I'm a Day Hiker. Here's How I Explored (and Endured) America's Remotest National Park for 10 Days

On the morning of Sunday, June 30, 2024, the air in the Arctic tundra was anything but arctic. It was a windless and muggy 72-degree day. Under the hazy blue sky, the crisp aroma of Labrador tea plants perfumed the soggy Alaskan bush. 

The Alatna River—one of six National Wild and Scenic Rivers in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, the highest tally of all U.S. National Parks—flowed in the glacier-carved valley hundreds of feet below. The serpentine waterway, fed by lakes high on the Arctic Divide, slithered its way through a forest wreathed in black and white spruce trees that painted the mountainside in glorious evergreen.

As the temperature climbed, so too did our group: a motley crew of six backpackers and two professional guides in America’s least-visited national park. We weren’t hiking per se, but “side-hilling,” Alaskan jargon for walking through a calf-burning minefield of mud and untamed vegetation.

With 50-plus pounds of food and gear strapped to our clammy backs, we bushwhacked our way through gnarly thickets of willow and alder while a ruthless militia of mosquitoes attacked us from every direction. Come summertime, the notoriously blood-thirsty insects are so big and ubiquitous in Alaska they’re jokingly referred to as the state bird. 

The moose, wolves, muskox, lynx, wolverines, and bears—both black and brown—that roam the remote wilds north of the Arctic Circle had likely never laid eyes on humans, Earth’s most erratic mammal. Conventional protocol suggests that hikers wear bells on their clothes to give advance warning to wildlife, but it’s more of a backcountry buzzkill than foolproof deterrent.

“How do you tell the difference between grizzly and black bear scat?” Lily, one of our guides, said jokingly. “Grizzly scat has bells and whistles in it.”

That wasn’t a problem for us, I imagined while snickering. We didn’t have any bells or whistles. Instead, we had other means of bear repellant: three canisters of bear spray, blooming body odor, and a chorus of off-key singing voices that, save for Emily from Georgia, were sure to spook any mega-toothed megafauna into swimming across the Bering Strait to Russia. Turned out that, from our current location, Siberia was closer than both Anchorage and Juneau, the Alaskan capital.

Mere hours into our nearly two-week backcountry affair, not long after catching a float plane in Bettles (population: 23) that dropped us into the park, I’d been slapped by one willow branch after another. My wobbly right ankle had collapsed twice in the sadistic, albeit soil-stabilizing tussocks, diabolical knobs of cotton grass that number in the millions, wholly indifferent to hiking boots.

“I feel like an explorer,” said Rita, a New Yorker and soon-to-be med-school student tramping her way through the Last Frontier alongside her 57-year-old dad, Sam. His glazed gaze and heavy panting told me he didn't feel the same. 

I wasn't too worried about Joseph, the engineer from Seattle. But I was concerned about another member of our group: Nikhil. The dreadlocked twenty-something from Virginia seemed unprepared. His knockoff Nalgene water bottle, purchased from a hotel gift shop, would soon crack beyond repair. 

“Adventurous, torturous,” I wrote in my iPhone notes app during our first snack break, while an orange-crowned warbler sang an upbeat jingle from the top of an aspen tree. I hurled my new 75-liter Osprey backpack to the ground, plopped down on a shrub, and continued to type away.

“Day 1: Eating a blue-raspberry Airhead (for sugar I guess?) in a dwarf birch,” I added to the file. “Joseph and Emily are good. Sam looks shocked. Nikhil is dying. Rita, she’s exploring.”

As we marched deeper and deeper into the remote Alaskan backwoods, Rita’s sentiment proved as true as the Arctic summer day was long. Matter of fact, her playful declaration fit like a jigsaw puzzle with my raison d’etre for traveling to the Far North.

I’ve stepped foot in more than half of our country’s national parks, a system that writer and historian Wallace Stegner called “the best idea we ever had.” But I wasn’t here, 3,800 miles from my home in St. Louis, MO, to collect an inky park stamp. I ventured to Gates of the Arctic because—unlike overcrowded Yellowstone and Yosemite—other people didn’t.

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Exploring the Loneliest National Park

Of the 63 official national parks in the United States, Gates of the Arctic is the least-visited. In 2023, it had 11,045 visitors. According to Indigo Scott—one of just two backcountry rangers at Gates of the Arctic, America’s only national park entirely north of the Arctic Circle—it's even lower than that.

“The vast majority of [visitors] are just flight-seers who are entering the park for a day,” she told me on a rainy afternoon at the Bettles ranger station last July. “I would estimate about 2,000 people visit and actually stay in the backcountry here on any given year.”

The park exists in one of the coldest places on Earth—think 20 to 50 degrees below Fahrenheit. So, those statistics skew towards the high season, mid-June to mid-August, when the sun never sets, and the weather is tolerable. Even then, there’s “less than 100 people in the park on any given day,” Scott said.

To put these visitation statistics into context, National Park of American Samoa—the second-least visited—tallied 12,135 recreational visits in 2023. Translation: an archipelago in the South Pacific, 2,600 miles southwest of Hawaii and closer to Australia than the U.S., lured over 1,000 more people than Gates of the Arctic.

