched close by. 

Only shortly after that, the river narrowed down and passed through some vertical, low cliffs. The water was dark and deep and passed slowly through the tight canyon. After that, the terrain was back to normal: Large bends curving through the endless boreal forests of interior Alaska. 

At one place I saw a Wolf. It turned up on one of the shingle-fields along the inside of a bend. Maybe it was a young animal. It was big enough, but it seemed a little immature in its looks and behavior. It did not look at all like the wolves you see in zoos; you certainly could never confuse it with a dog. The legs seemed to be too long and too thin, the head was disproportionately big, the fur was thick and fluffy and clean. 

The Wolf trotted elegantly along down towards me as if it was walking on springs, it moved in an arc closer to the bank. I grabbed the oars and forced the dinghy so close to the shore that I could feel the bottom. 

Then the weirdest thing happened, rather than take off the Wolf moved forward all the way to the edge of the water, it lowered its head, turned its ears forward and starred persistently out at me. It started stepping restlessly back and forth, its feet almost touching the water, it was only 6 or 7 meters from me and the thought suddenly occurred to me that the Wolf could easily run out through the shallow water and jump at me. I did not have my gun handy, like my camera it was somewhere in my backpack so as not to get wet. But somehow the Wolf did not really exude aggressive intent, more curiosity than anything else, it ran back a bit and at that point the current took hold of me again and started moving me further on downstream. I could see how the Wolf followed me along on the bank, it came popping up among the bushes a few times, looking out at me. Then the river turned the other way, the gravel banks came to and end and there I lost sight of the Wolf. It was the only Timber Wolf I ever saw in Alaska.

I also saw two Black Bears along this part of the Koyukuk, but they were not so much fun. Both were fairly small animals with quick movements, they hurriedly scrambled into the forest cover as soon as they spotted me. On one of the occasions the bear was a bit curious; it stopped briefly and stuck its head above a bush near the bank to take a closer look. It had some white markings around the nose; otherwise its fur was a completely deep, shining black. Then it galloped on into the woods.

It was funny how I started feeling a kind of kinship with these large mammals. It was as if we were all in this together, like me the wild animals got wet when it rained and were bitten by mosquitoes at night. There were no people in this country; the animals were the only company available. After a while I felt the urge to speak up and address the animal whenever I passed close by a Moose or a Red Fox or a rabbit. Maybe I had been out here a little too long. 

In the evenings I pulled my rubber dinghy up onto land and pitched my tent on the bank. I made a small fire and boiled water for coffee, for supper I made some sandwiches with peanut butter or raisins. At night I went to sleep with the pistol within easy reach, because I often saw tracks and paw-marks from bears along the river banks.

One night I was woken up by the howling of the Wolves. I had never heard a Wolf call before and actually imagined it would sound something like a big dog's whining cry, that is how you hear it reproduced in movies. But this was different, it was a deep, steady wailing which slowly increased in pitch and then died out again. There were more than one and judging from the sound they were not far away.

This time I got concerned, I felt an itching sensation in my body. These cries sounded unnatural; they were bizarre, and I did not like it at all. Yes, I was being irrational, I knew that Wolves are practically harmless, decades go by between occasions where a normal, fully-grown person is reported attacked, and even then few cases have ever been verified. And still, this unnerving wailing spooked me. I cocked my pistol and went outside. It was around midnight, the light was dim, but there was nothing to be seen, the dense forest just closed in on me, the Wolves were out there invisible somewhere. The howling continued and after a while I got used to it. But I could not sleep; I lay awake for two hours that night until the cries stopped. 

I was getting close to another settlement at the Koyukuk, Allakaket. I was planning to drop by there as well; another one of Bill's friends lived here. He was a native, half or 3/4 or some other fraction of Indian he was, and he worked as boss for the landing strip in town. Bill had worked together with him during the winter he was employed in Bettles, and together they had driven a caterpillar from Bettles to Allakaket. Bill had told about how they put the cat in gear and jumped off when they had to cross the major rivers. Then they ran after the cat in case it should fall through the ice and climbed back up once it crossed safely. 

Allakaket was positioned right smack on the Arctic Circle; and as the river bent back and forth due west right before the village, I calculated that I crossed the Arctic Circle six times that day! Allakaket lay on the left bank of the river, the southern one; and diagonally opposite of there - on the northern bank - was another smaller village, Alatna. While the inhabitants in the south were Athabaska Indians, the villagers in the north were inland Eskimos. Since the old days, before the whites came, these two towns had been at odds and sometimes open war with each other. It was not quite clear to me, whether the two communities were still fighting each other, but they certainly remained completely segregated.

When I got to Allakaket, it turned out to be a fairly big settlement. Jerry had advised me to beach my dinghy long before town. "If you sail into Allakaket they will destroy your dinghy," he had said. It did sound a little peculiar, but I followed his advise and maybe that was just as well. A few hundred people probably lived in the village, there were about 30-40 wooden huts, closely connected with streets of boardwalks. I made some inquiries, but it turned out that Bill's friend was away in Fairbanks on some business, so I left again without having the chance to say 'hello'. 

On my way back I was stopped by a group of young Indian men wearing leather jackets and cowboy boots. They asked in a hostile manner was I was doing here. Once they realized that I was neither a hunter nor a gold prospector, and in fact was not even an American citizen, they loosened up a bit. Instead I was treated to a free lecture on how the whites had stolen Alaska from the native people. But that was all over now, they claimed. The country around here was about to be closed. Today a stranger was free to float down the Koyukuk, tomorrow he might get shot when he passed by this place. 

Somehow their threat right at that point did not come across as really convincing, let alone frightening. It was obvious that some big communal problems existed around here, but I did not feel I had neither the interest nor the right to get involved in these matters. I just said that I sincerely hoped that the natives would all be able to come to some reasonable terms with the whites regarding usage of the land. I told the kids not to shoot at people - who knows, people might shoot back, so we laughed a bit at that and parted as friends. I did feel a bit tense when I later passed the village in my dinghy, but there was no sound of gun fire.

I decided to continue down the Koyukuk River to the town of Hughes about another couple of hundred kilometers to the south-west. But then no further, the speed of the river was starting to get to me - or rather, the lack of speed. On some stretches I had to work the oars just to make walking pace, and that was not the idea, the dinghy was simply not built for paddling; in a canoe it would have been different, but this was just too slow and too tough and too boring. Going to the Yukon River like this and all the way to the Yukon Delta was out of the question. It was 10 June and I felt I had spent enough time on the Koyukuk.

On my way down to Hughes I saw my first Grizzly Bear. It appeared suddenly on the bank of the river just after a bend and I did not have time to maneuver close to it, because the current was rather swift right at this section. The bear was walking along in the sand a few meters from the water's edge. It stopped up and dug into the sand with its paws; then it continued. It was not a clumsy animal the way an over-fed Brown Bear can appear in zoos; it was graceful, athletic, almost elegant; it was nothing but fur and muscles roaming freely, its movements projected power and control. 

The bear did not react at all when I floated past, it did not even look up at me. I managed to stop the dinghy downstream a bit but by then the bear had disappeared into some bushes behind the river. It did not come forward again, and I did not want to go ashore to follow it. When I shortly afterwards sat up camp for the night, I chose to land on the other side of the river.

I had learned from conditions in Allakaket and landed my rubber raft several hundred meters upstream from Hughes which turned out to be just a small hamlet with 10-12 scattered houses. I got a hold of one of the authorities in town, and he explained that there would be a plane to Galena the next day around 10-11 am. And that I had better camp outside of town. Personally he certainly had nothing against strangers, but the young kids viewed these things differently. Recently they had thrown stones at two hunters who had landed their plane on the river nearby and chased them off. The old Indian seemed nervous and not very friendly; I did as he advised, although the whole thing appeared slightly silly to me.

The deflated raft, the small ax and the other gear that Bill had lent me I packed up and sent in a box to Karen Creek, there was a postal service in Hughes. 

When the plane arrived from Galena the next morning, it turned out to be a peculiar old model, a 'flying shoe-box' they called it locally and that was a pretty fitting description; I am not sure what the technical term is. It flew terribly, and one of my fellow passengers in the cargo space where we were seated, an elderly Indian lady, got air-sick and threw up violently on the way. We did a stopover at Hog River, a gold mining camp north-west of Hughes to pick up one more passenger, and then we crossed the interior Alaska's hilly forests and lowland swamps to Galena, some 200 km south of there at the Yukon River. 

The trip Hughes-Galena was a free ride, and in Galena it was possible to buy a ticket for the regular jet going to Fairbanks later that afternoon. I got talking to the passenger from Hog River who was also waiting for the Fairbanks departure. He knew Galena well; it is mainly a major base for air force personnel and DEWL (Distant Early Warning Line) equipment. We went for a walk around the base and managed to find a back entrance to a bar, where we were served, even though it was for military personnel only and was closed besides - but beers were only 50 cents per can!

The man from Hog River worked at the gold mine there; he was crazy about gold too, but in another way than the miners in the Brooks Range area. He was interested in huge mud dredges which were used in large industrial type of open placer mining operations. These dredges dig up dirt mechanically from deep old alluvial river beds and wash out the deposited gold debris. It had been a few years since he worked with gold last, because many of the old plants in Alaska were now closed. But with the recent increase in the price of gold, work had again become profitable and some were opening back up. 

At Hog River he had spent the spring doing up the old dredge and he had taught a young native kid to run it while he went back to his family in the lower 48 for a short break. His only luggage was a small transistor radio he was bringing in for repairs. They were four workers in camp, he said, plus a cook, they were all employed for salaries by the company who owned the mine; they did not receive a cut of the gold. But they had found a lot this spring he hinted, although there were no nuggets so far from the source of the gold, it was all dust.

Apart from one more person, the gold miner and I were the only passengers in the Boeing 707 to Fairbanks, so we were outnumbered by the stewardesses and the service was excellent. At Fairbanks International Airport we parted company, the gold miner had to catch another connection south and I made my way downtown. 

Also Fairbanks had been transformed; all around were green trees and people in summer clothes. But I had no business here, I quickly shopped around for some camera film and an airline ticket and already the next day I found myself sitting high over Alaska in a passenger jet once more, next stop: Barrow, the North Slope.

It was a crystal clear day; we passed across the interior and headed out over the Brooks Range, the enormous range lay beneath us as an endless belt of low mountains scarred with criss-cross patterns of deep valleys and shallow plateaus. This was the gateway to Arctic Alaska.

