The Golden Heart of Alaska

Alaska’s heartland is the Unexplored Country for adventure travelers. From the Alaska Range in the south to the Brooks Range in the north, this frontier covers over 175,000 square miles of mountains, rivers, national parks, preserves and wilderness areas. That’s an area covering 30 percent of the state and is as large as Indiana, New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio combined. The Arctic Coastal Plain adds another 80,000 square miles of remote coastline and tundra, incomparable in scope and beauty to any in the world.

You don’t “tour” Alaska’s heartland in the regular sense. Instead of evening dinner shows and night shopping, your clients sit on a hummock and watch the midnight sun dip slightly toward the horizon and rise again, never setting, just tracking a long, slow circle across the northern sky. In sharp contrast, on Nov. 19, the sun sets and is not seen again until Jan. 24. Visitors at this time of year can expect to huddle around a campfire, cupping a mug of hot tea, while nearby sled dogs sleep curled in furry clumps and the northern lights burn up the sky in red and green tendrils. In early spring, your clients can marvel at thousands of caribou with cute newborn calves or bask in hot springs on a remote mountainside, wondering why you didn’t prompt them to venture north sooner.

Do-It-Yourself and Day Tours

In Alaska, highways only cover about one-third of the state, yet it’s the Dalton, Alaska’s Frontier Highway, that offers the greatest adventure into the state’s heartland.

The Dalton Highway stretches 414 miles from its start at the Elliott Highway north of Fairbanks to the community of Deadhorse and Prudhoe Bay. From late May through mid-September, I recommend a minimum of three days of travel each way for people who like to stop and sightsee or a four-day, roundtrip sampling of the regional highlights. The one-way, 500-mile drive from Fairbanks to Deadhorse can take about 16-20 hours, depending on weather, road conditions and stopovers along the way.

Fairbanks is a base of operations for driving the Dalton Highway. Karen Lundquist with the Fairbanks Convention and Visitors Bureau said her department can offer assistance to travel agents by recommending tour operators, accommodations and vehicle rentals for Dalton travel. Across the street from FCVB is the Alaska Public Lands Information Center, which has ample information on traveling the Dalton, as does the Fairbanks office of the Bureau of Land Management. It’s too easy to miss subtle, yet impressive attractions along the Dalton. Advise your clients to make these stops for information and learn about the road conditions and attractions before they head north.

Until now, it has been nearly impossible to find rental car agencies that would allow their vehicles on the Dalton. But times are a changin’. Adventures in Alaska RV Rental offers a gravel-road-rigged motorhome equipped with all required items from generator to heavy-duty tires for $279 a day for a weekly rental. GoNorth Alaska Travel Center offers a variety of budget campers starting at $141 per day in peak season, and SUV rental vehicles starting at $125 per day. A motorhome or SUV rental offers complete freedom for anyone who wants to travel at their own pace. Camping pull-offs along the way, such as Jim River, provide ample opportunities to observe moose, bears, foxes and salmon spawning in a clearwater stream.

Dalton traffic is sparse by Lower 48 highway standards and consists of a few tour and private vehicles but mostly commercial trucks supplying the oil fields of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

The Dalton winds from the forested hills of the White Mountains to 4,749-foot Atigun Pass in the Brooks Range before dropping down to the Arctic Coastal Plain. Muskox, bears and caribou are frequently seen north of the Brooks Range. Expect ample opportunities for distant and up-close photography of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. I have always found caribou to photograph in July and August off the highway at Galbraith Lake located in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

Tourism infrastructure along the Dalton is still sparse, with the community of Coldfoot offering overnight accommodations and the last gasoline station until Deadhorse. My advice is to drive straight from Fairbanks to Yukon River Bridge, take time for a short visit, then drive straight through to Coldfoot. From there, spend time exploring the southern flanks of the Brooks Range and the coastal plain north to Deadhorse, where the highway ends a few miles short of the Arctic Ocean. Access to Prudhoe Bay oil fields and the Arctic Ocean is restricted, and visitors will need to arrange for seats on the Arctic Ocean Shuttle or another tour. Contact the Arctic Caribou Inn to arrange tours.

