Gates of the Arctic National Park
&
Kobuk Valley National Park

Gates Of The Artic and Kobuk Valley National Parks are two of Alaska's least visited parks. They are beautiful Arctic wildernesses, teeming with wildlife, that will provide a lucky visitor with an unforgettable experience.

Alaska

2015

About The Parks

I have combined these two parks because these were essentially ‘boots on the ground’ trips that we did with one flightseeing trip. We were flown in on a small plane, landed in each park, stayed no more than an hour in each park, and left. This is the kind of trip that people who are, like us, trying to visit all of the national parks and who are not prepared to spend a week kayaking or canoeing or weeks hiking into them. Both of these parks, as is the case with 5 of the 8 national parks in Alaska, have no roads going into them. You can either fly in on a small plane, canoe or kayak in, or hike a rather significant distance into them.

We flew into Anchorage and the next day boarded a Boeing 737 Combi and flew to Kotzebue, Alaska. A ‘combi’ is a plane that is split about in half with the front half containing cargo and the back half passengers.

Kotzebue is a mostly Native American village of about 3200 people. It is on the Chukchi Sea of the Arctic Ocean.

Wildlife

Brown bears, black bears, musk oxen, moose, Dall sheep, wolves, wolverines, coyotes, Arctic and red foxes, lynxes, marmots, porcupines, river otters, beavers, snowshoe hares, muskrats, bald eagles, golden eagles, peregrine falcons, ospreys, great horned and northern hawk-owls.

Lodging

Nulligivik Hotel

In Kotzebue we stayed at the Nulligivik Hotel and, other than a possible AirBNB, it was about the only place in town to stay. It was quite nice, nicer than we expected given where we were, and the three nights that we were there were very pleasant. The staff was friendly and accommodating. Our room had a beautiful view of the Chukchi Sea and it was worth staying up until about 11 PM to photograph the sunset. It was about $225 a night and I doubt that you’d find a finer place north of the Arctic Circle. Having stayed in Coldfoot, Alaska and Deadhorse, Alaska up on Prudhoe Bay I have some frame of reference regarding accommodations north of the Arctic Circle.

About three weeks after our visit, President Barack Obama came to Kotzebue to give a speech on climate change. He and his entourage stayed at the Nulligivik.

Bettles Lodge

On the eastern side of the park there is the town of Bettles which has the Bettles Lodge. Getting to Bettles requires a commuter plane flight on Wright Air Service. These are on small planes, 10 passenger, with a 40 pound cargo weight limit per passenger. This is common on bush planes to Alaska’s remote parks. You need to have the hotel hold your suitcases for you and you pack only what you need for your stay in the park.

Hiking

There are no marked trails to speak of. You don’t hike into these parks unless you are a seasoned back country hiker prepared to spend multiple nights in this wilderness. Often this is done with a guide.

Flightseeing

Typically people visiting these parks book flightseeing tours to view some of the parks features from the air. They generally can include a landing, although not on any airstrip, where you can spend an hour walking around and taking pictures. For people like myself, whose bucket list was to visit all the national parks, that is why they are called ‘boots on the ground’ flightseeing tours.

I had booked a flightseeing tour with a company called Northwestern Aviation owned and operated by our pilot, Jim Kincaid. I made many phone calls to Alaska to try to arrange flights into Kobuk Valley National Park and Gates of the Arctic National Park. Jim was able to do both out of Kotzebue. The cost would be $2100 and, fortunately, he had someone else who wanted to do the same trip so it was a three-way split as far as the cost. The itinerary was about a two-and-a-quarter hour flight to the western part of Gates of the Arctic National Park followed by about an hour’s flight to the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes in Kobuk Valley National Park and then about an hour plus flight back to Kotzebue.

