The pilot in the tiny Helio Courier kept circling over a small patch of tall grass, looking intently at the ground. "I think I have it" he blurted over the engine noise, then abruptly nosed the plane down to the ground. A few seconds went by, but it felt like an eternity. Then the front propeller went through a cluster of small bushes like a weed-whacker in an out-of-control lawn. The plane finally stopped, cold sweat dripped down my temples. We had reached our destination: the upper Kongakut Valley.

Touch down was traumatic, but seeing the plane fly away was even harder to deal with. We suddenly felt alone. There was only one way out of the valley: use the canoes to paddle down to the Arctic Ocean, where another plane was schedule to pick us up in two weeks time. In between, 130 miles of rough waters waited.
If escaping alive wasn’t enough, the team had also planned to climb over the Alaskan continental divide and claim the full descent of the Kongakut River from headwaters to the sea. The hike turned out to be a strenuous affair. The group crossed raging streams, bushwhacked through tussocks and tall grasses, climbed over snow couloirs and navigated steep rock faces. Finally, at the end of the valley and over a pass, we admired a beautiful scene: valleys and rivers converging, flowing south to the Yukon basin. We had reached our first goal. We shook hands as hundreds of caribou looked on. It certainly seemed that they hadn’t seen many humans before. We found time to scale an unnamed peak, then in a snow storm we returned safely to the base camp. The continental divide under our belt, we assembled the canoes and began the second part of our journey. We quickly learned why few have visited the upper valley of the Kongakut. The river is extremely shallow, and we struggled to push and drag our fully loaded boats downstream. The itinerary called for a minimum of 15 miles per day on the river. On day 1 we barely scrambled 3 miles. We pulled only 5 miles on day 2, and the morale of the group hit an all time low. Luckily, day 3 brought some much needed rain and higher water. We entered the canyon at full speed. The rapids in front of us where some of the most challenging that most of us have ever tackled. At one point, it took a good 4 hours to clear a meager mile and a half of river, but we kept going until we reached the end of the mountain sections a few days later.

The delta welcomed us with a band of thick ice through which the river had carved a small passage. Luckily, we had our Costa Del Mar sunglasses to protect our eyes from the glacier's glare. We built primitive shelters with drift wood on the beach, battling high winds and cold temperatures. In the distance, the waves crashed against drifting icebergs. A polar bear dropped a dead seal and stalked us for almost an hour before returning to his lunch.

With a solid back wind and the tent fly rigged as a spinnaker on the spare paddle, we sailed the last 20 miles at speeds of 5 knots. We reached the Beaufort landing strip a day in advance, and with our spare time, we enjoyed the comforts of the town of Kaktovik.

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