I
t was arguably the sweetest tasting water that has ever quenched my thirst.
Myself, and three others were rafting down the Upper Marsh Fork below the
North Slope of the Brooks Range in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)
in Northern Alaska. Despite the chilly Arctic air, after 30 miles of paddling
downriver against an icy headwind, I was thirsty. We made a pit stop inside a
smooth swirling eddy where I dropped my empty water bottle into the river,
filled it and guzzled.
I never treat the water when I’m in the high Eastern Sierra. It tastes better
than anything bottled at home or anywhere else for that matter. That was
until I reached the roadless expanse of the ANWR. Imagine if you could drink the
water flowing out of our local creeks and rivers without a second thought? More than
likely that will never happen. High population densities coupled with irresponsibility,
the uneducated and the uncaring equates to polluted waters that eventually feed our
oceans—the world’s personal toilet.
Eight years ago ocean explorer and environmentalist Jean-Michel Cousteau told me
that “the oceans begin in the mountains.” It’s one of those hard-hitting statements that
has stayed with me ever since, kind of like the swarms of mosquitoes we endured for
two weeks in the ANWR, North America’s largest wildlife refuge. That river water was
essential for washing down an unknown number of Alaska’s state bird.
We weren’t the only ones reaping the freezing yet refreshing rivers. For herds of
caribou, shaggy musk oxen, methodical moose, majestic dall sheep, voracious grizzly
bears, roaming wolves, pesky Arctic terns and long-tailed ducks, the rivers in the refuge
are the lifeline for the mega fauna in this untouched wilderness.
After rafting, and portaging,
160 miles down the Upper Marsh
Fork, converging with the Canning
River, then the Staines River and
eventually the Arctic Ocean, I was
still enjoying the sweet-tasting
waters in the refuge. The Staines
River ran out somewhere near the
Arctic Ocean and the vast coastal
plain. We were camped where
the river ended and still we were
drinking the river water so close to the ocean.
From there it was a tough 3-mile hike across uneven, spongy, soggy tundra to the
Arctic Ocean. A polar bear had been spotted four days prior by a seabird biologist for
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service a few miles up the Staines River feeding on a carcass
we smelled as we paddled by it. From afar I sort of hoped for a glimpse of the apex
predator as I followed its massive detailed paw prints across the beach of a lonely and
desolate barrier island, a sort of buffer separating the coastal plain and the frigid ocean.
Instead, all I got was an earful from a nosey Arctic ground squirrel and a honking tundra
swan. As I walked along the beach, small islands of ice floes cracked and splintered as
they floated by. I reveled in the fact that there was no trash amongst the graveyard of
bleached driftwood and skeletal remains of caribou and migrating seabirds.
An Arctic fox scurried across the barrier island paying me no mind at all as it
scavenged the beach. The Arctic was void of any clouds, but unfortunately the horizon
couldn’t have been less clear. Although a bit hazy, I could make out oil drilling sites at
Point Thomson through my frosty binoculars. About 30 miles west of the refuge and
piercing the Beaufort Sea, drill sites probed the coast. Even more disturbing than the
sight of those towering cranes was the faint drum generated by those drill sites carrying
across the coastal plain by a perpetually stiff Arctic breeze. Suddenly this wilderness
exper