"Good morning ladies and gentlemen ... " the pilot announced over the PA system, then followed the usual details about where we were going and when we would get there, " ... the temperature in Fairbanks is now 70 degrees. The weather in Barrow is clear and sunny with a temperature of 26 degrees." This was Fahrenheit degrees: I.e.  21° C and -4° C respectively.

The information hit me like a slap in the face; I could hardly believe my own ears. But when we passed the Brooks Range I understood that it was in fact still freezing up here. As we moved north, the mountains turned into foothills and the foothills turned into vast expanses of flat tundra. And the tundra was snow-covered; everything here was white except for 5-10 % bare patches. At the coast, the Arctic Ocean stretched all the way to the horizon as one endless field of ice formations. Then we started the approach to Barrow. I had indeed come to the most northerly town in North America. 

I was completely taken by surprise by the climate on the North Slope. Of course I knew that spring came later up here than south of the Brooks Range. I also knew from my research that the coast at Barrow is only ice-free for a few weeks each year, some summers the ice never moves back at all. But I had taken it for granted that there would be thaw here near the middle of June, and that the midnight sun would have melted at least most of the snow on the tundra. But now I found out the hard way that it had not, and there was little I could do about that.

I had come to Barrow to see the tundra and to photograph the special Arctic bird life. The Arctic is renowned for large congregations of birds that flock to these regions each year to breed. But the way things were looking now it could take a long time before the migrants arrived, maybe weeks. There was nothing to do but to wait.

Barrow is located about 800 kilometers north/north-west of Fairbanks. It is close to the 71st parallel which means it is about 550 km north of the Arctic Circle. It is a large Eskimo village with several thousand inhabitants, the largest native town in Alaska. There are modern buildings, a road network, a cinema and several shops. On my part however, I had had enough of native villages and had not come to look at another sordid town. I walked far from the place, up north a bit, and found a small patch on an elevation in the tundra which was not covered with snow, there I pitched my tent. 

It took a while for me to get used to my new surroundings. There were no more rivers and mountains and forests, no more warm winds and rolled up shirt sleeves. Out here was nothing, nothing but ice and snow in all directions and as far as the eye could see. The country was completely flat; it was uneven, broken up by small mounds and thousands of ice-covered lakes and ponds in between, created by the alternations of frost and thaw. But it had no features, no hills, no rivers and no other vegetation than short grasses. I looked south to see if it was possible to view the Brooks Range in the distance. But the mountains were more than 200 km to the south and not even the foothills were visible. 

The sun soon disappeared behind a light cloud cover and an icy, penetrating wind took over. It began to snow a bit. I started wondering why in the world I had come here, why I had left the pleasant interior for this barren ice desert. I crawled into my tent and deep into my sleeping bag. 

While I was waiting for summer to break through on the North Slope, I decided to go for a hike out to The Point, the northern tip of Alaska. There was a road running from Barrow north along the coast to a large naval base, the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory (NARL). This facility was actually like a small town in itself, built up by pre-fabricated houses and trailers providing homes and offices for hundreds of people. I never made it up there on foot, a pick-up stopped on the road, and the driver offered me a lift.

As it turned out, it was no less than the director of the navy's oil and natural gas exploration department who gave me a ride; I found that out after a while. The boss was not completely comfortable with me walking out to Point Barrow. There were some massive ice movements going on out on the peninsula, he warned. Nobody from the base had been out there this year. I promised the director to be careful, to be back before the night and to report to his office when I got back. 

North of the NARL-base was a more secluded military facility, a large DEW-base operated by the air force, a part of the American Distant Early Warning Line system, directed mainly at The Soviet Union which was not too far from here. This base functioned as a completely separate entity; they had their own airport here and got all their supplies directly from the outside, the personnel kept to themselves. From the DEW-base there was another few km to walk along a gravel road and then the track came to an end.

It really was very hard going from then on making it out to Nuvuk, The Point, across ice and loose sand, but it was not dangerous. There was nothing there to see except for plenty of gravel and ice. The narrow cape was elevated about 10-12 meters above the surrounding sea ice so it was possible to look far and wide. In places the ice had been pushed up and across the cape making walking strenuous. The thought of seeing a Polar Bear walking along out on the coastal ice shield fascinated me, this would be the ideal place for it, I could clearly envisage the bear moving out there through its typical habitat. But things do not always work that way, no Polar Bear turned up as ordered. This is not an easy animal to see in Alaska. Nevertheless, there were Polar Bears in this area; a few weeks later, while I was still at Barrow, a large male was shot on the beach just south of town. But I never saw any white bear myself.

At the Point, the cape came to an end and there were some open gravel banks. But there was no life, not even a bird or a straw of grass. This must be what Mars looks like. To the north was no more land, only 2,000 km of solid sea ice all the way to the North Pole. It was a special place this one, but completely dead and not very stimulating. I was not sure if the efforts making it out here had been worth it, but naturally I could now brag that I had visited the most northerly point in Alaska. 

The camp boss received me well when I came back to report in that evening. We had dinner in the cafeteria on the NARL-base and I was allowed to leave behind some of my gear that I did not need for my walks around the tundra, among other things my .45 automatic. The Boss even offered me the use of a bunk in one of the barracks, but I refused this kind gesture, I wanted to stay in my tent out on the tundra.

But I did visit the NARL-base now and again during my stay at Barrow. The oil exploration boss turned out to be one of these quiet and kind Americans that you only know exist if you have been there; the Americans that travel abroad as tourists for some reason always seem to be the other type, the loud-mouth and superficial ones. The boss didn't ask too many questions, but he always seemed to have time for me when I called on him and let me have a hot meal or watch a movie in camp. 

The boss had worked at the naval base since it was established in 1947 and managed the so-called 'Petroleum Reserve No 4', a huge area on the North Slope stretching several hundred km to the east and to the south which was presumable packed with hydrocarbon deposits, but which was not opened for commercial exploration. A bit of natural gas was produced from test wells making the NARL-camp and Barrow town self-sufficient in energy, otherwise this massive piece of land was protected for research. 

During the end of June, winter gradually loosened its grip on the tundra. Around this time an active migration of eider ducks and geese along the coastline took place. The birds flew in large flocks over the sea ice north up to the cape where they cut across the narrow land bridge and continued east along the North Slope. The Eskimos from Barrow took advantage of these predictable movements, south of town a few men were always sitting out on the sea ice in the shelter behind a large ice formation, when the flocks of eider ducks came in close enough they would pick out one or two with their shotguns. Hundreds of ducks passed by and it did not take more than a few hours for each hunter so accumulate so many ducks that he could just barely carry them home.

The Eskimos also hunted seals that came up for air out on the ice at cracks and breathing holes. I met two such hunters a few kilometers from town one day. They merrily told about how easy it was getting the seals and how each seal was worth 'two bottles', that was two bottles of booze, the local currency presumably. 

There were also Eskimos which took their hunting a bit more serious. The community was allowed to kill some protected animals like whales and bears for their own consumption. Each spring, in the months of May and June, whales migrated past Barrow and they could be seen in big cracks of open water that developed when the sheets of sea ice shifted during that time of year, often many 

kilometers from the coast. I cannot remember what species they were, I never saw any. The Eskimos drove out there and launched boats into the water and shot the whales if they were able to locate any with a kind of grenade. This year they had a white lady with them another Eskimo told me, she was doing a TV documentary on the whale hunting of the Eskimos. It had been a good year for whales and they got several. The meat they cut up on location at the edge of the ice opening and dragged it home behind their snowmobiles. The meat was then distributed according to a quota system among all the natives in Barrow. 

The attitude of the Eskimos towards me was so much different than the Indians' had been in the interior of Alaska. The Eskimos were friendly and hospitable; they liked to mix with me and chat. They did not seem to have any sense of day and night this time of year and would wonder around the place at all hours. When I was in their company I nevertheless felt a little bit uncomfortable; because as soon as they spoke to each other, they would switch to their own language, which was like Greek to me. Sometimes they would come out to my tent way outside of town, but once or twice I also visited their homes. When I later at the naval base mentioned that, the scientists advised me to keep clear of that place, the village was full of disease they said. I don’t know if that is true or not, I never got sick.  

All the resident birds had arrived at the tundra by now. I bought a pair of rubber boots at the general store in town as replacement for the leather boots I had been wearing before and got started doing what I came to Barrow to do: Photograph Arctic birds. I spent all my time hiking in the tundra, sometimes I would camp for several days some 30 or 40 km from town, walking far to find the best places for birds and trying to capture as many species as I could on film. 

The tundra around Barrow was a wonderful place for avian wildlife. The barren fields apparently were crammed with tiny greenery and invertebrates providing food for especially many water-birds. But the rich places were mysteriously patchy, you could walk for hours without seeing much, and then suddenly there were pockets where for some reason birds were just everywhere.

I saw Spectacled Eider, Steller's Eider, Tundra Swan, Snow Goose, Sabine's Gull, Snowy Owl, Pomarine Skua and many other species difficult to find, even in Alaska. Some shorebirds like Grey Plover, Bar-bellied Godwit and Ruddy Turnstone I knew as migrants from the coasts of Europe, others like Baird’s Sandpiper, Buff-breasted Sandpiper and Red Phalarope were new to me. I used R.T. Peterson’s A Field Guide to Western Birds that I bought in Fairbanks for identification, and I still have that book in my collections, although many more modern guides to American birds have come out since then of course.

Seeing these high Arctic specialties here in summer plumage at their nests in the grass was truly incredible. I had long dreamt about observing these Arctic birds at their remote breeding grounds, and now the dream was coming true. I spent some long days in the tundra, surveying new places or hiding at nests I found for the bird to come in close. The excitement I felt whenever I got that new important photo was worth all the waiting.

And the days were indeed long here, even at midnight the sun was still hovering above the horizon to the north-west shining dimly before it reversed back up slowly shifting north and then south. It never set; but then again, it never made it very high above the horizon either, and each morning there was a thin layer of ice across my container with drinking water, it was still that cold.

I was not the only birdwatcher in the tundra. I met a biology student who went about his work in a very scientific fashion. Every day he visited a certain section of the tundra where he counted and recorded all birds and especially all nests that he could find. Then he plotted all information onto some detailed maps he had and made notes on numbers of eggs in each brood, hatching dates, the birds' behavioral patterns etc. I often talked to the scientist when they met, for he knew so much more about the birds than I. And he was interested in my observations in turn. I told about a Bald Eagle I had seen further south; that was a new sighting for Barrow. And I carried a dead Sooty Shearwater I had found with me for identification, that one turned out to be a new record for this area as well. 