America’s top 10 most-popular parks—Great Smoky Mountains, Grand Canyon, Zion, Yellowstone, Rocky Mountain, Yosemite, Acadia, Grand Teton, Joshua Tree, and Olympic—drew a combined 48 million visitors in 2023. Add up their land area, and the total is still 1.2 million less acres than Gates of the Arctic’s 8.4 million. That’s bigger than Rhode Island, Delaware, and Connecticut combined. 

Gates of the Arctic isn’t even the biggest national park; that title belongs to Wrangell-St. Elias in south-central Alaska. But at 200 miles long and 130 miles wide, Gates of the Arctic was just the right size for a crowd-averse writer and hiker.

Beginning in 1929, forester and wilderness activist Bob Marshall undertook several expeditions by foot, boat, and dog sled in search of “blank spaces on maps,” he wrote in Alaska Wilderness: Exploring the Central Brooks Range. During Marshall’s journey, he chronicled an iconic passage formed by two stately peaks, now named Frigid Crags and Boreal Mountain, calling it “the Gates of the Arctic,” which inspired the park’s name, and eventually, its protection.

“As we perched on top of this remnant of a long-vanished age, it seemed to be the end of the earth or the heart of another earth,” Marshall wrote.

Congress established Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve in 1980 to safeguard the Rocky Mountains’ northernmost extension, the Brooks Range. However, the sprawling park has been inhabited for more than 13,000 years. About 250 Alaska Natives still reside inside the park in a pint-sized village near Anaktuvuk Pass, where the Nunamiut, one of North America’s last nomadic people, hunt caribou and fish to survive.

Inaccessible by road or commercial flight, I had three options to experience Marshall’s nirvana for myself: Hike in off the Dalton Highway, charter my own bush plane, or join a group trip. I passed on the first two, opting to join a 10-day pack-and-raft expedition with Alaska Alpine Adventures, an Anchorage-based outfitter and one of just a small number of companies with permission to guide in the park.

I’d never overnighted in the backcountry. I was a versed day hiker and car camper, but I preferred adventuring lightly. Schlepping my shelter on my shoulders never quite fit the bill.

For Gates of the Arctic, though, I was willing to change my tune for a week-and-a-half adventure in one of the last untouched places on Earth. No cars. No campsites. And nary a cell phone bar. But before I left home, Alaska Alpine Adventures owner Dan Oberlatz emailed me a warning.

“Unless you luck into a great stretch of weather, you will be cold, wet, and tired,” he wrote. “Be prepared to suffer a little bit.”

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Seeking the Arrigetch Peaks

Armed with topography maps, our fearless guides led us up the frothy blue banks of Arrigetch Creek. We camped on a rocky islet that roared with the symphony of gushing snowmelt bound for the Alatna River. The terrain ahead, sparkling with eye-popping purple dwarf fireweed, led to the base of the otherworldly Arrigetch Peaks.

It was clear as midday, the Arctic sun still hard at work, when I punched my thoughts into an iPhone note timestamped July 2, 2024, 12:19 a.m.—just three days into our trek.

“Whoever said ‘nothing good happens after midnight’ never traveled to Alaska.”

Awakened by a golden-crowned sparrow’s sweet ballad, I unzipped my tent’s front door to stare at the park’s headlining act—the Arrigetch Peaks—eager to soak up every last drop of beauty and solitude at basecamp that took us two full days and 10 challenging miles to reach.

“If the Scottish Highlands had a lovechild with the Grand Tetons, it’d be but a pebble of magnificence compared to what I now see,” I tapped, unsure if I should snap a photo or genuflect at the alpine altar.

It’s no wonder the Nunamiut christened these jagged spires the Arrigetch, which translates to “fingers of the outstretched hand” in the Inupiat language. To witness their majesty, what so few humans had seen and would ever see, was downright spiritual.

By mid-morning, heat vacated the Brooks Range. Head to toe in rain gear, we trudged up the craggy pass over mammoth blocks of stone into Aquarius Valley with only water, lunch, and trekking poles in hand. The higher we climbed, the greater the wind howled, until we landed on the shoreline of an alpine lake marooned by soaring charcoal walls.

“We’re probably the only ones within 100 square miles right now,” Shannon, our other tour guide, said as a pair of Arctic warblers crisscrossed the postcard view.

“Where else can you go and not hear the highway?” Sam added, smiling.

After a well-earned lunch of salami and cheese sandwiches, half of us split off to scale the nameless high point that towered over our campsite.

Lily, Joseph, Emily, and I endured a grueling hour-long ascent up a lichen-carpeted boulder field in the eye of a horizontal downpour. As the rain kicked into high gear, the delicate climb over talus debris left no time for conversation. Nevertheless, we pushed up the steep slope and past a patchwork of snow and ice to the gusty edge to witness the most sublime cluster of granite steeples I had ever seen.

Garnished with the season’s last pockets of snow, the Alaskan cordillera corkscrewed into the grey sky. As I gawked in awe at the hypnotic summits, my heart thumped to a magical beat. Everything within eyeshot, from the intense mountain panorama to the aqua-tinged tarn in the rainy cirque below, felt ethereal as the elements pelted us with unapologetic rigor.