Altogether we’d be spending about four and half hours in a small plane with three take-offs and landings. My wife is not very fond of small planes, to say the least, and this Alaska trip was for us to go to the five Alaska national parks that we hadn’t been to – all of which we had to fly into on small planes. I would have preferred to do a shorter flight as the first flight. Unfortunately juggling regular airline flights, these flights on small planes into the national parks and hotel accommodations at all of these places, had us doing this, the longest flight by far, as the first bush plane flight. As it turned out we had a great day, Jim was an excellent pilot and, after that, all the other shorter flights were that much easier for both of us.

The day of our flight turned out to be overcast and somewhat drizzly which was in line with the forecast. That was obviously not what we hoped for. Aside from being on a small plane in inclement weather, the conditions were not going to make for good pictures. Before we left our pilot was in radio contact with some other Native American villages along our planned route and was able to confirm that the weather was better along our planned route and acceptable to fly in. We took off on schedule in a light rain in a small plane that held three passengers and a pilot. Both of my cars are bigger inside than the interior of this plane which I think was a Cessna 172.

Our first stop was to be about 20 or 30 miles into Gates of the Arctic and would take about 2¼ hours to get there. We’d be flying over Kobuk Valley National Park and the eastern part of this park was very wet. There were many small ponds everywhere dominating the landscape. This was not some place to hike into. It is an extremely remote park and getting to it on anything but a plane could take quite some time. It is about a hundred mile trip on the Kobuk River from Kotzebue and about 250 miles on that river coming from Bettles which is east of the park.

From the landscape that we saw it was easy to see why Kobuk Valley National Park is one of the least visited parks in the entire system with only 15,500 visitors in 2017. It doesn’t even have its own national parks brochure. It shares one, entitled ‘Western Arctic National Parklands’, with Cape Krusenstern National Monument, Noatak National Preserve and the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve. Gates of the Arctic National Park is actually last with 11,177 visitors (2017) but I have to wonder how they count them. I doubt that my visit to both parks was known to the national parks system. It is possible, however, that pilots flying into and landing in these national parks notify the park rangers of their itinerary and the number of passengers they are taking in.

Eventually we landed on a gravel bar alongside the Noatak River near Lake Matcharak. We really were out in the middle of nowhere and I would have been surprised to find out that there was another human being within 100 miles of us. We got out of the plane and started taking pictures and, since we were by a river which is where bears tend to forage, I looked up and down the river to see if there was anything doing. Sure enough about 100 yards away there was a grizzly bear by the side of the river. I said to our pilot “Jim, there’s a grizzly bear down the river and he seems to be headed this way”. Jim, who had walked away from the plane to where he could answer natures call, just said okay. I figured if he wasn’t worried we’ll just continue taking our pictures. I told my wife, Jo Ann, to stand in the foreground and I would get the bear in the background for a picture.

After a few minutes of picture taking and taking in the scenery and remoteness of where we were, all the while keeping an eye on the bear, I noticed he was still coming our way. I again called to Jim and said “Jim, the grizzly is still coming and he seems to be picking up speed”. At that point Jim went over to the plane and pulled out a revolver which he said was a .44 magnum. He also got a can of bear spray and put it on the ground behind him and watched the grizzly. I went over and stood near the bear spray because I kind of felt that that might be a better option than the pistol. A grizzly bear can run 30 miles an hour and he could be on us fairly quickly if he had a mind to.

I don’t know how good a shot Jim is but my feeling was it was unlikely that he was some kind of Wyatt Earp. I figured that he would have maybe two shots to stop the charging bear which, in that do-or-die circumstance, bears little resemblance to target shooting. But, when the bear got to be about 125 feet away from us, Jim just yelled at the bear “go away bear, go away!” With that the bear made a right turn and headed away from us, he then turned left and essentially detoured around us. He disappeared behind some shrubbery and Jim kept an eye on where he went to make sure he didn’t have any second thoughts about leaving us. That was the last we saw of that bear but we got some good pictures and the encounter was one of the highlights of the trip.