The student was from the NARL-base where the department for petroleum exploration's work was only one of many activities. This base was the only Arctic research facility in the U.S. at that time, and a lot of different projects were carried out here. Every form of life on the tundra was studied in detail. On the base was a complete mini-zoo with long rows of cages, there was a Wolf family with small cubs, a Wolverine, several Arctic Foxes and inside one of the buildings even a slightly overweight Polar Bear. They were all studied intensely. 

And so were the animals and plants out in the wild. Every summer season biologists and biology students from the lower 48 would come up and work on each their assignment. I met a girl out in the tundra who was studying arctic vegetation; I wondered how she could find things to do, since the only vegetation here was short grass! But obviously it was not that simple. She came from the University of Seattle in the state of Washington like many of the other students. They were put up in nice prefabricated apartments near the camp which were self contained with their own kitchen units. Another scientist I met studied plankton out in the Arctic Ocean; he was flown out from NARL at intervals to stay at a big base that the Americans had established on a floating ice formation far from shore. 

We were coming well into the month of July by now. The sea ice lay unmovable all the way to the beach as always. But out in the tundra the snow was gone. The fields were green, and the lakes and ponds that were scattered all over the landscape were now shining a deep blue. And in Barrow, the snow-melting had uncovered years of accumulated garbage and rubbish among the houses and around the outskirts of town. Nothing apparently rotted away completely here, and the sanitary disposal system did not seem to be working especially efficient in these parts. 

The frost had not left the surface of the ground however; in fact it never did in this region which had so-called permafrost. I never managed, during all the time I spent at Barrow, to find a place where I could press the aluminum pegs holding my tent all the way into the ground. They always hit ice half way down making my tent less secure than usual. My rain-suit I also never used, that turned out to be dead weight; even in July, what little precipitation that did fall came in the form of snow. But that did not matter; in fact, is was an advantage as you never got wet, you just brushed off the 'rain'. Even though the temperature never ventured too many degrees into the positive, the climate on the tundra was actually quite pleasant; it would be calm and sunny for weeks in a row.

The water for washing every day was a bit cold, but that didn't bother me. My main problem at Barrow was that there were no trees or bushes or other wooded growth whatsoever. I needed firewood to be able to boil water for coffee or to cook some hot food when I camped out in the tundra. But I never managed to find even a few sticks of any kind - and no firewood no fire, and no fire no coffee, that was a terrible case of deprivation! 

After about four weeks at Barrow I felt I had done what I came to do. I had seen and photographed what I wanted to, and I was running out of spots to go to. There were other places I wanted to visit, other things I wanted to see in Arctic Alaska before I was due back at Karen Creek in August. 

On the 16th July I caught a plane back to Fairbanks. Or rather, first I went part of the way. On the return journey the flight from Fairbanks did a detour and stopped over at Prudhoe Bay, the site of the Alaskan oil fields. I got off there. 

At Prudhoe Bay you were not just far east but also a fair ways south of Barrow. The Brooks Range foothills were clearly visible in the south. At the coast the beach was free of ice, although the permanent ice cover could still be seen offshore near the horizon.

I got a lift out from the Deadhorse Airport and was even treated to a luxurious lunch at one of the oil field facilities which was equipped with palm trees in the reception area and leather furniture in the lounge. A life in luxury had mushroomed up in the wilderness. Unlike Barrow, there was no trash anywhere and the place was squeaky clean inside and outside. The oil field hand who showed me around headed out to one of the rigs later and dropped me off near the coast.

Several drilling rigs were visible around the place, and at one site I noticed stacks of 120 cm diameter steel pipe, piled up on the tundra in an endless number of rows each hundred of meters long; there were no people to be seen anywhere, just this awesome sight of industrial might in the middle of nowhere. It was the famous Trans-Alaska Pipeline waiting to be put into place. 

There are some dates of special importance in the history of modern Alaska: 1867, when Russia sold the territory to the US. 1896, when gold was first discovered. 1959, when Alaska became the 50th independent federal state. And then 1968, when Atlantic Richfield found oil on Alaska's North Slope. They and British Petroleum soon located the richest oil fields in the United States, and a big controversy developed when they applied for permission to transport the oil down through the state to the port of Valdez on the south coast, which is always free of ice and better suited for shipment to the markets in the continental US. It was a distance of 1,250 km across permafrost, Arctic mountain ranges and regions in the south with volcanic activity, something that had never been attempted before. Legal protests relating to land rights and environmental concerns delayed the project for several years; but now it had been approved, and the pipeline and the access road to the Slope was about to become a reality. It was the largest project that private capital had ever undertaken anywhere at that time, and it was on everybody's lips in Alaska that summer. When bumper stickers on cars in Fairbanks read 'What Pipeline?' it was certainly meant as a joke. 

As it happened, I only stayed for two days at Prudhoe Bay. There were some new birds here that I had not seen at Barrow, like Brant Goose and White-rumped Sandpiper, but not that many and generally the density had been better at Barrow. And anyway, I had seen enough of the tundra by now, the endless fields of wet grasses. I wanted to see some mountains around me again soon. 

But what really did me in at this place were the mosquitoes, they were absolutely horrendous at Prudhoe Bay this time of year. Around the airport and the oil field installations they were not so bad. But at certain places out in the tundra there were hundreds of them, thousands rather - swarming closely around. And they knew just what they wanted too, they landed constantly on any part of the body that was not covered up biting painfully, even on the covered parts penetrating jeans and shirts with their sting, they could not be chased off. What little insect repellent I was carrying did not worry them, the stuff soon got dissolved in perspiration anyway as the weather was noticeably warmer here than at Barrow. These bugs could drive a grown man crazy, the situation was totally unbearable. 

So I decided that enough was enough and started out for my next destination: St Lawrence Island. Out here there were supposed to be large bird cliffs on the mountains facing the sea, those I would really like to see. I left Prudhoe Bay and via Fairbanks caught a connection to Nome, the jumping-off point for islands in the Bering Sea.

According to the information that I got in Fairbanks, a plane should leave Nome for St Lawrence Island the next day. There were often delays in these flights over the Bering Sea due to frequent fog and reduced visibility. But I double-checked and the weather outlook for the next day was fine, so I just had to spend one night in Nome.

Nome is a fairly large and modern town with about 5,000 people; I think there are somewhat fewer today. It was the scene of a rush for gold in 1900, that year alone 15,000 men from the southern US arrived to try their luck. Nome was so much easier to reach then by steam-boat straight from Seattle than the Klondyke region had been a few years earlier. The gold was found right on the beach or in the moors behind, but there were also deposits in the mountain creeks further inland in the hills on the Seward Peninsula. As it turned out, the place was not all that rich and the rush died down. Today, miners still scramble there for the left-over bits, the small-time operations made famous recently by the TV program Bering Sea Gold showing on Discovery Channel. 

Nome is still not accessible overland, but around the town and several hundred km into the peninsula there is an extensive local network of rough roads. When I was there, the characteristic silhouettes of radar and communication antennas at the local DEW stations were visible on the hills behind town. I didn’t actually venture into town - although a lady at the airport offered me a ride in her big saloon car (I have lost count of the hospitable and generous Americans I met in Alaska). I just walked into the hills behind the coast and pitched my tent near a stream as I always did.  

The plane for St. Lawrence Island left from its own little airstrip on the other side of Nome Airport; two more passengers joined the flight apart from me. The plane was a small twin propeller model; I can’t remember now what type. From my seat I could look across and check on the instrument console, how fast and how high we were going. We flew due west across nothing but ice-free sea until after about 300 km, where the island appeared to the south. In the end we reached some high cliffs, we swung around the northern cape and down there below the mountains on a sandy plateau was the town of Gambell. 

We landed just south of the town on a sandy spit between the sea and a saline lake, a few of the Eskimos came out to meet us. The people here had some funny looking vehicles; they were designed like a kind of tricycle but with hugely oversized wheels and powerful engines, those are now common all over the North and in rural areas, but it was the first time I saw one. The people there obviously moved effortlessly across country. Some of the natives came up to me and wanted to know why I was there. I told them I was here to photograph Arctic sea birds, I intended to start work over there, I said, pointing to the large cliffs that I had seen from the airplane now towering steeply about a kilometer behind the airfield.

"Well, that should be all right," the Eskimo I was talking to commented, "but don't move out further than that."

I assured him I would not, but I could not quite understand what the guy was trying to say. His English was not very good anyway, maybe he was afraid that I should get lost or something on the island, I felt fairly convinced that I could handle myself and that nothing would happen, in fact I had plans for walking far out on the island, but I did not mention that.

I had no idea about where to go to find the great bird cliffs that I had heard should exist on St Lawrence Island. I only knew that somewhere on this island Arctic sea birds came in by the thousands each summer to breed, and usually birds like these preferred to nest on steep cliffs facing the sea. I knew what birds I could expect to find, because I had carefully read and memorized a big fat book called Birds of Alaska while still at Karen Creek, and I had that Peterson field guide I mentioned earlier with me, so that I could identify the different species that might turn up.

The cliffs at Gambell peaked at about 200 meters above sea level. And they proved to be full of birds indeed. Most of the birds were to be found on the less steep section facing west towards the town. Here the cliffs were sloping at a reasonable angle and quite broken up and eroded, which meant that they could be climbed. With a bit of care and determination you could move around and cover all parts of these formations. Down below Eskimo ladies were moving about with big baskets, like tea pickers do in Asia, apparently gathering edible leaves and shoots.

The Eskimos obviously used this mountain as a kind of graveyard. In this region with permafrost in the ground they did not bury their dead, they put them in coffins and dragged then up here and left them in the cliffs. Some of the coffins had been shifted around by rock- or snow-slides presumably, and human remains spilled out on the ground, it was a pretty macabre sight.

From the top of the hill it was possible to see Cape Chaplin on the Chukotka Peninsula over in the Far East of Russia. The place was some 80 km to the north-east, but with binoculars you could clearly see tall mountains with spots of snow cover; it was another continent, so near and still a world apart. 

I climbed around all afternoon in the cliffs and watched and photographed North American sea birds: Crested Auklet, Least Auklet, Tufted Puffin, Pelagic Cormorant and other species were there in the hundreds flying to and fro and landing on the boulders on their way to nests inside crevices among the rocks. I also spotted a member of the auk family, a Dovekie which was not supposed to occur there, according the literature it had only been recorded once before from Alaska, at Barrow. 

