Gates of the Arctic National Preserve ⓘ

People come to Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve seeking rare opportunities for uninterrupted solitude and intimate encounters with nature. If they look carefully, visitors can see evidence of people who lived in or passed through this land before.

Inupiaq and Athabascan people and their ancestors traveled long distances over rough terrain throughout the central Brooks Range. Their knowledge of the land enabled them to survive on the plants and animals available during each season. Their descendants, now living in small communities nearby, continue to use this knowledge to hunt and gather in the Park and Preserve.

Early explorers and scientists pushed as far into the region as the terrain allowed. They filled empty spaces on their maps and sought new species and resources. Gold miners searched for riches along the Kobuk and Koyukuk Rivers. Their crumbling cabins and rusting artifacts remind us of their stay.

These people, and the hunters, trappers, mountain climbers, and wildlife enthusiasts that followed, have all added to the history of this place. Their stories add layers and depth to the meaning of wilderness.

Caribou & People Caribou &people have lived in a close, intricate relationship for at least 11,000 years in northern Alaska, where caribou have been vitally important for the survival of all native people.

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, rangers and sled dogs ventured into the arctic winter to improve the wilderness character of a northern section of Gates of the Arctic National Park & Preserve by removing decades old fuel barrels left from military exploration.

During the 1880s, explorers representing various branches of the US military became the first outsiders to study the geography and people of the Brooks Range. Read More...

The story of a 1924 USGS expedition through the Brooks Range to Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 4. Read More...

In 1898 gold seekers too late to stake claims in the Klondike spilled over the border into Alaska. Many of them tried placer mining along the wild rivers of the Brooks Range. Read More...

The U.S. Geological Survey played a key role in locating mineral deposits and mapping northern Alaska in the aftermath of the Klondike-Alaska gold rush. Read More...

Inspired by wilderness advocate Bob Marshall, NPS planners pushed for a national park that protected the natural splendor of the central Brooks Range. Read more. . .

If some of these stories have piqued your interest, check out our Suggested Reading List .

Today, as in the past, many Alaskans live off the land, relying on fish, wildlife and other wild resources. Alaska's natural abundance forms the backbone of life and economy for many people in the state, and indigenous people in Alaska have used these subsistence resources for food, shelter, clothing, transportation, handicrafts and trade for thousands of years. Subsistence, and all it entails, is critical to sustaining the physical and spiritual culture of Alaska Native peoples and to making life on the land possible for many of Alaska's rural residents. Helga Eakon, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Interagency Coordinator, describes the Alaska Native relationship to the land this way:

Subsistence is a way that Native peoples of Alaska have preserved their cultures. This way of life is not confined to the land. It stretches out to the sky and the waters and rivers. The creatures of the earth give themselves to the people, who in turn share with family and friends, shaping relationships that celebrate life.

In the years that followed, the pace of change accelerated and development abounded in Alaska's remote areas. In response, rural residents began to organize, and before long they petitioned government officials in hopes of retaining some protection for their land base and their subsistence way of life. In deliberations leading to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, the U.S. Congress acknowledged the importance of subsistence hunting and fishing to Alaska Natives but provided no specific protection on federal public lands.

In 1980, Congress formally recognized the social and cultural importance of protecting subsistence for both Native and non-Native rural residents when it passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). This legislation created millions of acres of new national park and national preserve lands in Alaska and helped to preserve subsistence use and a unique connection to the land fostered by tradition and lifelong experience. The new law defined subsistence as:

Customary and traditional uses by rural Alaska residents of wild, renewable resources for direct personal or family consumption as food, shelter, fuel, clothing, tools or transportation; for the making and selling of handicraft articles out of non-edible by-products of fish and wildlife resources taken for personal or family consumption; for barter, or sharing for personal or family consumption; and for customary trade.

When Representative Morris Udall and others were writing ANILCA during the 1970s, they recognized the importance of people's connections to the land and their need to harvest subsistence resources. As a result, the architects of the lands act included Title VIII to protect subsistence needs for rural Alaskans. The wording of Title VIII reveals the unusual conditions of life in Alaska's rural areas:

(1) the continuation of the opportunity for subsistence uses by rural residents of Alaska, including both Natives and non-Natives, on the public lands and by Alaska Natives on Native lands is essential to Native physical, economic, traditional, and cultural existence and to non-Native physical, economic, traditional, and social existence;

(2) the situation in Alaska is unique in that, in most cases, no practical alternative means are available to replace the food supplies and other items gathered from fish and wildlife which supply rural residents dependent on subsistence uses.

With the passage of ANILCA, the American people made a promise: to protect some of our nation's most splendid natural ecosystems and treasured landscapes while providing the opportunity for those engaged in a traditional subsistence way of life to continue to do so. In this way, the landmark law that created many of Alaska's national park units confirms the strong connection between local residents and the land.

In Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve nomadic peoples have used and occupied the area for thousands of years, following caribou herds and traveling to regional trading areas to meet with other Native groups. These peoples eventually formed three distinct cultures occupying the central Brooks Range in the 1800s: Athapaskan-speaking Koyukon, and Inupiaq-speaking Kuuvanmiit and Nunamiut. Today local rural residents in established communities and remote homesteads continue to depend upon resources in the park to sustain a subsistence way of life and maintain cultural traditions. Subsistence activities occur throughout the year and are usually concentrated in the northern and eastern portions of the park and along rivers flowing out of the mountains that connect low-lying communities. Winter trapping efforts concentrate on the harvest of lynx, wolverine, wolves, marten, and fox. Hunting, fishing, trapping, and gathering in repeated seasonal cycles remains a vital part of evolving subsistence lifeways and an unbroken link to the past for local residents in this region.

Subsistence Resource Commissions (SRCs) have been established for most national parks and monuments in Alaska to provide meaningful participation and involvement of local subsistence users in planning and management decisions. The purpose of the Commission is to recommend to the Governor of Alaska and the Secretary of the Interior a program for subsistence hunting within Gates of the Arctic National Park. Learn more about the Subsistence Resource Commission

The museum collections for Gates of the Arctic serve to document the cultural and natural history of the Central Brooks Range and are used for research, interpretation, and resource management purposes. The largest of the collections are in archaeology and archives, followed by smaller collections in biology, paleontology, history, and ethnology. The majority of the collections are stored in a state of the art curation facility in the Fairbanks Administrative Center, while others are curated in partner repositories such as the University of Alaska Museum of the North (UAMN).

Gates of the Arctic has been described as a living landscape and the museum collections reflect this unique attribute. The cultural materials housed in the museum illuminate the details of human occupation of the central Brooks Range from modern times stretching back for over ten thousand years. The limited paleontological collections reach back even further. The biological collections, housed primarily at UAMN, provide a record of the combined arctic and sub-arctic ecology of the region. The extensive archive documents the creation and early years of the park and preserve as well as years worth of administrative activity including numerous resource management undertakings within the park.

This virtual exhibit highlights a specific section of the collections, and is a combination of stories and images that provide a deeper insight into a specific subset of the overall collection. Browse archaeological research at a prehistoric Paleo-Eskimo camp: A virtual exhibit

The Gates of the Arctic museum collections have no permanent exhibit space but are used regularly incorporated in traveling and temporary exhibits, and can be explored virtually through an online catalog, and web-based exhibits. Contact the park curator to request access to collections for research or educational uses.

A new on-line collections web catalog is now available for anyone to browse. The collections can be searched in several different ways and many of the items have associated images that can be viewed.

“Caribou meat is our meat since I was born. I was raised with it. The skin was my clothes. The meat was my diet and the broth was my drink… Without caribou meat, what would I eat...?”

In Northern Alaska, people and caribou have lived in a close, intricate relationship for at least 11,000 years. Caribou have been vitally important for the survival of all native people whose homelands are now partially encompassed by Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve—or inland Iñupiat of Anaktuvuk Pass, Iñupiat people of the Kobuk and Noatak Rivers, and Koyukon Athabascans.

For some tribes, caribou is just part of a diet which also includes other game, fish and marine mammals. But for inland mountain people—the Nunamiut Iñupiat—tuttu (caribou) is by far the single most important food source. Since a time immemorial, Nunamiut people have eaten meat, fat, and many other parts of the caribou and have sipped broth made from caribou meat and bones. Caribou skin clothing —parkas, pants, boots, socks and mittens—has protected them from the arctic cold. They have slept under caribou skin blankets and have sheltered in caribou skin tents . Caribou hides have also provided rawhide line for making snowshoes and sleds. And sinew from caribou tendons, in single or braided strands, have been used to make nets to catch ptarmigan and fish, as lashing for hunting tools, and as a strong and durable thread.

For Nunamiut people, the importance of caribou extends far beyond the material realm. This animal is at the foundation of their history; it pervades their daily life; and it is a symbol of their unique inland culture. Caribou hunting is pursued with passion and pride, as an endeavor requiring great skill, and it is underlain by deeply held spiritual beliefs. Today, as in the past, caribou symbolize what it means to be Nunamiut.

In historic times, reliance on migratory caribou herds dictated a nomadic lifestyle. It also made the stories and teachings passed down through generations crucial for success in hunting and for survival in the challenging arctic environment. Beginning in childhood, Nunamiut people acquired a sophisticated knowledge of caribou behavior and ecology, they learned every detail of the landscape, and they came to understand the vagaries of arctic weather. They also devised a complex array of hunting methods , such as the construction of human-like stone figures (iñuksuit ) to help direct or funnel caribou over many miles into corrals, lakes or rivers where hunters waited with spears or bows and arrows.

Modern life has changed from earlier times , when Nunamiut Iñupiat moved their encampments from place to place to intercept caribou migrations. Since the 1950s, they have lived in the village of Anaktuvuk Pass, which is on a major migratory pathway. However, an intimate knowledge of caribou is still essential for Nunamiut hunters, who travel widely by snow machine and hunt with rifles, either alone or in small groups. The people continue to wear beautiful caribou skin boots, socks, and mittens, and they sleep on caribou hide mattresses in camps. They have created a new art form—the caribou skin mask—which provides an income for some village families. And most importantly, caribou meat and fat are still essential as staple foods for today’s villagers.

