No Roads, No Regrets

We spent most of the rest of our trip on the river. Forward stroke. Glide. The raft skimmed shallow riffles. We bounced off underwater boulders like a pinball. Spin clockwise 360 degrees. Back-paddle. Dall sheep -- males with hefty curled horns, ewes and lambs -- clung to cliffs and watched us. Rapids tumbled, splashed. Forward stroke. Drift sideways. River stones scraped underneath and grounded us. The guides scouted the river's interconnected network of streams for the main channel, tugged us free. Spin counterclockwise 180 degrees. Drift backward. The water was as clear as glass. Arctic grayling, a game fish related to trout, rose to feed. Harlequin ducks escorted us. A golden eagle soared.

By early evening each day, we docked at a gravel bar and pitched our tents on rocks. Supper happened when it happened. We went to sleep whenever. The time of day stopped mattering; we had 24 hours of daylight. The sun sometimes ducked behind a mountain, but it never really set; it only circled around the sky.

Time to Let Go

By the end of Day Four, my body was disoriented, discombobulated by so much light. I lost all sense of time. I excused myself halfway through supper and crawled into my sleeping bag. Did I have the stamina for this? But there was no bailing out. I surrendered to exhaustion and to the sound of the rushing river. And unexpectedly, my letting go transformed me. I soon felt refreshed, receptive, ready for whatever happened. I walked the shore at midnight and gazed at the mackerel sky -- weirdly bright and gloriously iridescent. White-crowned sparrows sang throughout the night.

As the week passed, we indeed were harassed by monstrous mosquitoes, saw a grizzly bear lumbering in the distance and skirted several treacherous ice formations -- but I waved the bugs away, marveled at the bear through my binoculars and shattered four-inch-long shards of sparkling ice crystals.

All too quickly, we left the highest peaks behind and arrived at our final campsite. Located at the edge of the coastal plain, it bustled with birds and chicks. The Gwich'in refer to the plain as the "Sacred Place Where Life Begins" because it's also where the Porcupine caribou herd -- upon which the Gwich'in have subsisted for thousands of years -- has its ancestral calving grounds. And it was here that my husband found the perfect perch for me to climb during our last day in the refuge, while he and the others hiked on.

Soaring some 1,800 feet above the river, it was a craggy turret covered with scat, mottled feathers and lichen. But all I saw was an eagle's throne. That and a 360-degree view: Waves of jagged peaks. Softened foothills. Tundra meadows. The sweep of the Kongakut cascading to the sea. The yellow speck of our tent staked to a gravel bar far below. Icebergs in the Arctic Ocean. Sea fog.

And somewhere upstream, amid those rugged mountains, where the river had dissolved my useless worrying. I kept turning to take it all in. I felt humble, privileged to be a guest in this precious sanctuary. Thunderheads gathered, a golden eagle soared, and the sun circled around the sky.

Paula Stone last wrote for Travel about Newfoundland.