I knew that this was only the taste of things to come when I headed on down to the huge mountains on the south coast of St Lawrence Island as I had in mind. I was convinced from studying the topographical map I had, that was where the major bird cliffs had to be at. The sky was clear and the sun was shining, the birds were pretty and confiding and easy to approach, things looked really good at that moment. 

I camped at the top of the hill and looked forward to resuming my survey the next morning, there were still sections of the cliff I wanted to check out and birds I wanted to photograph. But when I woke up the next morning and looked outside, fog had moved in. There was no way I could take photographs in this weather. I decided to leave my tent in place there and hang around for another day to see if the fog cleared. 

It did not. Instead it got denser and darker; heavy clouds moved in from the sea, the wind picked up and it started to rain. It rained all day, and the next day too, non-stop. In that weather there was nothing I could do but to wait. The wind turned into a gale, the rain into a torrential downpour. I had to support my tent with rocks all around, so it would not blow away; the rain penetrated the fabric at corners and seams, and after a while everything inside was wet. This was simply the camper's nightmare. 

On the third day the sky was still dark, but the rain had eased a bit and the wind died down. I packed up the soaked mess that now constituted my equipment and made my way down to Gambell. I wanted to stop at the grocery store and buy some supplies before I walked down to the cliffs on the south-west coast. 

The shop did not open until later, and I sat down on the steps outside to wait. A Caucasian boy walked across the street and came up to me asking me if I did not want to come inside for a cup of coffee, he and his family lived in a large house opposite the store. A hot cup of coffee sounded real nice, I could not refuse. The house I got invited into turned out to be the village chapel as well as the minister's residence in Gambell. I stayed there for two days.

I never quite found out exactly what kind of religion these people preached, they belonged to some kind of Christian sect. There were missionaries in most of the native villages in Alaska and so also in Gambell. There was a small church in conjunction with the minister's house and that was where they conducted their religious gatherings. 

I myself do not have much of a religious background, and I carefully avoided the subject when I spoke with my host family. They were genuinely kind and generous to me; these were truly warm-hearted and caring people. They never tried to preach to me but they treated me with consideration and respect. And when they said grace that evening at the dinner table, they did ask the Lord to be merciful to those who had not yet found the right way and to show them the light. 

I did not like to feel indebted to anybody this way, but outside the cold rain was pouring and I did not feel like camping in these conditions either. There was no way I could repay these people for their hospitality, but I swore on the spot that one day, when I was well established, I would repay be taking in and helping some other stranded stranger when given the chance. 

The first thing the minister did, when I had spent some time in his house and told him about my plans, was to escort me across to the chief of the Eskimo community and speak to him. 

The chief stayed like most of the natives here in a small one-room shack, there were piles of old rubbish and stacks of Walrus bones outside. Inside did not look that much different, there was a bit of hall-space behind the door but otherwise all activities took place in this one room, dimly lit by only one small, grimy window. 

The chief, his wife and an undetermined number of children were present, one grown daughter were lying in a large bed with her boyfriend even though it was the middle of the day. In a corner of the room the chief's wife was brewing coffee on a stove. I felt the urge to use the bathroom, but when I found out that this facility consisted of a bucket standing in the hallway I changed my mind and decided to wait until later. 

The minister asked the chief on my behalf if I could be allowed to walk down to South-West Cape on foot and further on to Savoonga, the other native village further east on St Lawrence Island where the plane from Nome stopped over on its way back. The chief looked me over skeptically; he did not seem too enthusiastic about the proposal. But after some consideration he agreed, he nodded and said OK, he would inform the others in the community that a stranger would be moving about on the island for some time in the near future. 

"You were really in luck there, Morten, that they accepted you," the preacher said afterwards. "The natives here have the right to tell you to leave the island immediately, if they find you unwanted. This is their island."

I knew nothing of this but was now informed that the natives had been awarded ownership of large parts of Alaska, St Lawrence Island included, although some claims were still unsettled. A so-called Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act had recently been passed which also gave the natives part of the royalties for mineral and fossil fuel production in the state. This money was distributed among the natives, defined as persons with 1/4 or more Eskimo or Indian ancestry.

The priest told me that if I had started across St Lawrence Island without permission I could have created a lot of trouble. The natives here were afraid of the Russians and Asians, if they saw somebody they did not know out on the island they were likely to think that he was a communist or a spy. This was during the cold war, and emotions on security issues could run high.

I found out that the Eskimos here were of the same race and spoke the same dialect as those on the Chukotka Peninsula in Asia. Further north in the Bering Sea were two tiny islands, the Little Diomede, USA and 3 km west of there, the Big Diomede, USSR. Some winters if the Bering Sea froze over solid, the Eskimos would then go out on the sea ice and meet and exchange news. It was the only place in the world where Russians and Americans could visit each other on foot. But during some years with political tension visits were cancelled, and a lot of suspicion towards strangers still lingered on both sides.

After I had stayed with the minister and his family for two days, the weather was still miserable. The same grey sky, the same low clouds and wind and driving rain. However, I did not feel I could put out departure any longer; I started out for the south-west hoping the rain would clear before I got to the cliffs that I wanted to see. 

From the detailed maps I had, I estimated the walk down to the cliffs to be about 50 km, and I covered that in two days. The going was really easy. The ground was firm, there were no cliffs to climb, no swamps to cross, no trees or bushes in the way. There was no trail to follow either, but that did not really matter, I followed the coastline and my wonderful map. When the natives traveled to Savoonga they went by boat during the summer, during the winter they went by snowmobile if they traveled at all. They certainly never walked, so there was no system of trails anywhere.

But there were hunting and fishing camps at regular intervals near the beach along the coastline. On the first evening I reached such a camp, and I took the liberty of spending the night there. The hut was not locked, and there was a big wooden platform covered with Caribou pelts which made a wonderful bed. The Caribou had been introduced onto the island where to Eskimos managed the free-roaming animals like wild cattle. This way I did not have to pitch my tent, which was lucky as the rain was still pouring. 

In fact, this place was cleaner and neater than most native homes I had seen; there was even a small transistor radio, so I could catch up on the news and listen to some country music from Radio Nome; amusingly enough, the Eskimos loved country music originating from the hot and dusty states of Texas and Tennessee! Having grown up with classical music, as well as rock and jazz, country & western was new to me; at the Creek, we could receive a station from Fairbanks playing this stiff, but Bill didn't like it: Born in California in 1936, he didn't think too highly of the 'Okies', their southern accents nor their 'Okie music'. On St Lawrence Island I started to like it!    

The next morning the rain had stopped. That had been six days of solid, non-stop rain, which was pretty incredible and certainly something you would never see in other parts of Alaska. The sky was still grey; during all the time I spent on St Lawrence Island, I only saw the sun peeping out briefly though the cover a few times, and it kept on raining every other day.

I continued south, and on that evening I reached the South-West Cape, or at least I got to where the cliffs started, rising abruptly from the beach. Just before the hills, I had to cross a river and I was afraid that the heavy rains had made it swell up badly. From studying the map I knew that this one connected up to and drained a major part of the elevated country inland. 

True enough, when I stood in front of the river, it turned out to be a wide torrent unloading all the icy water from the mountains. Deep rivers like this are a major problem when you walk cross-country in Alaska. Back at Karen Creek, Tom had talked about the times he went prospecting during the spring floods in the Brooks Range. He would cross rivers by building a raft for his equipment and then swim across pushing the float in front of him. Luckily I did not have to do that here. I found a place some ways upstream where the river spread out a bit; here I undressed and walked across holding all my gear above my head - wearing only my underwear for some comfort and my leather boots to protect my feet against the shingles on the river bottom. Safely on the other bank I warmed up and camped for the night. 

The next morning I started inspecting the bird cliffs. The South-West Cape is a range of coastal formations stretching 14-15 km along the coastline and reaching a height of 480 m a.s.l. from where they stoop straight into the sea below. It is breathtaking scenery of raw beauty: The jagged peaks that extend into the low cloud cover, the eroded cliff faces with countless points and narrow canyons, the seemingly endless drop to the ocean far-far below. This is one place on earth where you are really alone, you stand here and feel like you are light years away from anywhere; there is only you and nature. Nobody ever comes here, you are surrounded by only the extraordinary power of the elements; you feel the captivating sensation of seeing the earth at its most magnificent state, as it must have been long before humans appeared. 

The birds are the icing on the cake, the decoration that completes the landscape. There were swerving flocks of thousands of auklets coming and going to their nesting grounds near the top, their screaming voices filling the air. Below at the vertical sections nearer the sea were dense colonies of kittiwakes and guillemots laying their eggs directly on the tiny ledges on the cliffs. They are all Arctic sea birds which spend their entire lives far offshore, except for two or three summer months when they have to come onto land shortly to reproduce. 

When I wanted to take a picture of this stunning scenery my camera failed. A week of wet conditions had been too much for the mechanics of my 2 1/4 square inch Hasselblad 500C, and the Compur type shutter built into the lens jammed. I never got a photograph of these cliffs, but I will always carry a picture of them in my mind. Later on, while back in Fairbanks, I tried to get my camera fixed. I had two lenses: an 80 mm standard lens and a small 250 mm telephoto lens. But I couldn’t get any of them to work, and the local photo-shop couldn’t either. I never took another photo during my Alaska trip; only much later, after I returned to Denmark, did I get my equipment properly serviced and up and running again. 

I walked along the cliffs following the edge at the top. In the beginning I managed to see massive colonies holding maybe hundreds of thousands of birds, numbers were impossible to estimate this way with any kind of accuracy. But further to the south some heavy blankets of fog rolled in and it became increasingly difficult to view the terrain and to get an idea about how many birds might be hidden down below the clouds. Finally the cliffs descended gently and ended up at Boxer Bay, where there was also a native hunting camp with some cabins; there were no birds on the lower cliffs around these parts. 

I continued hiking during the following days along this section of the coast where the cliffs were only 20-30 meters high. Just as packed with birds as the tall cliffs had been, just as completely devoid of life these parts were. Finally also the low cliffs came to an end and the coast went on as a sandy beach.

Just as I stepped out on the beach, I heard a hissing sound from the corner of the rocks. It was a seal resting in the sand, I had come between it and the sea and now it could not escape. I stepped to the side and made room for the animal which quickly crawled across and plunged into the sea water. The seal re-appeared off the coast and had rejoined its companions obviously, several more little seal heads popped out of the water nearby. I don’t know which species they were. 