Caribou and People | Caribou Skin Clothing | Caribou Skin Tents | Caribou Skin Tents (continued) | The Caribou Drive | Back to History and Culture

My father was in practically every stampede in Alaska and he walked to most of them, a pack on his back and a rifle in his hand.

It is hard to imagine telling the story of Koyukuk gold without mentioning the energetic and good humored Gordon C. Bettles—fur trader, shopkeeper, prospector, newspaperman, and friend to the down-on-his-luck placer miner. In 1888, Bettles was twenty-seven years old and eager to make his fortune. He had been mining for silver in Montana, but he abandoned his claims when he heard about a gold discovery on the Fortymile River in what was then Canada's Northwest Territory. Although a decade would pass before the great Klondike gold rush, Bettles joined a group of sixty men who scaled Chilkoot Pass and risked life and limb to travel the upper stretches of the Yukon River in rough boats. Before they found gold at the mouth of the Fortymile, twenty of the group had given up and returned home. But not Gordon Bettles!

For several months he traveled through Fortymile country using a portable sluice box called a "rocker" to wash $50 per day from streambed gravel. However, as soon as he caught wind of prospects on the Kuskokwim River, he and his partner left in search of gold and adventure. After a long winter and no signs of gold, Bettles returned to the Yukon River and in partnership with the fur trader Al Mayo he started a trading station near the confluence of the Tanana River. This was the beginning of his career as a shopkeeper and entrepreneur in some of Alaska's most remote gold fields.

By 1890 a group of miners discovered gold on Koyukuk tributaries north of the Arctic Circle, and Bettles responded by ordering 20 tons of supplies and forming G.C. Bettles & Co. "From a pickaxe to a candle" was the company's motto in newspaper ads. Four years later he opened a store, or "beanshop" as the miners called them, at a place along the Koyukuk he called Arctic Village. Business was slow in the early years because only a handful of men were willing to brave harsh winters and dig through frozen Koyukuk gravel bars to collect gold dust, flakes, and nuggets. In addition to running his store, Bettles owned the Yukon River steamboats the Cora and the Koyukuk and traded with Alaska Native trappers for the furs of marten, red and silver fox, beaver, and mink. Early in his career as a shopkeeper, Bettles earned a reputation for generosity because he freely offered miners a "grubstake" of food and supplies that they could pay back when they found their gold.

In 1892 Bettles married Sophie Kokrine, daughter of a Yukon River trader from Russia, and started a family. He also became a charter member of the Yukon Order of Pioneers, an organization formed to bring order and ethical conduct to the emerging gold camps. The Bettles name also spread throughout the region when he volunteered to help in the publication of the Yukon Press , the first newspaper in the Yukon River region. In the paper's first edition, he warned eager prospectors that a full season of back-breaking labor was needed on the Koyukuk before they might have a hope of seeing profit:

Miners coming to this section of the country from the outside world: I deem it necessary to advise them, owing to the difficulty of opening deep diggings, as it will at least take the greater portion of the first season before much, if any returns are realized, to come prepared to meet those obligations.

In 1898, five years after Bettles first reported on the Koyukuk, the overflow from the famous Klondike Gold Rush sent two thousand gold-hungry prospectors to Koyukuk country where they believed they would find the next El Dorado. Wherever their steamboats stopped the miners built log cabin camps and started digging. Responding quickly to the new opportunity, Bettles established the outpost of Bergman and another store farther north he called Bettles. By spring 1899, the prospectors' gold fever had faded and only one hundred miners remained, but the Koyukuk mining district held on with additional gold discoveries in 1906 and 1909.

Beginning in 1901 the tiny settlement of Bettles had a post office and continued to serve local miners, but by the 1930s most of the residents had moved on to Wiseman or, a decade later, to the new Navy airfield seven miles upriver (the town that grew around the airfield was also called Bettles). Today the tiny outposts established by Gordon Bettles are ghost towns or have disappeared entirely, but the larger story of gold mining in the region has become an important part of the history of the region in and around Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve.

In 1897, when the world heard the news of gold in the Canadian Yukon, Americans from all walks of life succumbed to "Klondicitis" and rushed northward to find their fortunes. Some stampeders went alone and formed partnerships on the way to the gold fields. Others formed mining companies and pooled their talents and resources to increase their chances of success. This was the approach taken by twenty-five Illinois residents living in or near the town of Galesburg, a railroad town about two hundred miles from Chicago. On January 18, 1898 they signed official papers creating the Galesburg-Alaska Mining and Developing Company. The next step would be to find some gold.

The rancher and amateur photographer Jasper N. Wyman was one of that optimistic group. He was also an avid outdoorsman, a quality that would serve him well in the months to come. By bringing his camera and glass photographic plates along to Alaska, Wyman managed to produce something quite rare: a thorough photographic documentation of a stampede in Alaska. The other members represented a wide array of professions from architects, bankers, and doctors to butchers, barbers, blacksmiths and cooks. The number also included two farmers, a student, a machinist, and two professional house-movers. In April 1898 this eclectic group traveled to Seattle where they would take the so-called 'rich man's route' to St. Michael at the mouth of the Yukon River. Stampeders with fewer resources took the more difficult path over Chilkoot Pass from Skagway and Dyea and traveled from the Yukon River headwaters to the Klondike.

