A Scientific Journey Across the Brooks Range
Matthew Sturm may be the only person in Alaska who gets up every day and checks the weather in Buckland, Selawik, Ambler, and Atqusuk. He's rooting for a good snowfall in northwest Alaska before March 20th, when he will begin a science-driven snowmachine trip from Nome to Barrow. Sturm works for the Army's Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory at Fort Wainwright. He and five others will attempt the snowmachine crossing of the Brooks Range to study the nature of northern snow. Over the course of 465 miles, they hope to sample snow at more than 100 locations and stop in villages along the way to resupply and meet with teachers and students.
Windstorms that can whip up ground blizzards are one of many travel hazards in the Arctic, but Sturm has plenty of miles under his snowmachine track. During the past several springs, he's escaped the office on similar treks across the Arctic to sample snow. Most of his partners on the 2002 trek have joined him in the past. Ken Tape is a graduate student who has helped Sturm on month-long sampling trips by snowmachine. Glen Liston of Colorado State University has also felt the bite of strong winds while out on the trail with Sturm. Jon Holmgren is another trail veteran who works for the cold regions lab in Fairbanks, and Eric Pyne of Fairbanks is a VECO handyman joining the group for his fourth trip with Sturm.
New to the world of snowmachine trekking is April Cheuvront, an 8th-grade science teacher from Table Rock Middle School in Morganton, North Carolina. Cheuvront is joining the expedition with help from its sponsor, the National Science Foundation. A backpacker, she recently hiked 140 miles solo from the hills of North Carolina to the Atlantic Ocean. Sturm saw her resume and knew she was the teacher for the trip.
"She looked like she wanted to rough it," he said.
Starting in Nome on six snowmachines, the travelers will head east to Council and possibly White Mountain, then turn north to Buckland. They will then ride off the Seward Peninsula and cross the Arctic Circle at Selawik. From there, they'll follow the Kobuk River upstream to the village of Ambler. From Ambler, the team will climb through the continental divide in the Brooks Range and continue on to the village of Atqusuk, then Barrow. Sturm is planning for 35 days to cover about 465 miles of wild Alaska.
"Iron Doggers (snowmachine racers) could do it in two days," Sturm said.
Sturm and the crew won't be setting any speed records. They will stop their caravan when their GPS units tell them they've reached a sample site. After they turn off their snowmachines, they'll get busy with their different roles, such as digging snow pits and measuring snow depth, density and strength.
"We want to get a first-hand picture of the snow," Sturm said. "We want to see how distinctive North Slope snow is from south of the range."
At certain sites, Sturm will take chemical samples of the snow to determine from what exotic locale it originated, possibly as far away as Japan or the South China Sea. They'll also try to find evidence for a warming Arctic at the boundary of tundra and forest, where shrubs are overtaking smaller plants.
At the end of each day, five of the trekkers will sleep in two wall tents. One lucky soul will sleep in a heated equipment sled. They will travel on packed village trails from Nome to Ambler, where their path will vanish. Villagers don't travel much from Ambler through the Brooks Range, so Sturm visited Fairbanks adventurer Roger Siglin recently to learn the best route through the mountains to the North Slope.
Sturm looks at the springtime trek as an opportunity to introduce the North Carolina teacher to the Arctic, to make friends in Native villages, and to learn about northern Alaska snow. From his office in Fairbanks, he explained that there is only one way to discover the subtle-but-important differences in that snow.
"We need to go and see."