Although I never saw any, Polar Bears have also been known to occur on St Lawrence Island. The males and the young animals do not hibernate, they follow the drift-ice during winter but cannot swim far, so when the sea ice-cover withdraws in the spring one or a few bears are sometimes trapped on the Bering Sea islands and have to spend the summer there roaming around the coastline. There were many small Arctic Foxes on St Lawrence however, at one place I found a den with some cute, half-grown young playing outside; the female was moving about nearby barking anxiously. There had been plenty of foxes at Barrow as well, they had all been white; these ones were in summer fur, a blue-grey color. There are two foxes in Alaska: the Red and the Arctic. In recent years, the Red Fox has moved north and tend to replace the smaller Arctic specialist as it expands its range, even up on the North Slope and some Bering Sea islands such as St Matthew Island. To my knowledge, there are still no Red Foxes on St Lawrence Island, and the Arctic one is doing well, feeding on voles and ground squirrels as well as birds of course.  

At that point I turned north and headed out over the low tundra of the interior of the St Lawrence towards the north coast and the village of Savoonga. On these parts of the island there were no mountains, only flat tundra with some rolling hills and permafrost and poor drainage which accounted for all the little lakes and ponds everywhere. Like the North Slope, the Bering Sea islands are part of Arctic Alaska, defined as the area where the average temperature of the warmest month is less than 10° C. At St Lawrence Island, the average temperature for the warmest month, July is 6 degrees. Because it is so cold, the island is treeless like the rest of the Arctic region.

The terrain had an eerie lack of features, so when heavy fog rolled in one morning and cut visibility to less than 100 meters it was really difficult to navigate; there was now no coastline, river or trail to follow, the sun could not be located. In fact, I did not quite know where I was. I had to walk while holding the compass in one hand looking at it virtually every minute to keep my baring north-east. Later that day, the fog lifted slowly showing nearby hills which I could recognize on the map and follow as I walked. 

When I arrived at the north coast of the island, I found a hunting camp on the map and walked over there to make a stop. For once there were people in camp, the first persons I had seen since I started out from Gambell a week ago and more than 100 km back. I figured I had about one more day's hike from here before I reached Savoonga; but the Eskimo family staying in camp invited me inside, and the man managed to get across to me in broken English that a boat would pass by on its way from Gambell to Savoonga. Before I quite realised what was going on, the Eskimo picked up a walkie-talkie and called the boat telling the operator to stop over at the camp and collect me. 

In reality I would much have preferred to walk; the mountains behind Savoonga were new volcanic formations that I was interested in seeing, and I wanted to survey the coastline for breeding birds, as this area was poorly known ornithologically and I planned to publish a report about my findings later. I did not want to sail at all. But I could not get that across to the Eskimo; and it was too late anyway, as the boat was already on its way, visible in the distance. There was little I could do except try to look happy. 

The Eskimo's family stayed in a large tent they had erected by covering a wooden structure with canvas. They had traveled in by boat but used a snowmobile dragging a small sledge carrying supplies for day trips into the tundra. I had seen that at Barrow too, the Eskimos using the snowmobiles on the tundra during the summer, and they seemed to get around quite well like that. The family was doing all right here, fishing, hunting and collecting berries and herbs. They were probably better off here than in the village.

The boat came in, I said thank you very much for coffee to the family at the camp and jumped aboard. It was a large, spacious boat with an outboard engine, made out not of wood but of a wooden frame covered with walrus skins. In it were five young guys. 

This was the kind of boat that the Eskimos use when they go out hunting Walruses during the period with drift ice conditions spring and fall, when Walruses migrate through the Bering Sea. They hunt whales as well from these boats like the natives at Barrow. The meat from these animals is dark and firm and tastes excellently, I was treated to some at the minister's house; it was a bit harder to understand that the Eskimos ate the thick layers of pure fat - the blubber - that these marine mammals have under their skin, they even regarded this as a delicacy. 

Eskimos apparently had a passion for firearms. At Barrow I had seen young kids on many occasions roam around the tundra shooting at anything that moved, mostly birds. The men here were no different; they carried a heavy arsenal with them of shotguns, small-bore rifles and handguns. They asked me if I carried a gun, and when I showed them my .45 Automatic they took turns trying it out, wasting some of my precious ammo in the process. 

We traveled east up along the northern coastline of the island, and when we passed some bird cliffs the firing commenced. The cliffs were quite low here, 30-40 meters high I would estimate, but very steep, practically vertical; they especially housed many guillemots, both Brünnich’s and Common Guillemots occur here, the Americans call them murres. Many were swimming on the water below the cliffs, and they were hit by a barrage of gunfire as the boat approached, the bullets were splashing into the water all around them. I saw one kid fire a .22 Automatic pistol repeatedly at flying guillemots, on two occasions hitting one in the air so that it folded up and came tumbling out of the sky, those were some pretty amazing shots. When a bird got hit the Eskimos yelled and cheered, but they never stopped the boat to pick up the dead or wounded animals. 

Meanwhile I sat and looked longingly at the splendid volcanic landscape that we passed by ashore. How I would have preferred walking in there in peace and quiet.

When we got to Savoonga I said goodbye to the Eskimos and thank you for the ride. "That will be 10 dollars," one of the kids replied. I quickly paid him 10 bucks and left, that was the worst money I spent on the trip. I was only too happy when I found out that there was a flight back to Nome that afternoon and that there was a seat available.

I was the only passenger on the small plane, and I sat next to the pilot as we headed out over the sea. The noise from the two engines was deafening however, so I was unable to have a proper conversation with the guy. At one stage the pilot made some hand signals to me pointing downwards, I managed to make out that he was saying 'Walruses'. Deep down below us in the ocean some large, sausage-shaped animals were making their way through the surface of the water. This peculiar sight still stood before my eyes as we approached Nome, it was my last impression from St Lawrence Island and the Bering Sea. 

Via Fairbanks I once more made my way to Bettles where I was well received by Jerry as always. It was wonderful to be back. No more violent rain storms or featureless terrain, I was back in the best part of Alaska, among people I had grown to know and to like. 

However, Jerry did not like my plan of going back to Karen Creek by walking down from Anaktuvuk Pass. And that was putting it mildly; he blew his top when I insisted that I wanted to go. "It is absolutely impossible!" he exclaimed. "There are Niggerheads all over the place, you will never make it!"

'Niggerheads' is a local term for a type of tussock that grows in swampy areas in the interior of Alaska. They grow in unstable bunches with water in between, and these reed beds are very difficult to walk through. Today the term may not be politically correct, but it is the only one I know. I was of the opinion that the terrain would be OK for walking, I judged so from the maps I had and because Bill had told me that there were no Niggerheads in the Glacier River valley at least, the one that his claim at Mascot Creek drains into.

"Bill doesn't know shit from wild honey," was Jerry's reply to that. "Bill is nothing but a big clown, and you can tell him I said so. Besides there is nothing to discuss, because you will not be allowed onto the plane to Anaktuvuk Pass at all, I will see to that." 

Jerry actually meant well, and when he realized that I was going anyway he started handing out his usual free advice: "Make sure you have your pistol ready if a bear mauls you," he said. "No, don't shoot the bear; shoot yourself so you won't feel the pain." Jerry was in a cheerful mood.

We heard on the news on the radio then that another tourist had just died in a bear encounter, an elderly hunter had met a bear while walking in the forest, he panicked, threw down his gun and collapsed while running away, basically dying of fear. 

Grizzly Bears were dangerous; there was no reason to conceal that fact. I decided I would be careful in the mountains and keep away from them if I met any on my hike. On St Lawrence Island I had done a bit of target practicing with Jerry's .45 Automatic and found out that I could hit reasonably well with it. But if I had to shoot, I would try out with a warning shot first, like Bill did. If I just kept cool I would not get hurt.

Apart from that bear issue, it was really striking how many accidents were always happening in this place. Among the American states, Alaska has a number of records - like it is the largest state, has the fewest inhabitants, the highest per capital income et c, ... and the highest accident rate! One year, 32 men died during oil exploration work on the North Slope alone. Many people leave home and are never found again. And there were so many other possibilities here of things going wrong.

Like the time during early spring when we heard on the radio that a man in Fairbanks had found the propane bottle outside his house frozen one morning. Minus 40 degrees is a peculiar temperature; as I mentioned earlier, it is the only temperature identical on the Fahrenheit and the Celsius scales, and it also happens to be the freezing point for liquid propane gas. Anyway, the man had heated up the bottle with a blow torch and when the gas suddenly melted and expanded and broke open the bottle into the flame, the result was pretty predictable: Another notch for the death statistics. A freak accident like that could not have happened anywhere else in the U.S.

Each summer there were episodes in Alaska where tourists in distress had to be rescued, especially in the Mount McKinley National Park where hikers and climbers could not always quite do what they set out to do. Rescuers had even lost their lives trying to save fool-hearted adventurers who could not take care of themselves. I had long ago decided that this should not happen to me, I did not reveal my route through the Brooks Range to Jerry; if I got into trouble I also wanted to get out of it myself. In Iceland I had once seen a girl suffer an open leg fracture, as she jumped across a mountain stream no more than one meter across. It would not happen to me.

So I packed up all the stuff I did not need during the hike in a box and walked across to Jeannie’s place and had her send it up by the mail plane to Karen Creek. Then 20 August I caught the once-weekly flight to Anaktuvuk Pass. It was one of those usual little one-engine postal planes that they used in the Koyukuk country, probably a Cessna, but I cannot recall which model. I sat next to the pilot as the only passenger. 

Before take-off, the pilot went through a checklist, one of the items were 'doors locked'. "Is your door locked?" he asked me. "Sure, sure, - check," I replied, it looked quite secure to me. But when we got airborne and headed north, my door jumped open. We both tried to force it shut again, but to no avail. This was a small plane that was not going very high, so we followed the John River valley into the mountains, and every time we navigated one of the bends to the right my door would fall open and I would look straight down on the ground. I could not drop out of course; however, the balance of the plane was probably somewhat off, but the pilot took the incident well and just laughed it off.

It was good being back in the Brooks Range again. The air was so dry and crystal clear here that the mountains far off in the distance made a contour against the sky as if they were cut out with a razor sharp knife. Down below was the valley with its characteristically thin cover of bushes and small trees. 

The valley started elevating more rapidly, the vegetation around the river got sparser and sparser, in the end there were only some scattered bushes left, the mountain walls on each side of the plane narrowed around us and became a pass. On top of the pass we flew low over the last hill. This was where John River originated, in front the mountains opened up and we looked down over the northern part of the Brooks Range. The river here, the Anaktuvuk River, would flow north into the Arctic Ocean. So this was the Continental Divide, the gateway to the Arctic, and right there was the village of Anaktuvuk Pass.