After booking passage on a large sailing ship called the G.W. Watson , they began assembling one of the most complete outfits that had yet gone north, including 20,000 pounds of flour, 7,500 of bacon, 4,500 of dried fruits, 5,000 of beans, 1,000 pounds of butter in cans, and 3,000 pounds of condensed cream. For transportation they had a 41-foot steam launch called the Silver Wave (strapped to the ship's deck), lumber to build a large steamboat, and would later acquire a flat-bottomed barge. During the weeks it took to purchase supplies and load the ship, the men toured Seattle and had their pictures taken by Wyman. When they finally set sail on May 19 one of the Galesburg gang played "Yankee Doodle" on the accordion as the G.W. Watson and two other ships cast off for Alaskan shores. Although their voyage would be shorter than they expected-only twenty-seven days from Seattle to St. Michael-storms and close quarters left many of the ship's 130 passengers seasick and miserable.

Upon arriving, the Galesburg men realized they were carrying some valuable goods-newspapers with recent news of the Spanish-American War unfolding in the Philippines and elsewhere. The residents of St. Michael, including 180 whites and an equal number of Eskimos, were hungry for news of the world. Wyman was on hand to photograph the landing at St. Michael and some of the dozens of vessels that were anchored in the bay. Hundreds of prospectors were camped on the beach. Most of them were greenhorns, newly arrived, but a few were miners who had survived a long winter in the Klondike gold fields. The high spirits of the Galesburg men were dampened when they learned that the Jane Grey , which left Seattle on the same night as the G. W. Watson had gone down. Thirty-seven passengers died in the disaster and twenty-six survivors managed to reach shore.

While Galesburg men began building the steamboat they would call the Illinois , Wyman spent his free time writing letters home and taking photographs of the St. Michael township and the nearby stampede camp people were calling Fort Get There. Wyman also enjoyed trading with local Eskimos for sealskin boots, skin mukluks, fur mittens and parkas, and trinkets made of ivory. His fondness for trading earned him the nickname "Mukluk Jap." Although the Klondike, in the Yukon Territory, was the main focus of the gold rush, by the summer of 1898 all the best claims in the area had been staked, and discouraged stampeders were beginning to leave Dawson City with the news. Wyman wrote home that "lots of people are coming down the river from Dawson to go back to their homes and some report very favorable and some tell some horrible sad stories of hardships they have gone through, and most of them advise everybody to not go to Dawson. It is overrun now."

Although the Brooks Range was well known to the Inupiaq and Athabascan peoples who trekked through the region in pursuit of fish and game, the mountains remained unknown to outsiders until the last decades of the 1800s. Long after the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, the Brooks Range remained a blank spot on cartographers' maps. During the 1880s, however, officials in the United States government felt the need to map northern Alaska, if only to know more about the vast territory under their jurisdiction.

The first explorers to find their way to Alaska’s Interior – Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka and Lieutenant Henry Allen, both of the U.S. Army – mapped major waterways in Interior Alaska but did not reach far enough north to encounter the Brooks Range. Lt. Schwatka charted much of the Yukon River, and although Lt. Allen did not cross what is today the boundary of Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, at the end of his 1,500 mile journey he did manage to map the upper course and tributaries of the Koyukuk River based on information from a Koyukon Indian elder. These early attempts soon inspired others to investigate Alaska’s last terra incognita .

Between 1883 and 1886, officers of the U.S. Navy and the Revenue Marine Service (now the Coast Guard) began investigating the rivers emptying into the ocean at Kotzebue Sound in northwestern Alaska. Although cooperation between the military branches was the norm, a rivalry developed between Naval Lieutenant George Stoney and Captain Michael Healy of the Revenue Marine after both men gathered geographical information from coastal Natives about the extent of the Noatak and Kobuk Rivers.

In 1884, Stoney and Healy (with Third Lt. J.C. Cantwell as his proxy) each launched their own expeditions up the Kobuk River, gathering mineral samples and describing Native peoples as they traveled. For the next two years, each of the expeditionary parties tried repeatedly to outdo the other by advancing further upstream and claiming the right of first discovery. In addition to gathering basic geographic and ethnographic data, both Stoney and Healy hoped to find a route north across the Brooks Range to allow rescue expeditions to help ice-bound whaling crews on the Arctic coast.

Travel above the Arctic Circle is frequently arduous, and these military explorers faced more than their share of hardship. To begin, they were fighting against the current in major rivers, nursing along either steam launches that broke down regularly or the Native skin boats known as umiaks which needed frequent patching. They faced high water, low water, low rations, rapids, capsizing, constant cold and wet, and devilish swarms of biting flies and mosquitoes. They spent endless hours waist deep in the freezing water with straps around their shoulders, pulling against the current or portaging over swampy land. This is how J.C. Cantwell described his crew after one overland journey:

They had been drenched by the rain and tormented by the mosquitoes ever since leaving the river, and their condition was now really pitiable. Their boots had been worn out by hard walking, and they were compelled to cut pieces from their blankets to bind around their feet. Their clothes were torn and their faces, haggard and blood-stained.

