Ned's Pipeline Trek Page

We walked into another world a few days ago--the Arctic north of the Brooks Range. My friend James Hopkins, my dog Jane and I hiked through the eerie mist of Atigun Pass before we landed in a narrow, wet valley that seems to widen with each step we take.

James, from Washington, D.C., has cheerfully shared one of the wettest parts of the trip with me. Low clouds have dashed back and forth through the valley, depositing their moisture on us with each pass. It has been a soggy welcome to the high Arctic, a land of almost infinite visibility framed by the Brooks Range mountains.

The mountains--young, black, and craggy, with peaks that resemble a set of bad teeth--are getting smaller as we walk north. Soon, they won't be visible at all; they'll be replaced in our line of sight by the flatness of the North Slope.

I said goodbye to trees a week ago, just before Jane and I climbed onto Chandalar Shelf. There, Jane returned to her blissful, bushy world of ptarmigan and ground squirrels. She harried 100 ptarmigan on Chandalar Shelf; one bird, whitish with a red head, flushed past me so close I reached for it as if it were a softball.

The lack of trees here makes Jane and I visible to most of the people driving past on the Dalton Highway. The truckers sometimes give us a blast of air horn when they see Jane bouncing through the tundra. Most people return my wave with a grin.

Our unobscured abode motivated a frenetic television reporter to wake us at 6:30 a.m. a few mornings ago when he saw the tent at the site of Atigun Camp. The newsman and a cameraman, both from a Seattle television station, were driving up the Dalton Highway to do a feature story on the trans-Alaska pipeline. Their boss wanted the story in 30 hours, so they had only moments to catch the pipeline hiker on the trail. I first became conscious of them when I heard a van idling outside the tent. When I unzipped the flap, a TV camera was focused on James, Jane and I. As the reporter introduced himself, the cameraman continued to film the inside of the tent. "I'm in my underwear," I said before exiting the sleeping bag. "He's in his underwear," the reporter said. The cameraman backed off. Feeling as fresh as the shirt I've slept in for the past week, I pulled on my wool cap and pants and stepped out to be interviewed. Jane scored on the van driver's bagel and chewed a stick for the camera. Satisfied, the crew blasted on toward Prudhoe Bay. I thought they were a bit pushy, but I did admire their ability to ferret us out. We all went back to sleep when the van left.

Jane is sleeping now, cozy in the canyon that forms between James and I in our sleeping bags. An arctic wind tests the tent poles and the sun has yet to top the mountains that surround us with dominance reminiscent of Valdez. But Valdez has trees, and ocean--ocean I tasted 103 days ago. Soon, I'll reach another ocean, the Arctic Ocean. Only about 250,000 more steps to go, I figure.

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