We touched down, and a big group of inland Eskimos came forward to meet the plane. I felt a bit silly the way my door had been rattling open during the landing. But I got talking to an elderly guy about conditions in the mountains at the moment. The Eskimo said that nobody had crossed over to Wiseman for a long time, but it certainly was not impossible, and he wished me a safe journey. I walked east up the Inukpasugruk River valley a bit and made my first camp on a hill overlooking the pass and the village.

This part of the Brooks Range was wilder than the southern part around Middlefork River that I knew so well. The mountain sides rose steep and rugged up around the plateau where the village was, in the north the range descended down towards the North Slope. 

It was getting late in the evening; this time of year, the nights were starting to turn dark again. Some heavy clouds came drifting from the north into the mountains; the whole scenery appeared a bit gloomy. Maybe Jerry had been right after all, when he had predicted that I would drown up there in the mountains in a foot of snow. It was well into August now, there was a light frost in the night air up here I could sense, those clouds could very well bring snow.

I was also concerned about fog. Bill had told about fog moving into the mountains from the north and cutting visibility to virtually zero for days and weeks. I navigated by matching distant features in the terrain with my maps, notably peaks and rivers; if I could not see far, I would get lost like it happened on St Lawrence Island. 

But the next morning all worries were forgotten. The sun shone from a clear sky, I never saw any traces of snow or fog in the mountains. In fact, my problem was mostly that during the day the sun got so hot that I perspired a lot. Another relief was discovering that the mosquitoes - that had been such a nuisance in the spring - had all gone. The dry season and the frosty nights had done them all in. 

I walked along Inukpasukgruk Creek upstream, followed a branch to the right (south) until it came to an end in a narrow pass. Bill had been right, these low water levels in the river beds made walking so much easier. This was easy going: firm footing, little vegetation. After the pass, I crossed the watershed through a difficult canyon full of large rocks and boulders. But once through that, I suddenly found myself at the top of a beautiful valley, the Tinayguk River valley. I was looking far out over the southern part of the Brooks Range, a seemingly endless expanse of rocky mountain slopes and picturesque green river valleys in between. Anaktuvuk Pass was behind me and old news, in front were 150 km of pleasant hiking, before Wiseman and Karen Creek. 

I made a program for one day at a time, each evening I would set a target for the next day's walking which I then either met or surpassed depending on conditions. My backpack was around 25 kg including two weeks of food supplies, my topographical maps were in the 1:250,000 scale and perfect for this kind of use.

The first valley I walked through - the Tinayguk - was quite narrow with some tall mountains, the Gray Mountains to the south. The vegetation cover was sparse with only some bushes and a few scattered trees, the going was easy. 

I was constantly aware of bears and kept to the open parts, so I would not run into one unintentionally and scare it. At one place I heard an animal move noisily through the bushes in front of me, but it turned out to be a large Porcupine; the tiny young following close behind looked exactly like a miniature version of its mother. They were not too scared but walked dignifiedly away from me. Another place a Moose was walking near the river with her calf; this was obviously a good place for animals. 

Later that afternoon - when I was almost at the bottom of the valley - I finally did see a bear. I had had this feeling all along, this here was the perfect Grizzly Bear country, this was where I would settle down had I been a bear. The bear was walking on the other side of the stream, uphill in the same direction as me. It was a fully grown individual, muscular and athletic, moving along like a big cat. It was a while before I saw that there was also a small baby bear. First it was messing around inside some bushes, but then it came forward and ran towards its mother. It started jumping playfully around the big bear, but she did not take any notice, she just walked on slowly stopping once in a while to dig into the sandy ground with her paws. The little bear started digging as well, imitating its mother, but it quickly lost interest and ran up into the vegetation again. 

Maybe Grizzly Bears do not have very good eyesight, or else they just don’t care about humans. I was less than 100 meters from the bears, but they did not react at all to my presence; the old female did not even look across at me. But I did not want to take any chances and moved further up my side of the embankment and walked past the bears who were moving forward slowly, constantly stopping to dig for roots or whatever they were finding in the soil. 

The rest of the hike progressed without hardly any problems. I walked along the river beds crossing to the next river at passes I judged from the maps as being best suitable. Only after the Tinayguk did I get into some trouble trying to cross to the North Fork River. There was no proper pass, so I had to climb over the ridge itself. The place was called Slatepile Mountain and that was a very fitting name; there were huge piles of slate plates and debris on the steep slopes making climbing hard work. This was the high country; there was nothing but rocks and stones here, not even a straw of grass. Amazingly I came across a very confiding Wandering Tattler nearby here, a migratory shorebird making its home in this barren terrain. 

After a tough climb up from the north I made it to the ridge. The view was great, but to my dismay I found the south side so steep and rugged that I could not possibly descend there. That way I lost almost a whole day backtracking and doing the climb all over again at a new place back west a bit. This crest was steep as well, but climbable. On the other side of the ridge I descended steeply into the next valley, the source of Shushalluk Creek which wound its way east for another 8 km or so into the North Fork Koyukuk River valley.

At the North Fork junction I checked out some cabins marked on my map, but they were run down and not suitable for camping. I crossed the main river bare-footed without any problems, the river bed was several hundred meters wide with large gravel banks and sand dunes but it was almost empty, the water-flow in the middle was just knee-deep. 

I saw something weird there: human footprints in the sand, just like my own but smaller, as if they were from a woman or a large child. Who had been here, walking bare-footed down the North Fork River? I could see it before me: a fairytale elf dancing along in the wilderness. I later told Bill about this, and he said that they were probably made by the wife of the trapper who went berserk in May. He had come back home and patched up with his wife, they had been over at the Northfork for a while, so Bill had heard.

The North Fork valley was beautiful, the sun was shining, I walked south downhill a bit at the edges of the water before I camped for the night. There was plenty of large bushes and small trees with dry wood for building a nice fire, so I cooked a warm soup that evening, it made a nice change from my regular diet of chocolate chip cookies and raisins.

From North Fork there was an easy crossing through Holmes Pass to Clear River and then over Chimney Pass and south along Glacier River where I again camped for the night. I had been six days on the trail at that point. I suddenly felt the urge to get on down to Karen Creek and find out how things were there. It was a distance of 45 km but I set the alarm clock for 6 o'clock the next morning and started out on the last leg.

Just before I left Glacier River I met another Grizzly Bear. It did not seem particularly big but it was well fed. By now all my anxieties had evaporated, I had made it through the mountains and I was only 20 km from human habitation. I put down my pack and walked closer to look at the bear, holding my pistol in one hand. 

The bear moved leisurely about inside some dense bushes, feeding on blueberries, there were lots of those in these parts. It was not able to pick the berries but was rather chewing through the bushes tearing off mostly leaves and twigs in the process. This bear had a darker fur than the other Grizzly Bears I had seen, it was dark brown, while the others had been quite pale, almost yellowish in color. It was rather plump; the heavy vegetation around it hampered its movements and made it appear clumsy. This one looked like the popular perception of a typical bear. 

I crossed the last divide and ended up near Nolan Creek. This was where I had been driving with Bill and Charlie back in May. When I found the jeep track I knew I was home free, from here on there was a road all the way to Karen Creek which made walking so much easier. At a small lake I rested, I shaved and put on dry socks and my last clean shirt. Then I walked down to the village of Wiseman. 

As I explained in the last chapter, my camera had died on St Lawrence Island, so I have no photos from that walk. But these days, images are not hard to find. In fact, some guy strapped a GoPro under his small aircraft and filmed the exact trip I walked. You can find the slightly time-lapsed edition here. The distance that took me a week to cover on foot takes 9 minutes here! His route is a bit more southerly than mine, but we end up the same place: At the road toward Nolan Creek (at 7:30 min), then Wiseman and south along the Middlefork and what is now the Dalton Highway to Coldfoot.   

But back to 1974: In Wiseman I met some of the people I had been introduced to in May and I was invited inside for a cup of coffee. But I was keen to get going and soon crossed the Middlefork river on the nice, new bridge that had been put in since spring. The access road had been transformed as well, it was now a broad and even gravel highway, it did not take long before an Alyeska pick-up truck came by heading south; the driver stopped and offered me a lift.

At Jeannie Creek I got out and said ‘thank you for the ride’ and walked down to the Middlefork. For the last time I had to take off my boots and jeans and wade through the river. I knew every tree and every bush around here, it was like coming home. The weather had turned a bit darkish by then, and for the first time in a week it started to rain slightly while I stood on the shingle river bed and put my clothes back on. Then I walked up along the old caterpillar track - up to Karen Creek camp.

There was nobody in camp, the whole place looked like it used to. I set my backpack up against the cabin wall and took off my gun-belt. Then I went into the kitchen and said 'hi' to a young man who was sitting there, he must have been 18 or 19 years old. I said who I was, the kid said that his name was Mike; Bill was over in the cabin.

Bill was cleaning up some stuff in the cabin when I stepped in. He smiled his little smile and said to me that I was early. "Yes," I replied, "it didn't take as long to walk through the mountains as I had calculated. But it is good to be back at Karen Creek. I can recognize the smell here in the cabin, funny, it is actually quite distinctive." "You mean it stinks," Bill quipped.

But it did not really stink; the smell was a pleasant mixture of spruce-wood and gun-oil and woolen blankets and books and a number of other difficult-to-determine ingredients. 

Bill was about to pack up some things in a bag and said: "Listen, we are on our way down to Coldfoot to sell some gold. You can come along if you want to."

Now Bill showed me part of the reward of this summer's work. He pulled out two moose-skin pouches and poured the content of one of them out on the table. It was full of gold nuggets, big ones and small ones among each other. A few weighed 2 or 3 ounces, most of them were in the 1/2 to 1 ounce category. I picked up the biggest one; there you go, 900 dollars Bill wanted for this one. 

The other pouch contained gold dust. It was larger than the pouch with the nuggets, but worth about the same in cash according to Bill.

It is surprising how heavy gold is when you are holding a lot of it; I could not get over how a small purse like this could feel so heavy in my hand, it must have been several kilograms. The dust was left behind this time around, but the purse with the nuggets and the delicate set of scales and Bill's pocket calculator all went into the bag.

For once we left camp without bringing Bill's revolver, we did not want to offend anybody by coming into Coldfoot armed. When Bill carried gold in town, he always took his little cal. .22 so-called 'Saturday night special' with him. He had modified it himself by reducing the length of the barrel, so it took up very little space in a pocket. Without a special permit it was not allowed to carry a weapon concealed like that, but Bill preferred to risk a fine rather than risk losing the whole year's production on his way to the goldsmith or the bank. 

