My first Climb in the Brooks Range, Summer 1990

It all started with a Ford Escort that leaked oil.

After 15 days on the road, alternating between a Moody Blues mix and “Squeeze’s Greatest Hits”, my college roommate and I found ourselves looking up at Mt. Sukakpak, along the Dalton Highway, in Alaska.

The Dalton Highway in 1990 was a narrow elevation of dirt and gravel steeply dropping off onto the tundra on the so-called shoulder. We had headlight guards as defense against the alpha-dog trucks and their gravelly aftermath. A radiator guard, rigged from garbage bags with slits cut in them for airflow, proved to be a really bad idea. And there was no escaping several cracks in the windshield.

The highway was technically closed to public traffic at Disaster Creek but there was no sign of a manned checkpoint. A young man we had met cursed the driving restriction, telling us that there was a beautiful pass leading into the Gates of the Arctic National Park just a few miles beyond. A former pipeline maintenance worker, he had contemplated blowing up the pipeline at one point to protest all of the restrictions. Upon realizing that “two rights don’t make a wrong”, he called off his plans.

At the Coldfoot gas station the tanks were dry. We bribed the attendant for 10 gallons ($20) from his personal stash as the re-supply was some days off.

Although the slow transformation of the landscape from Appalachian to Prairie to High Plains to Rockies to Tundra slowly opened my soul to easily and fully accepting the newness of where I was, I was still stunned by Mt. Sukakpak. I won’t try to describe it in any other way that what always comes to mind: It looks like a different mountain from every angle.

Our camp was beyond Mt. Sukakpak on the other side of the Dalton highway at a pullout by the Dietrich River. Having driven past Sukakpak and looking up at it again, it was unrecognizable…and very imposing. On our side of the highway, beyond the river and pipeline, lay a greenish well-defined unnamed peak at 4000 feet, about a 2500 foot vertical climb from our campsite. This was the one I decided to climb. It lay in the direction of and possibly within the borders of Gates of the Arctic National Park.

We pitched our tent, green on top with an orange floor. The tent stakes barely punched an inch into the surface gravel before stopping on the permafrost. A new experience! We packed what we needed for a modest day hike: Canteens slung over shoulders, our topographic map, anoraks tied around our waists. The peak was obvious throughout the approach through a thinning forest and thick willow. At one point, we followed a creek, knowing that the water would lead us “up there” quickly. There was No Trail. This fact hadn’t really struck me as odd at the time, but it was the first time I had spent so much time hiking with a purpose and without a trail.

There were no National Park Headquarters, no Orientation Centers, no backcountry safety videos; just two guys without a compass who had been in the car for a long time and had decided to go for a walk. I have no idea how we first figured out that we needed to start making noise while hiking through the willows. Every 10 seconds or so we shouted “No Bears here!”, using our best North Eastern accents. This devolved into making up bear songs.

We broke past tree line, reached a ridge and followed it to the summit. We snapped photos mainly to the east…towards Sukakpuk and Weil. Towards home. There was a rainbow out there. I wish we had taken a panorama out west, into the Gates of The Arctic National Park, but that direction was meaningless to me at the time. From the summit we looked down at our tent. It was an orange dot in the distance. That meant only one thing. The wind had flipped it over. Sukukpak, again, looked different. It was about 40 degrees and breezy on that summit day. And we were thousands of miles from our lives. After 18 years, I still feel it: the music mix, the total newness, the freedom, the uncertainty, the glory. Upon arriving back at camp, we were in disbelief that we actually climbed to the summit. It was a longer hike than we had anticipated. We named the peak Escort Mountain.