Unsatisfied with only being able to travel in summer, Stoney equipped his crew with provisions for a twenty-month overwintering expedition at a site they called Fort Cosmos, some 250 miles up the Kobuk River. From this base near the modern village of Shungnak, Stoney sent men in all directions with orders to map and gather intelligence. Stoney’s own description of the journey includes this description of the spectacular Arrigetch Peaks (located in the southwestern corner of Gates of the Arctic):

They appear in every conceivable way and shape: there are rugged, weather-scarred peaks, lofty minarets, cathedral spires, high towers and rounded domes; with circular knobs, flat tops, sharp edges, serrated ridges and smooth backbones. These fantastic shapes form the summits of bare, perpendicular mountains.

One of Stoney’s men, Ensign W.L. Howard, managed to lead a team of two military men and two Natives northward to the Noatak River and beyond to the Arctic Ocean near Point Barrow. Along the way, Howard and his white crewmates had to learn to live off the land and to follow the lead of the Natives in the region who included the men in their seasonal rounds to trade furs on the Arctic coast for seal oil, rifles, and flour. Howard learned to snowshoe and drive a dog team, to hunt caribou and build a snow shelter.

The accounts written by Stoney and Healy (and some of their subordinates) provide a glimpse of interior Eskimo life at a critical juncture between traditional ways and the new ways brought by traders and whalers. By 1886, most of the Eskimo groups had been severely affected by the combination of caribou decline and the diseases and trade goods of the whites – particularly the introduction of the rifle, which altered traditional hunting patterns. Starvation, death from disease, and a desperate kind of mobility as people fought for survival and access to addictive trade goods had already disrupted normal seasonal rounds and wreaked havoc on Eskimo lifeways.

These early journeys into the Brooks Range and Arctic Alaska opened the region to the outside world, to the prospectors spilling out of the Klondike in search of new gold fields and to still more map-makers, the dedicated geologists and cartographers of the United States Geological Survey. Even so, the remote Brooks Range with its ice-choked rivers and wind-blown mountain peaks seemed to offer little to an industrialized America. The people living on the land were widely dispersed, most towns sprang up only to fade away, and the land remained largely unaltered – that is, until the arrival of the airplane closed the distances and the discovery of oil on the North Slope attracted the world’s attention.

The History of the Central Brooks Range , William E. Brown (2005) Alaska’s Brooks Range , John M. Kauffmann (1992) The Brooks Range , Alaska Geographic (1996)

In late February 1924, a U.S. Geological Survey team left the Yukon River community of Tanana on dog sleds following a route that would take them through territory largely unknown to outsiders. Their goal was to advance up the Alatna River and establish a camp on the north side of the Arctic Mountains (today's Brooks Range) to wait for spring break-up. Then, they would unpack a crate of cedar canoes they carried on a specially built sled and paddle northward to the Arctic Ocean. Their goal was to explore the 36,000-acre Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 4, an enormous section of Arctic Alaska set aside by President Warren Harding to supply the U.S. Navy with petroleum in times of war.

Although the geologists and topographers of the Geological Survey were accustomed to working in remote and dangerous terrain, the whole enterprise would be a race against time, and Alaskan reporters called this "the most hazardous mission ever undertaken by this branch of the government service." The eight-man team, headed by geologists Philip Smith and John Mertie, included two topographers for mapping, two field assistants, a cook and a dog musher, both recruited from remote Alaskan gold camps. Freight-haulers would also join the first leg of the expedition to deliver several tons of supplies to a point near the Continental Divide. The New York Times called them "all stout lads, hard as nails, with plenty of experience in difficult situations."

Like other Geological Survey expeditions, this one was carefully orchestrated to meet the demands of weather and terrain, but some dangers could not be anticipated. When spring arrived in late May, the men eagerly boarded their canoes only to find vast sheets of overflow ice called aufeis impeding their progress and battering their canoes. And, while struggling to guide the boats through ice-filled channels and over gravel bars, Mertie crushed a bone in his foot, which slowed progress for a week. After reaching the Colville River, the group split into two parties, both of which faced swarms of mosquitoes, back-breaking portages, and the odious task of killing the sled dogs they could no longer feed. Remarkably, the two groups managed to reach Point Barrow within twelve hours of one another and just in time to catch the last ship to Nome before pack ice blocked their passage home.

When news of their success reached the continental United States, Popular Science Monthly declared: "A few weeks ago there emerged from the wilderness of northern-most Alaska a little band of government scientists after seven months of thrilling adventure and hopeless isolation in the heart of the frozen North. They had penetrated into the terrifying bleakness and desolation of the last remaining frontier of the American continent to measure its potential wealth-to survey the region for oil and precious and useful metals and to seek possible routes for transporting these valuable deposits to the doorway of civilization."