Apart from that, Bill did not trust the people at Coldfoot 100 percent. A couple of years back there had been a break-in in his cabin at Karen Creek. The men came by helicopter, and in Alaska only oil field personnel fly helicopters, they are too expensive and complicated to run for ordinary people. Some guns and different small items were stolen, but no gold. Bill still had the drawings he made then of the men's footprints, and he was still making an effort to get them apprehended. He had announced publicly that those who broke into his camp would get shot, and there was no doubt that he meant it.

There was now so little water flowing down the Middlefork River that it was possible to cross it in the jeep. Upstream a bit, there was a wide section where the water was so shallow that by staying in first gear and four-wheel drive and by working your way slowly across the rocky bottom, you could make it to the other side, water penetrated across the floor into the cabin of the vehicle but it did not invade the ignition system, the exhaust was elevated to allow the engine to breathe. Over on the other bank Bill had made a kind of a clearing and a track through the forest up to the access road. There was now road connection from Karen Creek to the outside world. 

At Coldfoot we arranged a sort of retail outlet for raw placer gold in one of the camp offices. Bill soon got busy with his scales and his calculator. The nuggets were sold for 250 or 275 dollars an ounce, depending on size and shape, and there were plenty of the construction workers who wanted to buy. They especially picked those nuggets that they thought were the prettiest; the small pieces came in all kinds of different shapes. Gold is a very soft and malleable metal, many of the fragments had been hammered almost flat by the forces of erosion, or they had been broken into small, withered figures. The workers wanted to use the raw lumps of gold for customized jewelry, some were speculating that the price would go up and hoped to sell later at a profit, most of all they wanted to take home with them a souvenir from the Brooks Range.

Bill made some arrangements in Coldfoot so that Mike, who had helped him dive for gold during the summer, got a lift south. Mike was even allowed to board a flight that would take him all the way to Anchorage free of charge. The plane left the next morning. Mike was also allowed to borrow the phone and talk to his parents in Anchorage; the Alyeska people in Coldfoot were all right neighbors after all. 

A lot of gold nuggets poorer but a lot richer in cash, we all drove back to Karen Creek. I asked Mike what he intended to use the money for that he had made during the summer. He wanted to buy a car, Mike said, he already had one on hand. It was an almost new Ford Mustang V8, it cost 1,100 dollars and he could afford that now. Who said money can't buy happiness?

Mike told me that he had seen two wolves walk down at the river that summer, apart from that no wolves or bears were seen in camp while I was absent. Last summer Bill had a Wolf for a 'pet'. He fed it by putting out scraps of meat for it a few meters from the door to the kitchen hut. He never saw the animal though, only its tracks; and it did not return this summer. 

Mike stayed in the old workshop which had now been converted into a guest room. And they had also managed to do up what we called 'the tent', a wooden frame covered in plastic and canvas which had been pretty torn up in the spring but which had now been repaired and decorated and made into another cozy guest room. I took over my old place, the lower bunk inside the cabin.

The next morning Bill and I drove Mike to Coldfoot and saw him off. He was the last of Bill's summer guests to leave the creek; the summer was coming to an end. Back in camp, there was just Bill and me left, autumn was on its way. We sat down in the kitchen that afternoon and had a cup of coffee.

Bill was interested in hearing a bit about what I had been up to. He was apparently somewhat impressed by my hike through the Brooks Range and wanted to know more about it. I showed him on the map where I had walked and explained that the going had been real easy most places, often walking in the mountains was like walking across a golf course; the only place where the going had been a bit heavy and slow was coming out of the Glacier River valley, which was a bit of a paradox as that was the only place where I had been assured that there would be no Niggerheads. That was shortly after the place where I had seen that blueberry-picking Grizzly Bear, I told Bill about that as well. 

"Did it look fat and well nourished, the bear," Bill wanted to know. I replied that in actual fact it did, why? "Well, the thing is, I drove over to Mascot Creek in the army carrier a few weeks back and a bear had been visiting then. It had broken the door to the cabin down, messed up everything and helped itself to 500 dollars worth of grub."

Bill was really annoyed over that incident, and it quite possibly could have been the bear I saw who was the culprit; it had certainly been walking at that time just 7-8 km north of Mascot Creek which runs into Glacier River. Bill was a bit disappointed that I had not made the effort of walking down to inspect his camp at the creek. He was somewhat proud of having built up that place, and he told in the usual vague terms about quite a lot of gold that he had dug out of the creek this year. The work at Mascot Creek was entirely his own project and did not affect the Karen Creek accounts.

Now Bill showed me a preliminary set of accounts for the year at Karen Creek, and they looked very promising. The production target was already met; that would cover all the expenses and secure each participant a reasonable salary. What was found from now on would be extra profit. The revenue from the gold production was shared so that first of all Bill got 10% of the gross income. That was a royalty payment, because the creek belonged to him. Then all expenses were deducted, and the net income was divided by the total number of working weeks put in. This way a weekly salary was derived at and it was the same for all workers on the job: Bill's sister who had cooked and cleaned during some of the busy summer weeks, I who had shoveled snow and chopped firewood, and then Bill and his diving companions who had done the actual mining - everybody was paid the same. 

It was plain to see that Bill had to be making pretty good money. With his extra income from Mascot Creek and Jeannie Creek and a few claims in California - that he usually worked a bit during the winter months if he could find the time - it all added up. But that was naturally during good years, providing everything went according to plan, and providing that he did not 'waste' time prospecting for more claims in new streams. 

With regards to the following weeks, Bill and I agreed that I should stay at the camp for another 2 or 3 weeks, during this time there was still work to be done in the creek. Later in September I would go back, Bill intended so stay until around 1st of October, wrap up everything and lock up the camp before he too headed south. 

But for the moment, first priority was to extract as much gold out of Karen Creek as possible while there was still time, i.e. before the frost came. Early the next morning, we started out; we drove up to location at the creek and Bill showed around. While I was away, they had reached bedrock in that deep hole which Bill had commented on and had expressed such great faith in during the spring. And they had not been disappointed; this was where they had found most of this summer's gold. 

It was now a steep, roundish pool 6-7 meters across with 3-4 meters deep water. The surface was calm, the water crystal clear and you could see every detail on the bottom. It was like a big wishing well, but instead of with coins, the bottom was lined with crushed gold. 

Bill did not use his engine-driven suction dredge here, he utilized the water pressure created by the tall wall built across the creek to dam up the water and form the pool. When you opened a valve at the bottom of the dam, water started running through a series of flexible tubes. By diving into the pool and directing the tube along the bottom Bill could vacuum the bedrock. 

The water had now been dammed up so high that Bill could no longer breathe through a snorkel, that device had been replaced by an elaborate system of air hoses through which oxygen was driven by an air pump sitting on the bank. 

While Bill was down inside the water, my job was to inspect the creek further upstream. I had to expose the bedrock by shoveling gravel and then search for gold in cracks and crevices. Through a box with a glass bottom, I looked down into the water and with a hand pump like Bill's, I picked up any gold that was down there.

Bill had with the small caterpillar cleared a path out in the creek a long way upstream from where we worked in the spring; with the four-wheel drive jeep we actually used the creek as a kind of road. We were able to drive almost all the way up to the new place. The water in the creek was fairly calm and shallow and only reached to about halfway up the wheels on the jeep.

Out in the creek some places lay huge boulders which we obviously had to drive around but which clearly fascinated Bill. He evidently had to work extra hard moving those rocks when he wanted to work in that section of the stream, some of them were like old acquaintances to him whom he had struggled with on several occasions. Bill used a system of steel wires and chains - and pulleys to gear the forces applied - when he had to move those boulders. The wires he fastened to a tree on the bank or to long pegs which he drove down into the ground if no trees were nearby. The rocks usually penetrated down through the gravel deposits resting directly on the bedrock itself; Bill had found rich pockets of gold deposits under some of them, and of course that did not make them less interesting.

Bill also had dynamite available to blow up obstructions with. He had a whole box of sticks packed inside wax paper in a metal crate in one of the 'old timer' log cabins far from his own camp. But he did not use it often, it made too much of a mess he said. I inquired whether it was not difficult to get ahold of explosives like that. But Bill said that he had just told the dealer that he was a gold miner, then he was given a permit without further fuss, and he was allowed to buy all the dynamite he wanted, including detonators and fuses. 

It was a busy time at Karen Creek. For more than a week we worked in and around the pool all day. And we found a lot of gold, 4-5 ounces each day. In the evenings we sat in the kitchen while darkness fell picking black grains of sand from the gold and admiring the nuggets we had recovered. 

Bill had himself experimented with jewelry making; he had tried melting the gold dust and had manufactured the wedding rings for him and his wife when he got married. He still had his own ring and it was incomprehensible that this product was made by an amateur; it was a thick ring, completely smooth, made out of un-treated placer. In this area, the placer was about 92% gold, i.e. 22 carat; the rest being mainly silver with traces of other metals like copper. Bill said that gold was a totally unique material to work with; even cold it was soft and stuck together like gel. Of all metals gold could form the thinnest threads; theoretically one pennyweight could be molded into an unbroken thread over 2 miles long. Gold does not react to molecules in water and air and never loses its glowing shine. 

Now that we found so much gold, I started to understand the fever which can pervade some people when they get gold and which can make them do anything it takes to get more. It was a wonderful feeling when you stood out in the creek looking through the glass box; you stirred up the gravel and suddenly the sand and the small stones were whisked away by the current and there you saw it: small specks of orange left behind on the bottom, unmoved by the water, they were absolutely unmistakable, they were pieces of gold that had been lying there since the beginning of time, all you had to do was pick them up with the hand pump.

I started to look at the creek with new eyes. If there was a little bit of tiny fragments in this crack, then how about the next one? Maybe it would hold a whole row of big nuggets. They were here somewhere, that was for certain. Bill had told about nuggets weighing 8 ounces or more. The only problem was figuring out where they were at and digging them out. 

Bill also had the mineral mining concession to a section of the Hammond River north of the village of Wiseman. And he wanted to go up there and work a bit, partly to explore new ground and partly because it was required by the conditions of his claim. We packed a kit of prospecting equipment and loaded it into the jeep; I drove that one, Bill followed behind in the small caterpillar. 

