I’ve been asked most of these questions more than once about Gates of the Arctic NP, so I will post the questions and answers for all.

Questions

1. Were Mosquitoes a problem?

Answer: yes and no. Yes, there were a lot of mosquitoes and we had to swat them away sometimes and hit them on our arms and hands.

But NO, not one of us ever got a single mosquito bite, so we really couldn’t complain about them. We also encountered quite a few small gnats. Remember, this trip was in September.

ON a Side Note: ‘Caribou Trails’ newspaper which we read in Alaska had some interesting bits on caribou. Amongst them were that scientists estimate that Alaska has 950,000 caribou weighing 230 million pounds. They also estimate that Alaska had 17 trillion mosquitoes weighing 96 million pounds. They said that caribou can lose 4.4 pounds of blood to mosquitoes each year. Luckily, we didn’t lose any blood to mosquitoes.

2. Did you Fish and were there lots of fish in the river?

Answer: no and no. We decided that we did not have enough time to fish since we planned to hike and take thousands of photographs.

And no, we never saw any fish in the rivers or streams and the water was crystal clear. I’m not sure why we never saw any fish in the rivers.

I know that Alaska has tons of fish, but again, we were north of the Arctic Circle. Most fishing in Alaska that I hear about is in southern Alaska.

3. Was the Boreal Forest really hard to walk in or are you just old?

Answer: Yes, the boreal forest was really hard to walk in (Gordon) due to soft spongy ground, dense undergrowth, and no trails.

And there wasn’t another 69 year old in the wilderness that could keep up with me.

4. Was it really cold?

Answer: no, it really wasn’t cold. Daytime highs were about 55 degrees F and night-time lows were in the mid to high 40’s. It was warm for September in the Arctic. We were told that we were really lucky with the warm weather. And even when it rained, we never got very wet and never got cold. We were well prepared for this trip. At night, I never did get inside my sleeping bag, I just more or less used my sleeping bag as a blanket. But we slept in our tents as it rained quite a bit at night.

5. How often and how much did it rain?

Answer: It rained every day but never very much. From my journal at the end of the first day, “it rained about ten times today but I probably only got 87 drops of rain on me”. That was an exaggeration, but not by much. Most of the real rain was at night. During the day, it was usually just extremely light rain for short periods of time. The rain never changed our schedule or kept us from doing anything that we wanted to do, like hikes.