Smith and Mertie were less sanguine about the prospect of finding useful quantities of oil in the Arctic, and warned "no one should risk funds whose loss will seriously embarrass him, because development of oil in this region is distinctly a wildcat undertaking of the most speculative nature." Meanwhile, the sort of foot-slogging geology for which the Geological Survey was famous was becoming obsolete with the arrival of the airplane age in Alaska. Airplanes and later helicopters got the job done in a fraction of the time. Although the efforts of Smith and Mertie and other Survey employees were soon forgotten by the American public, their journey has become part of the history of Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve.

The gold rush in the region that is now Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve was largely dependent on the events and circumstances surrounding the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897 and the Nome Gold Rush in 1899. Positioned geographically between the two major gold discoveries, the central Brooks Range fostered its own stampede when the Klondike waned, only to lose nearly all of its miners when the Nome rush began.

The discovery of gold in the Klondike inspired thousands of people to rush north, and the northern goldfields were the promised lands that brought the American frontier tradition to Alaska. Tales of the Klondike, both true and false, gave birth to the popular notion that all of the north was golden, that a man had only to stake his claim and start digging and his fortune would be made. Disillusionment quickly followed elation as the newly arrived prospectors realized that the good claims had been staked. Furthermore, the Canadian government levied a 10% royalty on the miners’ earnings and charged import duties on their equipment.

By the spring of 1898, the reality of conditions in the Klondike had begun to sink in, and many miners turned downstream to American territory to renew their search for the mother lode. As the disaffected Klondikers traveled down the Yukon, they spread the word to groups steaming upriver that there was nothing to be gained by going to Dawson. Some prospectors continued their headlong rush to the Klondike but many turned aside, carrying their equipment, supplies, and golden dreams up the remote rivers of interior Alaska.

The flow of miners from the Klondike to less crowded areas resulted in a rush for gold on the Koyukuk and Kobuk Rivers. When gold was discovered on the Koyukuk, Gordon Bettles opened a trading post in a tiny boomtown the miners called Bergman. When it flooded, he opened another post a short distance upstream and named it after himself. Unfortunately, most of the Koyukuk gold was not accessible using mining methods of the day, and it was nearly impossible to extract enough to make it pay, particularly given the remote location and the severe climate. One miner wrote home, “Dearest, let me tell you any one who has ever gone prospecting for Gold is the hardest earned money a man ever earned, for this is the most miserable place on earth.”

An early freeze trapped sixty-eight steamships and their nine hundred passengers in the ice of the Koyukuk River. Five hundred fifty of them, faced with the prospect of a winter in the arctic interior, headed overland to the Yukon and the coast. The rest stayed, spending the dark cold winter in small camps along the river and purchasing supplies from Bettles on credit. One winter was enough for most of the men and many left in the spring. Today, place names like Jimtown, Beaver City and Soo City, and the remains of steamships whisper of the stranded travelers.

Many of the remaining miners moved up the Middle Fork of the Koyukuk searching for paying claims. Necessities were supplied by traders who brought goods and equipment at increasingly great expense up the shallow rivers. A small group of buildings on Slate Creek became Coldfoot, named for the miners who got "cold feet" and left the country.

In 1907, gold nuggets worth thousands of dollars were found at Nolan Creek, and trading posts and supplies moved north to the town of Wiseman. As the Nolan boom faded, gold was discovered farther north on the Hammond River and so the cycle continued. Small pockets of gold were mined by men willing to endure the severe isolation and primitive conditions of the remote, mountainous region.

A similar story was played out on the Kobuk River in 1889-99. The Kobuk offered even less logistical support to the miners than the Koyukuk since it was not a tributary of the relatively well-traveled Yukon. The Kobuk stampede began when the captain of the whaling ship Alaska greatly exaggerated a prospector’s Kobuk gold discovery to encourage people to book passage on the ship’s return to Alaska. Word spread and hundreds of miners rushed to the Kobuk only to find that, as on the Koyukuk, not much gold could be extracted in paying quantity.

This, combined with a tenuous supply network and the subsequent discovery of the truly rich gold fields at Nome, resulted in a mass exodus from the Kobuk after only a single year. As it happened, one of the men who came north on the Alaska left the ship at Port Clarence and ended up being one of the discoverers of the Nome gold fields, while his shipmates who continued on to the Kobuk found nothing.

The gold rush brought major changes to the lifestyle of the Kobuk Eskimo and Koyukon Athabascan peoples who inhabited the area and made their living through a semi-nomadic cycle of subsistence hunting and fishing. In addition to introducing new tools, materials, and foods to the Native peoples, Euro-American gold seekers introduced a new way of life based on wage labor.

Native peoples trapped, hunted and fished for the miners; they provided transportation for men, messages and supplies; and they saved more than a few lives by helping ill-prepared prospectors out of tight spots. Following closely on the miners’ heels were missionaries whose schools and church teachings reinforced the changes introduced by the miners. Eskimo and Athabascan people in the region settled in villages and became largely dependent on the supplies and work opportunities of the white man’s culture.

