Our pilots made four or five passes over the braided Ambler River before deciding exactly where to attempt our landing. I wasn’t worried but I will say that I was curious about it. Our planes had big soft wheels but the gravel bars in the river didn’t look all that smooth to me. Some of the river rocks were large enough for me to see how large they were from our plane. Our plane landed first and my son Andrew took the first photo. This is a good view of the ‘braided’ Ambler River and our landing location.

If you look at the second photo, we landed coming from the direction in the photo. We could only have cleared the stream by a few feet to start our landing. The planes turned around by the time of this photo but the pilots were looking at their ‘runway’ and clearing rocks away for their departure.

For our part, we were really excited to be on the ground and in Gates of the Arctic National Park. In the third photo, you can see some smiling faces. (my daughter-in-law, my son, and my wife)

We had to pack up all of our gear from the gravel bar and portage it to the hillside where we would make our camp. I don’t know what our packs weighed but I was glad that it was going to be a short hike to our camp.

We only had to cross a small branch of the river. It was shallow but the ground was very uneven, the water ice cold and flowing quickly. Andrew thought it best to use hiking poles.

We still had our smiles as we all crossed the creek to get to camp.