By the way, the last thing you want to do is have to shoot a bear in a national park up there. If you do you have to skin it and bring the skin and the skull to the park rangers and you better have a pretty darn good reason for why you shot it!

When you look at the picture gallery you’ll see us standing with what looks like small versions of national parks signs for Kobuk Valley and Gates of the Arctic at our feet. A previous national park ‘boots on the ground tourist’, knowing that there would be no national park sign to take a picture with, painted his own sign, complete with the national park system colors and logo, with hinges on the back so that it could be folded up into about a one foot square package and brought them on his trip to take pictures with. After he took his flightseeing trip he had no further use for them so he left them with Jim who took them for us to use.

We then boarded the plane and took off for our stop in Kobuk Valley National Park. We headed for the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes. This was about a 50 minutes or so flight from where we were in Gates heading roughly southwest. From the plane I did see another bear also foraging further down by the river.

The Great Kobuk Sand Dunes (there is also the Little Kobuk Sand Dunes) are about 34 square miles of dunes and we landed on a part that was very firm. We got out and walked up the dunes, checked out the scenery and took some pictures. We probably were there for about an hour but that was fine and accomplished our purpose. We now could check off parks 47 and 48 out of 60.

We took off and headed back to Kotzebue. Unfortunately the weather was pretty much overcast throughout the day but at least we didn’t have much rain. Jim was able to fly under the clouds and, while we did experience an occasional sprinkle in the air, we were able to see the scenery and it really was beautiful. The human eye could see the beauty but my pictures lacked the vividness that sunlight would have produced.

With many mountains and valleys and expansive views these parks really are pure unspoiled wilderness. That’s a big part of their beauty. Their remoteness insures that there’s never a crowd and your pictures only contain the landscape you want to photograph and the people you want in them. Nobody’s Aunt Edna is in your picture!

I had planned another flightseeing trip into the eastern part of Gates of the Arctic. I wanted to see the two mountains, Frigid Crags and Boreal Mountain, straddling the North Fork of the Koyukuk river that Bob Marshall, a wilderness activist, called the “Gates of the Arctic”. For that flight I was going to have to take a small ‘commuter’ (10 passenger) flight to Bettles, Alaska to meet up with the pilot that was going to fly me to that formation and to Anatuvuk Pass, a Native American village at the northern edge of the park. I had planned to do that flight, and my trip to Kaktovik to see the polar bears, out of Fairbanks. I allotted six days in Fairbanks (staying at the River’s Edge Resort where we had stayed twice before) knowing that weather could be a problem on any flightseeing trip - all the more so in the Arctic.

As it happened my flight out of Bettles kept getting pushed back due to an early (August) snowstorm up in Gates and the fact that the pilot had hunters that he had dropped off sometime earlier and who needed to be picked up. They were, understandably, a priority since they hadn’t planned on snow and were running out of food too.

There really wasn’t much to do in Fairbanks while I was waiting for the flight into Gates so we drove down to Denali and spent two days there, keeping in contact with our pilot in Bettles, in the hope that we could get our trip in. Alas, it was not to be and we had to be satisfied that at least we had such a great park, as Denali is, as an emergency alternative. That was the third time we’ve been to Denali and no less enjoyable than any of the others. Plenty of bears, moose and Dall sheep to see from the bus. Though obviously not nearly as exciting as the bear we encountered in Gates.

Gates of the Arctic and Kobuk Valley National Parks Photo Gallery

Other Resources

Gates Of The Artic National Park on the National Parks Service website - NPS.gov

Kobuk Valley National Park on the National Parks Service website - NPS.gov

Gates Of The Arctic National Park - Wikipedia

Kobuk Valley National Park - Wikipedia

Kotzebue, Alaska - official site

List of visitors to all national parks

Other National Parks Within a Day’s Drive

There are no other parks within a day‘s drive. There are no roads into Gates of the Arctic National Park or Kobuk Valley National Park. You can only fly in via a bush plane, canoe or hike into them.
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