It took us over an hour to reach the start of the lowest ridge and about two and a half hours to get up to where we had some great views. I was so surprised that even most of the rock areas of the ridge and most of the down trees were also covered with several inches of mosses, lichens, liverworts and the like. This was a wet, soft, spongy environment. In the first photo, all the vegetative growth in the bottom of the photo is growing on top of the solid rock ridge. You can see the ridge ahead and the steep north side doesn’t have vegetation but the rest does.

The second photo is looking back down to where we had hiked to get up to the ridge. Of course, you can’t tell our exact routes that we took but it was through just such forest.

You can see what two and a half hours of hiking got us in the third photo. April is smiling and she earned that smile. My understanding is that most hiking in this wilderness area is done either above tree line or along the rivers. It is obvious why that is the case. It’s just too much work and energy to hike through the brush with no trails.

Andrew took a nice photo of me as you can see in the fourth photo. At that point, I was ready to sit and take a rest. I was sitting right on the rock ridge and yet you can see that I was also sitting among plants, and most of them were blueberries. Sitting was very easy as the ground made it seem like I was sitting on a pile of cushions.

The last photo is another great photo. Andrew got me lagging behind the group. I took a very different route to the higher ridge so I was a bit behind. But I love this photo. If you look straight down the ridge to the two highest evergreen trees standing up, we were camped right behind them, only right on the river. Gates of the Arctic is a beautiful park.