Our trip’s logistic preparation began a year before our entry into the field, with upwards of a decade of research in Arctic natural and human history. Since returning from guiding our Beartooth Mountain backpacking trip in Montana last summer, my beloved co-leader Genevieve and I filled our months daydreaming about the Brooks Range. We combed through trip reports, topography lines, mapping software, and google satellite imagery to plan our entirely off-trail backcountry backpacking route through Gates of the Arctic.
After finalizing our route selection with the National Parks Service and our pilots at Coyote Air, we began tackling arguably the most important aspect of trip prep- food! Not only do we eat to hike out there, but we hike to eat! Planning food pack out pantry style allows us to bring all the familiar kitchen staples so we can chef to our hearts content. Packing food to be sent across the continent to live in a storage container weeks before we received it required a unique set of preparations. Aside from assembling the hundreds of pounds of dehydrated vegetables and proteins, we scooped dozens of pounds of peanut butter and jelly into gallon sized bags, poured olive oil / soy sauce / soap into Gatorade bottles- double bagged to prevent leakage, and vacuum sealed butter. After many meticulous nights of calculations and weighing supplies, we shipped out our rations to the Arctic Circle- approximately 37 flat rate USPS boxes! We packed four 10-13 day rations for 9 people of our 45 day expedition, one ration that we traveled into the field with and three that were flown in as resupplies by Coyote Air. Our resupplies weren’t just a replenishment of rations, but milestones that marked the progress we’d made on our journey, giving us intervals to define how we wanted our expedition to continue evolving.
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