Kobuk Valley

Alaska is 470 times larger than my native Rhode Island. The 6640 miles of shoreline in the Last Frontier make my own “Ocean State’s” 400 seem insignificant at best.

Google Maps is unable to calculate the drive from Juneau, in the southeast corner of the titanic state to Point Hope, the westernmost elbow of northern Alaska. This is because most of the roads north of Fairbanks aren’t roads at all. They are snowmobile tracks and dogsled paths. To get places in Alaska, people fly. It is not a cheap place to be a tourist.

For this reason, I foresee Alaska being the single biggest roadblock to completing this challenge (primarily due to the fact that I am not on the loosest of budgets). Kobuk Valley National Park, nestled between the Waring and Bard Mountains of northwest Alaska, is far and away the least visited National Park. According to NPS statistics, in 2007 the park had an all-time low of only 847 visitors (that figure has risen slightly in recent years). That means in 2007 only 16 people a week made it to the park. Those must be some lonely park rangers.

Isolated beauty comes at a price. To explore the valley most people need to take two flights once they’re in Alaska before they even get to see the park. The first brings you from Anchorage or Fairbanks to Kotzebue, the town nearest the park (about 100 miles). From there, you can charter a private plane or boat to take you into the park and nearby villages. In the winter, well-supplied snowmobiles can make the trek.

Which makes it all the more rewarding to finally see one of the most beautiful areas of North America. When a land bridge connected modern day Alaska to the Asian continent, Kobuk valley was one of the few (relatively) lush, ice free sanctuaries—a paradise for mastodons, bison and mammoths.

In the ensuing 13,000 years, climates changed, ocean levels shifted and the land bridge flooded, yet Kobuk Valley remained the environmental refuge it once was.

Unlike many of the Alaskan national parks, there are no glaciers in Kobuk Valley today. Geologists have identified at least five glaciations that have moved through the area of the park, and these massive moving ice fields deposited huge amounts of sediment, which over the course of thousands of years has eroded to sand.

This sand has been worked by the prevailing easterly winds into massive dune fields currently covering over 20,000 acres. While the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes currently cover only 23.5 square miles, the NPS website posits that they once stretched across 300 square miles—roughly the size of all the land in New York City.

I intend to make my way to this deserted corner of the country and spend four days rafting down the leisurely Kobuk river during the 24 hour daylight that bathes Alaska from the beginning of June to the beginning of July. Here, when the summer temperatures can reach 100˚F, I plan on boogie-boarding down 100 foot tall sand hills in the largest active dune field within the arctic. It will be one of the few ways I’ll be able to remember my home in the Ocean State.