Fall in Alaska is magnificent, but short, which is why it pays to follow along and flail like hell to grasp every colorful moment.
By Ken Marsh
Alaska’s old-time prospectors had a saying that gold is where you find it. And where you find it may surprise you. A friend who once dredged for gold north of the Arctic Circle was shocked to discover a small fortune in nuggets and flakes not in the creek bottom he was working, but stored in two rusting coffee tins stashed under the floor of the 80-year-old log cabin he slept in on the claim.
In a 1964 issue of The Alaska Sportsmanmagazine, author D.L. Sancrant wrote of a pair of gold seekers stranded in the wilderness 30 years earlier. Low on food, the men shot some ptarmigan and discovered upon field dressing them that the birds’ gizzards contained not only the usual gray pebbles, but glittering pieces of gold.
These instances are exceptions, of course; lightning strike surprises few ever experience. But Alaska is rich in nuggets of all kinds, especially in the days between late August and early October, when the summer crowds have dispersed and a mother lode is guaranteed, of brilliant colors and silent, golden days all framed by mountains, glaciers and cool, clean air.
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The aspen leaves, frost-nipped and yellow, quake in a light wind; scarlet high-bush cranberry shrubs cower darkly in the shadows, shivering vaguely. It’s the first week of September and I’ve pulled my pickup onto a little-used Richardson Highway spur to stretch my legs and breathe. I’m surrounded on three sides by glacier-hung ranges and the chilly air, scented by ripening berries, offers a distinctive red-wine fragrance.
Autumn in Alaska is magnificently colorful and exhilarating; it is a moveable feast of vibrant days — some bright and dry; others damp, dark and seductively sullen — highlighted by shades of gold, red and brown that well up first in the northern tundra and alpine reaches before cutting loose and sweeping southward in a broad celestial tide. The season’s only shortfall, when viewed from any single venue, is that it comes and goes too swiftly. Which is why I’ve long believed that, given the means and time, a lover of fall would do well to start up north and ride that wave, clear to winter’s threshold.
And so I’m here today, 300 miles north of my home in Anchorage, to greet the season and savor it from top to bottom, beginning to end, even as it slips through my fingers the way autumn and time always seem to do. It’s early afternoon, though already I’m thinking about where I might camp for the night. My choices are many. I want to drive a portion of the Tok Cutoff before this spectacular blue-sky day ends, mostly to see Mount Drum, an 11,696-foot-tall Wrangell Mountains jewel. At the same time, the lakes and hills of the Denali Highway country west of Paxson call.
Alaska’s core road system provides substantial avenue to all seasons, connecting the Southcentral ports of Valdez, Seward, and Homer to the state’s Interior and, ultimately, to the North Slope and roads’ end at the Beaufort Sea. Unfortunately for me, the usual limitations — mostly time and budget — preclude a highway trek where I might follow Alaska’s autumn to its full extent; from Arctic Ocean to, say, the temperate Southeast Alaska community of Haines on Lynn Canal. But such a trip is certainly possible, and on my list of things to do one day.
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So I’ve fostered this notion for some time now that I might greet autumn’s early days in the high Arctic and move southward — migrate like the caribou do — with the turning leaves. Along the way, I’ve developed a dream trip or two, tentative segments that could comprise a part of the whole or, more likely, serve as abbreviated standalones. Not all are highway dependent. In fact, some of my most intriguing treks are set in the state’s most remote reaches. A favorite example begins in the hills east of Kotzebue, some 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle, on the edge of the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes in Kobuk Valley National Park, America’s least visited national park. To greet the first days of fall, plan to arrive around the last week of August via Alaska Airlines in Kotzebue from Anchorage or Fairbanks, and follow up with a Bush plane hop to the village of Ambler.
From here, drop a well-provisioned raft or folding canoe into the Kobuk River and glide with the gentle current into the early days of fall. You’ll pass Onion Portage, a locale named by some accounts for an abundance of wild onions, but better known as an ages-old crossing for migrating caribou and site where Eskimos have ambushed the tundra deer since prehistoric times. Hit it right and you’ll see caribou by the thousands. You’ll hear their muted, guttural cries and clicking hooves, whiff in the wind the herds’ slight ammonia-stockyard smell. You might see the animals spill from the hills in endless antlered lines, to ford the river, nostrils flared, eyes bugged, stubby snow-white tails held high.
Look here, where the northernmost edge of the boreal forest meets open Arctic tundra (a biome called the taiga), for berries in abundance — blueberries, crowberries, highbush cranberries and lingonberries. A handful of blueberries goes nicely with a chocolate bar, or sprinkled in an early-morning bowl of oatmeal steaming-hot against the frosty river bottom.
In the river itself, search among the yellow reflections of willow and birch for hungry fish. Arctic grayling lie in the pools; they’re small, weighing perhaps a pound or two, but willing feeders. Especially in the fall when they’re fattening up for a long, lean winter, grayling will snap at all forms of small spinners and dry flies.
