Feb. 6, 2008

Alaska junior forward Trevor Hyatt grew up enjoying the vast wilderness that his home state had to offer. After his freshman year with the Nanooks, Hyatt found a way to translate his love of the outdoors into summer employment. In his own words, Hyatt describes his first excursion through the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.

River Guiding In Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
By Trevor Hyatt

It all started when I was in elementary school growing up in Anchorage, Alaska. I was growing up playing hockey in the winters and into the summers, and I loved it. My family had season tickets to watch the University of Anchorage Alaska Seawolves. It was when I was watching the Seawolves play that I decided I wanted to play college hockey. I was also growing to love the great outdoors that Alaska has to offer. I grew up hiking, fishing, skiing, camping and rafting. Through playing on a men's league team, my father met Macgill Adams, the owner of Wilderness Alaska. He guides backpacking, sea kayaking and river trips all over the state. The next thing I knew I was going on numerous trips with my dad and Macgill. As I grew older I started learning how to guide river tours.

The summer after my freshman year at the University of Alaska Fairbanks I was given the opportunity to take a summer job with Macgill to help him guide a 12-day river float trip on the Kongakut River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). That is the place in northeast Alaska that some people want to open for drilling for oil. I did not want to work construction all summer so I chose to have a great summer in ANWR. After I returned from a biking trip through Croatia, I set out for Fairbanks to where the trip would begin.

I woke up to my alarm going off at about 5 a.m. and dragged myself out of bed, it was light as day out, the same as when I went to bed at midnight. I headed to the small aircraft airport to meet up with an excited group of eight clients from Colorado. I had met the group the night before at dinner and got to know a little more about them. They were all from Boulder, Colorado, and they all knew each other from previous endeavors.

Macgill was already off to the river by plane and I was in charge of getting the rest of the gear and the clients aboard the planes. We all arrived in Arctic Village, a native village 100 miles above the Arctic Circle, and tried to find stuff to do for a couple of hours while we waited for the small chartered bush planes to fly us to the Kongakut River. It is quite an experience flying in those small bush planes packed to the brim with people and gear. They can only take between three or four people at a time so they have to make multiple trips. It is pretty incredible to fly through the mountains and clouds in such a small plane.

We finally arrived all in one piece on a gravel bar that could not have been any longer than 50 yards; you would not even guess that a plane could land on such a short strip. It was pouring down rain as we tried to get all of our gear off the plane and set-up, but then it suddenly stopped and the sky cleared. The weather in the Brooks Range, which is the mountains that run through ANWR, usually builds up into a shower and then a thunderstorm in the afternoon, but clears up for the evening. Depending on what time of year, the sky turns many great vibrant colors in a sunset and the light never leads to darkness during the summer. For some people it takes time to get used to sleeping without darkness. They bring sleeping masks and the like, but some just get used to it, as I have after so many years. In the Arctic your internal clock tends to get shifted from what it is in the real world. You don't pack a watch and just let your body tell you when you need to sleep. It usually comes down to getting up at around noon and going to bed at 2:00 to 4:00 a.m. This is not just for college students, but even older people with the early to rise, early to bed mentality take on this new time schedule.

The rest of the trip was amazing. We decided to stay in the mountains longer and not float out to the Arctic Ocean, as originally planned. This was because the coast still looked partly frozen over. We spent a couple extra nights in campsites and were able to see some amazing stuff. We hiked up all the old favorite mountains and even created some new routes that added to the allure of this river. This place is amazing in the fact that nothing except the rivers have names. There are so many mountains and ridges and lakes that have no names, because there are no people in this area. The only inhabitants in this country are the wildlife, hence the name, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

We were able to show our clients two grizzly bears, about 50 mountain goats, numerous eagles and other birds, a cow moose running with her two new calves being stalked by a pack of wolves and one of the major highlights - thousands of caribou. The caribou are amazing in number, it is every bit the Serengeti during migration. On our last day we were floating down to where the plane would pick us up and we saw thousands of tiny dots speck the hillside coming straight for us. As they got bigger they ran full tilt into the river swimming across behind us and going on to the other side. Their flying hooves clicking, babies bleating, and moms grunting, the river erupting in a roar of splashing static as thousands of caribou plunged toward the greener pastures west of the river. An amazing experience of being in the right place at the right time - everyone would take this lasting impression home with them. It was a perfect grand finale.

As I was the last person to board the last bush plane I looked back and thought, wow this might have been the best job I will ever get to experience. It was a long flight through ever-changing rainstorms and clear, turbulent air back to Fairbanks and the real world. It is always very surreal coming back to civilization after being in a place like the Arctic for two weeks. But it was time to get started with the next year and get to work on training and summer school. I can only hope that I will be able to continue to get the opportunity to show people from all over the beauty of Alaska and especially ANWR.