As the peak of the Gold Rush passed and the Koyukuk and Kobuk country emptied, a small number of white men remained in the interior, working claims that paid just enough for a living. They settled into an existence that was similar in many ways to the life of the Natives – trapping for furs, hunting and fishing for wild food, and buying supplies at trading posts. These non-Native people joined the Natives in small communities where together they shaped a distinctive subsistence lifestyle that survives to the present in most interior Alaskan villages.

For more information about Koyukuk Gold Mining Check out "A Short Story of Mining on the Koyukuk" (1921).

During the 1880s and 1890s, the expeditions of the Navy and the Revenue Marine Service, as well as the observations of wandering prospectors, helped to chart the twists and turns of river systems in the Brooks Range. Between the rivers, however, the maps were either largely blank or highly speculative. In 1898, the federal government announced a systematic topographic and geologic survey of Alaska that would include renewed exploration of the Brooks Range. Alfred Hulse Brooks, the new head of the Alaskan branch of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), called the project "far more important than any previously done," due in large part because it "furnished the first clue to the geography and geology of the part of Alaska north of the Yukon Basin." Between 1899 and 1911, six major reconnaissance expeditions traversed the mountain range, mapping its topography and geology and defining the patterns of economic geology so important to prospectors and miners.

The first of these USGS expeditions took place in 1899 when Frank Schrader and Thomas Gerdine led a team of four other geologists up the Chandalar River in canoes, portaged fifteen miles to the Bettles River watershed, and floated the Middle Fork of the Koyukuk. Two years later Schrader and seven others advanced up the John River to Anaktuvuk Pass, crossed through to the North Slope and ran the Anaktuvuk and Colville rivers to the Arctic Coast. Also in 1901, a party led by Walter Mendenhall surveyed the Alatna and Kobuk rivers, portaging their canoes over the long-used Koyukon-Inupiat route from Helpmejack Creek to the upper Kobuk and down to Kotzebue Sound in the Chukchi Sea.

And this was just the beginning. After a hiatus of about eight years, the USGS investigators again began crisscrossing the Brooks Range, producing some of the most thorough documentation of the region ever produced. The USGS Bulletins contain accounts of interactions with miners and wonderfully detailed descriptions of mining operations and mineral prospects. It appears the surveyors got on well with the prospectors and miners because the surveyors demonstrated that they could travel light and tough with dog teams, pack horses, and canoes - often for months, through the whole round of seasons. The geologists also shared their scientific observations and maps with the miners, who typically relied on only their personal experiences and hearsay.

By summarizing their knowledge of travel routes and mining prospects in Alaska, the USGS investigators were able to counter some of the inaccurate and crassly promotional gold rush literature that was luring stampeders to disappointment and disaster. In the process, they accomplished truly amazing feats of endurance, poling their canoes up swift rivers and across endless stretches of soft, wet country, hauling bulky survey and photographic gear, enduring mosquitoes and foul weather, and all the while creating detailed maps and finely wrought drawings of geological sections. Their survey network eventually extended from the Yukon River north to the Arctic Ocean, and from the Chandalar River west to Kotzebue Sound.

The early inspiration for the creation of a vast northern national park can be traced back to a U.S. Forest Service forester named Bob Marshall , who arrived in Alaska in 1929 looking for what he called "blank spaces on maps." When Marshall first traveled to the isolated mining camp of Wiseman in northern Alaska, he was already a prominent wilderness advocate. His wilderness philosophy defined wild places as essential not only for ecological health but for human happiness as well. "For me and for thousands with similar inclinations," he wrote, "the most important passion of life is the overpowering desire to escape periodically from the strangling clutch of a mechanistic civilization." Marshall's quest for happiness led him to the Koyukuk region of the Alaska's Brooks Range where he found adventure and the companionship of local residents.

During the 1930s, Marshall returned to Alaska three more times to live in Wiseman and explore the rugged terrain of the Koyukuk watershed and beyond to the continental divide. He used northern forest research as a pretext for mountain climbing, mapping uncharted waterways, and mingling with the Alaska Native people and gold mining sourdoughs of the Koyukuk. In 1933, Marshall published his study of daily life in Wiseman entitled Arctic Village , advertising to the world that he had discovered a kind of arctic utopia. Marshall was no less enthusiastic when describing the mountains, rivers, and valleys of the Brooks Range, particularly the stretch along the North Fork of the Koyukuk , where he named two adjacent peaks the "Gates of the Arctic." Marshall's writings inspired later wilderness enthusiasts to push for preservation of a vast section of the Brooks Range as Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve.