Frontier Flying Service offers flightseeing along the Arctic coast, with its spectacular aerial views of offshore Arctic pack ice and ample wildlife. I’ve journeyed inland and spent time on the Kavik and Hulahula drainages, hiking and taking in the fascinating tundra wilderness, fishing and generally enjoying cross-country hiking. I didn’t see another person or hear another aircraft for the duration of my stay.

If clients would rather fly than drive, Warbelow Air Ventures out of Fairbanks offers Arctic Journeys, a selection of flightseeing and interactive trips that include a Bush Mail Flight and visiting the Gates of the Arctic National Park and a Nunamiut Eskimo village at Anaktuvuk Pass. The Bush Pilot Experience allows a client to ride in the pilot’s seat on a flying tour of the Goldstream Valley. (Don’t worry, the pilot is flying the plane from the co-pilot seat.) Prices run from $149 per person up to $649 for a complete, all-day tour of select northern Alaska Native villages.

One of the great cultural tours I have enjoyed over the last 30 years is with Lorry and Nellie Schuerch of Kiana Lodge, located east of Kotzebue about 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle. With them, you become immersed in the wild Kobuk Valley, home of the Kobuk River Inupiat Eskimos. Their rugged northern lifestyle mixes western lodge hospitality with the old way of fish camps and subsistence lifestyles.

Lorry and Nellie are of Eskimo descent, and take an active part in processing fish and game native-style. Lorry personally provides tours of the Kobuk River, visiting with local Eskimos in their fish camps, and observing large herds of caribou migrating through the area.

“This portion of Alaska is home to the Western Arctic Caribou herd, the largest in Alaska with about 500,000 animals,” Lorry said. “Large herds of caribou walk within 100 yards of our front porch every fall, and we see them swimming the river on the way to their rutting grounds.”

Unlike larger cultural tours, Lorry keeps group size from one to six. I always look forward to spending time talking with the Schuerchs or the village elders about survival in the Arctic, as well as their stories of explorers, gold miners, traders and missionaries of the early 1900s. And Lorry will show clients firsthand how to subsist off the land.

There’s No Place Like Nome

Some Arctic frontier towns are just good to poke around in, talk with the locals, visit the bars and check out the historical ruins. Nome is one of those places. About 40,000 people lived in Nome at the turn of the century. Today’s population is 3,500. “There is no place like Nome” is the city slogan, and it’s right on target.

My first experience in Nome was breathtaking, with a helicopter flight over the glacial-ravaged Kigluaik Mountains. I rented a car and drove the extensive gravel road system, checking out old gold-mining locomotives and abandoned camps. At last count, there were 44 abandoned gold dredges in the area that are fascinating to view and photograph. In between I managed to catch huge Arctic grayling and Arctic char, eat wild blueberries and soak in the hot tub at Pilgrim Hot Springs.

There is a bit of eccentricity here too. Each year, the “Nome National Forest” begins with a request among local residents to donate their used Christmas trees. Around the second week in March, volunteers “plant” these trees on the Bering Sea, close to town. They erect cut-outs of painted plywood people and animals, along with a few flamingoes and palm trees. The plywood decor is removed before the ice goes out and reused the following year, while the broken ice floes transport the used Christmas trees out to sea.

Birders travel to Nome to view rare northern birds while enjoying over 2,000 species of wildflowers. For hard-core golfers, the Bering Sea Lions Club sponsors the Bering Sea Ice Golf Classic each year. Golfers play on a course laid out on the Bering Sea pack ice, driving bright orange golf balls that can be seen against the snow. The six-hole course is a par 41, with cash prizes for the best score. Tiger might be hard pressed to par on this course.

Nome is approximately 160 miles from Russia, and Circumpolar Expeditions offers an introductory trip from Alaska. The one-hour flight from Nome to Provideniya, Russia, is a charter flight. Arrangements must be made at least two months in advance to allow time to secure the required travel documents. The company also offers a variety of guided trips into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to see the Porcupine caribou herd calving grounds, where thousands of caribou swarm together to bear their newborn calves each spring.

For those who wish to leave the tour details to someone else, Northern Alaska Tour Company’s Matt Atkinson says the Fairbanks-based business offers a variety of summer and winter tour options.

“We offer one- to four-day air, road or air/road tours along the Dalton Highway in roomy, comfortable 10- to 25-passenger vans,” he said. “Optional side tours along the way include the Koyukuk River Float and the Arctic Mountain Safari.”