“Every now and again it hits me that we’re hiking in the Arctic Circle,” Emily said. “How many people can say that?”

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Paddling the Alatna River

I was far from ready to abandon the Arrigetch Peaks. But less than 48 hours after arriving in the spellbinding sierra, one we grinded to reach, it was time to move on. Before we broke camp, the Alps unveiled one last surprise as we packed our bags on another damp Arctic morning: a rainbow. The tie-dye arch sprouted from Arrigetch Creek before it faded up valley behind a peak shaped like the sorting hat from Harry Potter.

Over the next few days, we returned to our regularly scheduled side-hilling. Crest line after crest line, valley after valley, we clambered thousands of feet up and down the steepest slopes of the trip, breathlessly bushwacking in frigid weather across undulating tundra en route to the Alatna River.

There was bear scat but no bears, moose prints but no moose, and caribou sheds but no caribou. The rain soaked my feet, and downhills butchered my knees. Fueled by an endless supply of reindeer sausage, my tired legs powered on. If the pair of northern wheatear birds that Emily and I spied at camp one evening could migrate 9,000 miles over multiple months from sub-Saharan Africa to breed in the Arctic Circle, I sure as hell had nothing to gripe about.

Eventually, we returned to Circle Lake, our day-one drop-off point, to collect our food cache, swap gear bags for dry bags, throw on chest waders, and inflate two kayaks and three canoes.

To reach the Alatna, we paddled across the scenic oxbow and a small beaver pond with more loons and grebes than beavers, then portaged our way through a back-breaking bog coated with sludge, filth, and fresh wolf prints. The swampy slog required multiple straining roundtrips.

Once through, Lily gave us a crash course on ‘ferry angling’ so we could traverse the fast-moving Alatna to our campsite on a gravel beach no more than a touchdown pass away. Sam and Rita put on a master class in both form and flow. Joseph and Nikhil produced the opposite: “Start paddling, Nikhil,” the former yelled as they rushed towards the Pacific. Emily and I split the difference at best, but lived to tell the tale.

After a blustery night inside my windblown tent, morning came. At this point in the journey, I hoped the river would propel us for the remainder of the trip. But our time on Alatna’s squiggly Class I rapids, part of the Brooks Range drainage system, was a tale of two water days.

On the first day, we rowed into a brutal headwind and bitter mid-forties chill that doubled our time on the water. Despite numb feet and reverberating eardrums, we were, collectively, the widest-smiling sufferers the Arctic ever did see.

The wind died and sun shone on the next day. Thankfully, the Alatna lived up to its nickname, “A-flat-na,” as we flip-flopped between a gentle paddle and chillaxed flow along the still corridor. Bend after bend, the current steered us downriver beneath wind-worn rocky bluffs and distant snowcapped peaks.

“It makes you feel insignificant in the most significant way,” Emily said from the canoe’s bow that afternoon.

Tomorrow, a float plane would snatch us from Takahula Lake and bring us back to Bettles. The day after next, a different pilot would drop us off in Fairbanks, reuniting us with “the great, thumping, modern world,” as Marshall wrote.

I wasn’t ready for any of that—noise, emails, or even a hot shower. I was more than happy in my wild Arctic time capsule. But I’d soon have to let go.

Gates of the Arctic FAQs

Where Is Gates of the Arctic?

Entirely north of the Article Circle, Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve is more than 200 miles north of Fairbanks, AK. A half-million acres bigger than Maryland, it’s America’s second biggest national park and one of the largest wilderness areas on Earth, covering 8.4 million acres of the Brooks Range.

How to Explore Gates of the Arctic

Gates of the Arctic's allure is tied to its lack of infrastructure. No roads or trails of any kind exist within the park’s boundaries. Visitors can fly on a chartered bush plane from Fairbanks to Bettles, Coldfoot, Kotzebue, or Anaktuvuk Pass. Depending on where you land, you’ll need to catch a float plane to enter the park. Single-day flight-seeing tours to glimpse the Arrigetch Peaks are available through multiple carriers. You can also hike into the park from Dalton Highway near Coldfoot, but only skilled backcountry trekkers should consider such an option.

If you want to spend more than a few days in the park, Alaska Alpine Adventures, one of the state’s most seasoned backcountry outfitters, offers four trips to Gates each summer. They range from 10 to 12 days and combine a variety of backcountry verticals. Its most epic package? The multi-sport adventure of hiking and pack-rafting, which displays the park’s solitude and wild beauty on both land and water.

Essential Gear for a Week in the Alaskan Arctic

• Best Heavy-Duty Backpack: Osprey Aether Pro 75
• Best Rain Pants: Arc’teryx Beta Pant
• Best Hiking Boots: Scarpa Moraine Polar GTX
• Best All-Weather Hiking Pant: KUHL Renegade Pant
• Best Packable Down Jacket: Outdoor Research Transcendent Down Hoodie
• Best Daily Crew: Patagonia Long-Sleeved Capilene Cool Lightweight Shirt