After reserving our Noatak River and Great Kobuk Sand Dunes Combination trip in 2020 with Alaska Alpine Adventures, a few days later, we received an email from the company owner. The email asked if we would like to add a five-day, four-night trip to Bering Land Bridge National Preserve and Cape Krusenstern National Monument at the end of our Noatak-Great Sand Dunes adventure. John, Isabel, Sara, and I decided to grab the hook on this opportunity. We figured it was unlikely we would ever visit these places otherwise. Plus, as they say, it’s only money and you can’t take it with you! That was how our 2021 Arctic Adventure (which is described in my “Arctic Adventure” post) grew from 12 to 17 days.
Having taken off from the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes at 5:45 p.m. on Saturday, August 7th in the Golden Eagle Outfitters’ DeHavilland Otter aircraft, we landed one-hour later in Kotzebue. After spending the majority of the day hanging around our camp in Kobuk Valley National Park in the mist and rain waiting for our flight, arriving back in “civilization” was a bit of a rough transition.
After spending almost two weeks with Brian, Dave, and Doug, our goodbyes were regrettably brief and rushed as they literally had only a few minutes to spare to catch their plane to Anchorage. As we walked toward the Golden Eagle Outfitter’s office, we were doing a mental shift to prepare meeting our second guide along with three new fellow travelers, all the while hoping we could still fly yet today, to Bering Land Bridge National Preserve before the weather closed in. The group waiting inside the office was very happy to see us. Arriving on a flight from Anchorage in the early afternoon, they had been treading water in Kotzebue waiting for us to return from the park. Now, we had arrived and our new group was all together.
Our “new” guide, Melissa, was not “new” to Sara, John, and me. She, along with Matt, had been our guides for our 2019 trip to Twin Lakes in Lake Clark National Park. We were then introduced to our new partners in adventure; Becky and her daughter, Ollie, and Barbra, all of whom were from the Lower 48. Matt and Melissa then turned to the task of first sorting, and then helping load into the otter, gear for the next four days.
Amazingly, just 30 minutes after our arrival in Kotzebue, our new group was in the air and on our way for an approximately 50-minute flight to Serpentine Hot Springs, which is located in the 2.7 million-acre Bering Land Bridge National Preserve. According to the National Park Service (NPS) website, the preserve “…lies at the continental crossroads that greatly influenced the distribution of life in the Western Hemisphere during the Pleistocene Epoch. It is a vital landscape for indigenous communities who depend on the land just as their ancestors did for many generations. It is a wild and ecologically healthy landscape unlike any other.” We were filled with anticipation of what adventures lay ahead.
Our flight took us west out of Kotzebue, over the relatively calm, grayish waters, of Kotzebue Sound, an arm of the Chukchi Sea, which in turn, is part of the Arctic Ocean. After crossing the sound, the Seward Peninsula appeared below with barrier islands, low-lying wetlands, and a myriad of lakes and ponds, some of which hosted tundra swans. Sitting on the left side of the plane, I missed seeing a wolf running across the tundra; however, I was rewarded with the sight of a small herd of caribou.
As we flew farther inland, our path took us over first small, and then increasingly higher hills, which transitioned into low mountains, some of which had rocky outcroppings. This meant there was little room between the ground below and low-hanging cloud cover above, which we were now entering. I hoped our pilot would not have to turn around. A few moments later, when I saw the left wing of the plane only a few hundred feet above the ground as we flew just over the top of one of the low mountains, I was beginning to wonder if, in fact, we could turn around, if need be. As my mind was beginning to contemplate that possibility, the ground below suddenly dropped away. The pilot then banked to the left, making a 180-degree turn, before landing on a gravel airstrip.
It was 8:00 p.m. However, since we were just 45 miles south of the Arctic Circle, there was still plenty of daylight. Continuing to peer out the plane window, I was surprised to see more than a dozen people, along with a stack of gear, waiting for us. After taxiing to the side of the airstrip, the pilot turned off the engines; it was time to deplane. We were elated to have arrived, after all and in one piece, at Serpentine Hot Springs in the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve!