We stopped over on the way in Wiseman and exchanged news with Charlie. Charlie advised us that old Harry from Nolan Creek had declared war on the oil companies. During the summer, he had arranged several campaigns against Alyeska and their representatives, as he still had some unsettled disputes over land rights with them. As long as these cases remained unsolved, his demand was that the construction people stayed away from his territory, as he saw it. 

A few days later we actually met Harry in Wiseman, otherwise he was still staying at his summer residence up near that rich mine of his at Nolan Creek. Harry was happy to give us his side of the story, he cheerfully told about how he had driven his enormous caterpillar down and parked it on the middle of the new access road, bringing all work on the road to a complete halt for half a day. Then he had gone down to Coldfoot camp and complained, threatening the camp manager with a hunting rifle that he had with him - old, white-bearded Harry! 

One of his more humorous conceptions was to snatch some hard hats and put them on top of wooden crosses that he put together and set up along the infamous Haul Road. These hard hats were the trademark of oil field and construction workers. "They even wear them when they are sitting inside their goddamn trucks," as Harry put it. Bill and he had a good laugh over these stories.

The Hammond River ran in a terrain of low mountains, the scenery was quite different from Karen Creek. It was further north, higher up and the trees here were sparse and stunted. Hammond was a proper river with a wide bed, and there was little gravel and shingles deposited here, the water was crystal clear and ran straight over the exposed bedrock itself which extended up along the low, rocky banks. The flow was fast but calm. It was a beautiful spot.

When I asked Bill if there was any gold in this river, he did not utter a word. He just picked up a glass-bottom box and a hand pump and walked down to the edge searching through the shallow water for a while. Then he returned holding two small fragments of gold in his hand. "Yes, there is gold here," he said.

We worked at Hammond River for a few days, but always returned to the Karen Creek camp in the evenings spending the nights there. It quickly got dark now in the evening; out in the countryside, the leaves of the willow bushes and birch trees had turned colorful nuances of red and yellow and were about to drop. Autumn had come to the Brooks Range. It was getting cold at night now but the days were typical for this area with clear blue skies from dawn till dusk, the midday sun still warmed quite a bit. 

Bill did not say much, and I did not either; we didn’t really talk much at all. Maybe Bill was starting to think ahead, he had to prepare the Karen Creek camp for the winter soon, he thought about his winter holiday, his family in California, his mother who was on her own now. But especially he had that little son of his on his mind. This time around he intended to get custody over him and bring him up to the creek next summer. I hoped he would succeed; no boy could have a better father. 

I had changed my views a lot about Bill since we first met back in February, down in Canada on the Alaska Highway. And I had changed my opinion about the United States as well. I grew up in a leftist family, and as kids in the 1960s we protested against the Vietnam War, institutionalized racism and American imperialism. But things were not as simple as they appeared to me then. In the US I was converted to a fan and a deep admirer of the American people, I have been one ever since. 

In Alaska I had met some people with extraordinary qualities, but qualities that there was not all that much use for in a conventional existence. It occurred to me that these men had to feel a bit isolated among average people, a bit lonely if you will, in spite of all their capabilities and strengths. 

In Wiseman one day we heard that two hunters were about to fly back to Bettles. This was the big game hunting season, and these two had been into the mountains with one of the hunting guides based in Wiseman and got themselves each a Dall Sheep. This was part of the deal when they bought the hunting tour. And now they were going back, they had ordered a chartered plane from Bettles to pick them up, it was going to be a slightly larger model with room for three passengers plus luggage; I was offered a lift.

I packed my stuff, and the next morning Bill took me to Wiseman in the jeep. While we were approaching Wiseman, Bill suddenly got an idea. He wanted to see if the jeep could make the trip cross-country through the woods and across the Middlefork into the village. That was a weird notion, considering that there recently had been installed the nicest new all-weather bridge across the river nearby. 

Bill drove off the Haul Road and started downhill in between the trees. The jeep could do a lot, but amongst some tall tussocks and short spruce trees it got stuck. Bill and I put snow chains onto all four wheels and we made it a little further, but in the end we became totally bogged down and the jeep could go no further. There were still a few hundred meters to the river and we walked down and crossed the river bare-footed. As usual Bill did not reveal his emotions; he remained indifferent and did not comment on the episode. He just puffed on his cigarette and said that he would get Harry to take his cat up there and pull out the jeep later. 

The hunters I was to travel with were two good-old-boys from Texas. They were wearing the obligatory red baseball caps that hunters use so they don’t go around knocking off each other. One of them was a real loudmouth; he just could not stay quiet for one minute. The other one rarely spoke.

Bill courteously waited together with me for the plane to arrive, although it was pretty obvious that he was uncomfortable in the company of the hunters. Their spokesman of course wanted to know everything there was to know about gold mining. 

Bill had this habit of sitting for a little while looking out into empty space when he was asked about something. Then he would slowly smile his little smile and only then would he answer. I had by now gotten used to this, but people who did not know Bill thought that maybe he had not heard the question and repeated it. Bill just let them do that, but I sometimes felt like bursting out saying that there indeed was nothing wrong with Bill's hearing, he just thought before he spoke unlike certain other people. It got real bad now with this big man from Texas, who was restless and impatient to start with, he probably ended up convinced that Bill was either half deaf or somewhat retarded. 

When the plane came in, the pilot started complaining that there were three passengers when he had been contracted to fly only two. Then the talkative one of the hunters said that they were three now, and if the pilot did not like that he was welcome to go home empty right now. I liked the Texan for that support and thought a little more highly of him after that. Of course the pilot ended up taking all of us.

Bill had withdrawn completely from the scene by then and did not say a word, except 'goodbye' when I got on to the plane. Then he just stood there at the runway and smiled.

Below Wiseman we flew low over Karen Creek and I took in every detail in a flash. The cabins, the trails, the waterways, I knew every single clearing and every track down there. Then it was all behind us.

In Bettles, Jerry was not in, he was in Fairbanks I was told. But I let himself into his trailer and waited for him there until he came back the next morning. He didn’t scold me for breaking into his trailer and in fact thought that was quite funny; he needed a better lock on the window, he just said.  

I stayed with Jerry for a few days. During the day I helped him with some of his construction projects, and at night we set down and had a drink together. Jerry explained what a wonderful country the US was - full of possibilities. All right, so some of the politicians had turned out to be crooked; at that time, the sitting President as well as the Vice-president had both just been exposed as criminals. But that was part of the game; Jerry saw nothing wrong with that.  The only mistake of such people was that they got caught. Where else in the world could you start out with nothing and become a millionaire from one year to the next. 

Jerry often talked about a real estate speculator who had offered him a partnership some time back. Jerry had refused, and a few months later the entrepreneur became a multi millionaire from his investments. That was a case that Jerry repeatedly brought up; he could not seem to forgive himself for his caution and poor judgment then. Jerry had himself formed a private limited company, Koyukuk Incorporated, to finance his activities. He sold shares to people in the region, the postmaster Jeannie for one had bought some. Bill did not want to buy any; but then, Bill did not have the slightest knowledge about or instinct for business, according to Jerry.

Andy paid us a visit. He came directly from Rabbit Creek where he had just completed that summer's work. He dropped by Jerry's place with his whole family, including a teenage son that I met again much later during my subsequent visits to Bill’s camp. We all had a cup of coffee and a chat, before the family continued down to Fairbanks. Andy was keen to find out from me how the summer had been at Karen Creek, but I remembered to be careful and replied just like Bill used to do, that it had been not too bad, then I mentioned the size of the biggest nugget we had found, that was allowed.

Bill had told me that Andy deeply regretted selling Karen Creek. The $6,000 he had been paid then for the claims was nothing compared to what Bill shoveled out of the creek every year. And the nuggets were bigger there than at Rabbit Creek. Andy was in his usual jovial mood and assured me that I simply had to come out and visit him and his family as soon as I got to Fairbanks. I said that would be very nice, but I never went. 

One day Jerry suggested that I stayed in Bettles and worked for him for the rest of the fall, until Christmas. I considered it for a while, but decided to return to Denmark. I wanted to work in the oil fields: drilling, exploration, production it did not matter, as long I was out there on location where crude oil and natural gas was found and produced. I was keen to get started on a career and did not want to waste time as an odd-job labourer in Bettles, however much I liked Alaska and Jerry's company. 

I wanted to go back to Europe and work in the oil fields in the North Sea. With some experience from there I could probably get a work permit in the US and maybe come back and work on the North Slope some day. As things turned out, that was pretty much what happened. I started a career as a petroleum engineer - working as faith would have it not in the Arctic but in the tropical environments of South-east Asia. I later retired to pursue my lifelong interest of photographing wildlife, specializing in rainforest birds.

In Bettles, I thanked Jerry sincerely for his hospitality. I had come to like Jerry better and better over time, and in general I felt indebted to all the fine people whom I had encountered during my time in Alaska. I had been given so much by them, and I had not really offered much back in return. But even though I could never pay all their favours back, I hope that I have been able to pay some of them forward. Or at least I tried. When I later in life got into a position as a supervisor of people - in the army, the oil business or as a parent – I did my best to remember what happened to me: Give the young people a break. Give them some space. Let them find their own feet. Let them learn by doing, even if they screw up now and then, that is how you build up character. Attitude and personality is more important than skills, skills can just be taught.  

It was late autumn as I left Bettles, the trees were bare and dark, the air was chilly. Jerry said that here at the end of September the first snow could turn up any day.

My return ticket out of Montreal, Canada was only valid for a year and had expired, but that was no problem, I got it converted to a single ticket back. My US immigration visa had expired as well, and on departure I had to go into a separate room and explain myself. But the Custom and Immigration officers were great about it, they understood and stamped me out and wished me good luck. That was 19 September 1974, the day after my birthday turning 22. 

When I later sat in the big new Boeing 747 going from Anchorage via Tokyo to Copenhagen, I heard some of the cabin crew speak Danish to each other. It struck me like a blow; I had not heard that language spoken for over a year. It was really weird, my mind wanted to speak the language again, but my mouth didn't want to obey, I had difficulties putting even one complete sentence together in my Mother tongue. I felt apprehensive about going back to my own region and my own country, excited but also somewhat distressed. So much appeared different to me now, I was not the same person as when I left, and life at home would never be quite the same. 

I flew north across the interior of Alaska and the Brooks Range one last time. When we headed out over the North Slope, the tundra deep underneath the plane was in its winter plumage already, covered in pure fresh snow. It was indeed a short summer they had in these parts; the sea ice connected up to the coastline again. Then we continued north out over the Arctic Ocean, and the north coast of Alaska disappeared behind us.