Anglers here may find much bigger surprises, too. Sheefish, thick-shouldered creatures quite unlike the delicate, sail-finned grayling, are something akin to giant whitefish, but with large, silver scales and upturned mouths that make them more closely resemble an exotic, Arctic form of tarpon. Big ones can weigh 50 pounds, and they jump like tarpon, too, when hooked in those cold Kobuk River eddies. Streamers cast from 8-weight fly rods, or spoons slung from sturdy, middle-weight spinning rods, are good medicine for sheefish.
Further along, another surprise waits. The Kobuk Sand Dunes, formed during an interglacial period eons ago by wind-driven deposits of glacial silt, are natural wonders. An hour’s hike from the river, through the fragrant spruce thickets and berry patches of fall, a series of three active sand dunes rise from the taiga like mirages to cover some 20,500 acres. “Otherworldly” seems a predictable characterization of this place where 20-story-high sand dunes rise abruptly from the middle of subarctic nowhere, yet NASA scientists have actually studied these sands, so far out and rarely seen by Earthlings, to learn more about the dune-scalloped surface of the planet Mars.
Figure on spending a day exploring the dunes before coming back down to Earth and rejoining the river and season at hand. The Kobuk’s dark waters wait; autumn’s meter keeps running. The trip from Ambler through the yellows, reds and misplaced sand dunes of the Kobuk River fall spans 120 miles and requires about a week of travel. The journey ends in the village of Kiana, where the Kobuk and Squirrel rivers meet; a prearranged Bush plane flight provides return passage to Kotzebue and other points south.
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That’s a dream trip, one of thousands of possibilities where a man might dip his fingers into the colors of Alaska’s fall and live for a moment to the beat of the season. Just keep in mind that there’s more to autumn in this huge, wild, wide-open country than a week spent in one beautiful corner. Best advice to those who wish to experience as much as possible is to keep moving. Revel in the golden leaves of high-country willows on sunlit evenings and among valley-bottom cottonwoods on wet mornings, always staying a step or two ahead of winter’s tireless advance.
Back on the Richardson Highway, north of the Glenn Highway junction at Glennallen, I’m driving again, slowing as I turn onto the Tok Cutoff, a narrow, nearly deserted two-lane road bordered by flaming-yellow aspen and birch trees. My plan is to continue 20 miles or so up the Tok Cutoff to a Copper River overlook where I can get a good look at the perpetually snow-covered Mount Drum. After that I’ll drive back to the Richardson Highway, turn north, and head for a wilderness campsite I discovered years ago on the Denali Highway.
The afternoon is bathed in sunlight as I drive through showers of leaves that flutter down with the breezes. A coyote steps onto the roadway. I ease my foot onto the brake, thinking maybe I can stop and take a picture. The coyote trots to the road’s edge, then freezes, head and tail low, yellow eyes glowering. By the time I’ve fully stopped and placed my hand on the camera, the coyote has vanished into the brush.
Fall in Alaska follows a similar script; it appears suddenly, pauses briefly. Then, just as quickly, it implodes into the monochromes and darkness of winter. Blink and you’ll miss it, which is why it pays to follow along and flail like hell to grasp every colorful moment.
The mountain is waiting as I round a bend overlooking the Copper River. Indeed, it is stunning, a halo of localized clouds framing its snowy-white double peaks, blue sky overhead and, in the foreground golden gravel-bar willow thickets and aspen- and birch-timbered foothills. An energy, unseen but palpable, seems to hum around me in the earth, the trees, the air. I can feel it in my bones, an edgy, undeniable sense of seasonal shift. I’m standing on the verge of a universal event, and am feeling very small. This is what it’s like to live to the point of tears.
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Several hours later I am northwest of Paxson, a lonesome, all-but-abandoned gasoline-stop at the intersection of the Richardson and Denali highways. The night is clear, cold and bright with stars. I have a fire crackling and am enjoying the solitude of my campsite, which overlooks a pair of tundra ponds. As daylight waned I’d looked across the ponds and watched the water glimmer magically. In the distance, I could see the Wrangell Mountains sweeping high into the eastern horizon. The promise of a hard frost was in the air.
Beyond all this beauty, though, a key element was lacking. There were no lavish colors. I’d come too late, missed the moment. Fall on the Denali Highway had come and gone perhaps a week earlier and the land now lay dormant in winter’s shadow, imprisoned in a sort of seasonal purgatory.
Now, to the north, I can see the silhouetted crags of the Alaska Range, though darkness obscures the snow I’d earlier seen topping the foothills. At my feet the fire pops and sends a plume of sparks into the cold night. A sip of wine dissolves pleasantly on my tongue. Alaska is a big country. In the morning I will drive south 200 miles, off the Denali Highway, onto the Richardson, and then the Glenn, to Sheep Mountain, where fall in the scenic valley separating the Chugach and Talkeetna ranges remains in full bloom. A week or so later, the reds and yellows will sweep the mountains and parks surrounding Anchorage. Then, well into October, autumn will strike the Kenai Peninsula to the south, blazing brightly and fully over the famous trout waters.
After that, for the rest of the year, fall in Alaska will reside only in my heart. It will stay there no matter where I go; I will remember it and dream of it and always the elements will be the same: The background will be composed of mountains and the air will be cool and tart with a fermented, red-wine fragrance that is distinctly autumnal, as exclusive to Alaska this time of year as the grapes of Bordeaux.
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