Winter tours are very popular, and Northern Alaska was operating Dalton tours during a recent bout of 50-below-zero temperatures.

“The majority of our guests during this time are from Japan,” he said. “They greatly enjoy our winter drive adventures. With the limited daylight, we have less formal interpretation and more hands-on activities, like sledding on the frozen Yukon River, or boiling hot water for tea and coffee at a wayside stopover.”

While their summer tours along the Dalton are popular, the winter with its twilight coloration, trees covered with snow and hoarfrost offers perhaps the best sightseeing. Their Aurora Drive Adventure is anything but a sleeper, and is worth investigating. Clients tour during midday, and scan the skies for aurora on the return trip at night.

Arctic Wild offers the Arctic Ocean Paddle Base Camp, a fascinating tour where clients paddle small canoes along the Arctic Ocean shoreline investigating old turn-of-the-century whaling and exploration camps, shoreline fauna, flora and the many icebergs that float ashore. Some chunks of grounded pack ice rise up to 30 feet. Paddle by seals perched on ice floes, or watch thousands of waterfowl fly by throughout the day and even larger concentrations of birds with their young in brackish water lagoons and river deltas. Cost is $3,000 per person.

Farther inland is Arrigetch, the destination for backpackers of all ages. After 25 years of flying into the Arrigetch, I have found the area remarkably unchanged with its massive monoliths and tundra flora. Arctic Wild owners David and Jennifer van den Berg offer a fully guided 30-mile backpacking hike into the heart of the Arrigetch Peaks. Hikers along the way enjoy natural hot springs, caribou sightings and some of the best mountain scenery and glacial amphitheaters imaginable. The price is $2,400 per person.

Whether it’s from a tour bus, a bush plane, an inflatable canoe or on foot crossing the Brooks Range, Alaska’s heartland is a frontier that is elusive yet attainable, and offers your clients North America’s last great wilderness treasure.

SELLING TIPS For the most part, Interior Alaska tours sell themselves to those clients in the know. For the rest, here are a few tips: Empower and excite your customers first. E-mail them articles from the TravelAge West archives. Get them anticipating the part of Alaska that most tourists never see. Focus on specific areas and tours based on their general interests, always taking into account their physical abilities. Your younger clients are probably already kayaking, camping or trekking. Challenge them to try their skills in Interior Alaska’s wilderness areas, where they need to follow GPS routes because there are no signs, roads or trails. They will see land unchanged since the Great Ice Age; caribou herds in the tens of thousands; whitewater canoeing down canyons without crowds; or climbing to mountaintops where they can spend all night in a natural hot spring, watching the northern lights overhead. Most visitors who experience it once are hooked for multiple return trips. In selling remote lodges, concentrate on the highlights: Traveling farther afield takes time, but the results are worth the wait. They’ll view wildlife, scenery and cultures they won’t see from a road tour, with photos that won’t look like their neighbors’. Wilderness lodges offer rustic comfort often on a par with four-star hotels. Custom jet-boats and modern bush aircraft within a stone’s throw of the lodge make remote travel each day a delight, avoiding long hikes or uncomfortable bus rides. Clients hike, row or sightsee as much as they want, or can just remain in the plane or boat and soak in the sights. Book during the off season, in June and September, and there may be no one else in camp.

CONTACT Adventures in Alaska RV Rental 907-458-7368 www.adventuresakrv.com Arctic Caribou Inn (Arctic Ocean Shuttle) 877-659-2368 www.arcticcaribouinn.com Arctic Wild 888-577-8203 www.arcticwild.com Bettles Lodge 800-770-5111 www.bettleslodge.com Circumpolar Expeditions 888-567-7165 www.arctictravel.net City of Nome, Alaska 907-443-6624 www.nomealaska.org Fairbanks Convention and Visitors Bureau 800-327-5774 www.explorefairbanks.com Frontier Flying Service 800-478-6779 www.frontierflying.com GoNorth Alaska Travel Center 866-236-7272 www.paratours.net Kiana Lodge 907-475-2149 www.alaskasheefishing.com Northern Alaska Tour Company 800-474-1986 www.northernalaska.com Warbelow’s Air Ventures 800-478-0812 www.warbelows.com