After World War II, military installations, oil and mineral discoveries, and improved aviation technology brought rapid change to the land north of the Arctic Circle. Many local residents in communities surrounding the Brooks Range were concerned that this change would be destructive and irreversible. Wilderness advocates were also concerned that oil development might destroy one of the nation's last large wild areas before it could be appreciated by the American people. The naturalist and author Olaus Murie urged that some vestiges of Alaska's backcountry be saved before industrial progress claimed them. He believed that designated wilderness areas would provide the last refuge for Alaska's traditional Native and pioneer lifestyles and that rather than "locking up the land," as wilderness critics charged, parks perpetuated frontier Alaska's social and cultural integrity, scenic beauty, and scientific values. During the 1950s, the expeditions that Olaus and his wife Mardy made in the eastern Brooks Range helped to generate support for creation of the Arctic National Wildlife Range (later renamed "Refuge"), and their wilderness advocacy helped the National Park Service to focus attention on arctic Alaska.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the philosophy of wilderness preservation popularized by Marshall and the Muries combined with the concerns of a largely homegrown Alaskan conservation movement and area residents who wanted to protect their way of life. Together, the environmentalists and the traditionalists worked to block early oil pipeline construction plans that were ill-adapted to the northern climate and soil conditions. After studying the area's natural and cultural landscapes, the National Park Service identified the central Brooks Range as a parkland candidate. These early planners attempted to adapt their proposals to the state's plans for an Arctic Transportation Corridor reaching north and south across the Brooks Range.

In 1968, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall urged President Lyndon B. Johnson to use his authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to designate Gates of the Arctic and other areas in Alaska as national monuments - a parting conservation gift to the nation during the last days of his administration. However, Johnson balked at the idea, and the process of making the proposals a reality was postponed. All through the 1970s, conservationists and the National Park Service waited for the passage of the Alaska National Interest Land Conservation Act, which was designed to create or expand fifteen Alaska parks. Finally, in 1978, when time was running out for the bill, President Jimmy Carter stepped in and used his authority to designate these areas as national monuments. Carter's actions held the conservation units in trust while Congress concluded its deliberations, and by 1980, Congress passed the land claims act, creating 106 million acres of new protected lands in Alaska.

Despite pressure from mining and petroleum developers to create a relatively small park split by a pipeline corridor, the final boundaries drawn for Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve encompassed eight million contiguous acres, stretching nearly two hundred miles from the region surrounding the North Fork of the Koyukuk westward to include the upper reaches of the Kobuk and the Noatak Rivers . At its western end, the park abuts Noatak National Preserve , and on the east, beyond the Dalton Highway corridor, the expanded Arctic National Wildlife Refuge stretches to the Canadian border. As such, Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve became the midsection of a nearly 800-mile swath of protected land covering the Brooks Range from end to end.

There are many ways to describe the unique landscape and archaeological features around Agiak Lake. However few have described them better than Aaron Wilson one of the archaeologists to study them. The following description is from his 2006 report...

"Perhaps the most fascinating story to be told at Agiak Lake revolves around the hundreds of sentinel-like inuksuit that stand watch over the lake. The rock cairns, positioned in complexes on either side of a valley, each totaling nearly a mile long and remarkably straight segments, were used like fences or scarecrows to skillfully direct herds of caribou along the length of the line and into Agiak Lake itself. Once in the lake, the caribou were deftly pursued by kayaking hunters and dispatched with long wooden lances tipped with razor-sharp stone spear points. The cooperation and expertise involved in a hunt such as this would have been matched by a keen knowledge of caribou behavior and an intimate knowledge of the surrounding landscape. What's more, archeological survey indicates that the caribou drivelines were repaired and modified for centuries, providing a stable caribou hunting technique for generations, perhaps millennia. Stories such as this and many others lay hidden away within the archaeological and ethnographic record of Agiak Lake."

In addition to these remarkable features there are numerous tent rings and cache pits around the lake which attest to the importance of the area to past inhabitants.

Learn more about the Northern Archaic prehistory, why it was highlighted for Alaska Archaeology Month in 2015, and download the poster.

The collection includes thousands of stone tools and exceptionally well preserved faunal remains archaeologically assigned to the Denbigh Flint Complex and left at the site by a small band of people nearly 4000 years ago. At two of these sites, further investigation - in the form of systematic subsurface testing and excavation - has revealed the unprecedented, well preserved remains of two distinct prehistoric hunting camps; one, attributed to the Denbigh Flint complex and which dates to 3,900 years before present, and the other, attributed to the Northern Archaic complex which dates to roughly 7000 years before present. The following links describe the efforts of Park archaeologists to document and research these remarkable finds, allow you to explore the discovery and investigation of the site, and view some of the artifacts found there.

Click on this image to join the crew during the initial discovery and subsequent fieldwork at the Lake Matcharak Paleo-Inuit site.

Click on this image to view samples from the stone and organic artifacts that comprise the GAAR-00222 museum collection.

Click on this image to view a series of short vodcasts (videos) created by Liz O'Connell of WonderVisions about the site, some of the research questions that drove the investigations, and the collection.

The Denbigh Flint Complex was highlighted for the 2014 Alaska Archaeology Month annual poster. View and download all the yearly posters at the link above.

Subsistence Resource Commissions (SRCs) have been established for most national parks and monuments in Alaska to provide meaningful participation and involvement of local subsistence users in planning and management decisions. The purpose of the Commission is to recommend to the Governor of Alaska and the Secretary of the Interior a program for subsistence hunting within Gates of the Arctic National Park. Since the establishment of the federal subsistence management program in 1990, the SRC has also been making recommendations on proposals for hunting and fishing regulations (e.g., harvest limits, seasons, and customary and traditional use determinations) affecting Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve directly to the federal subsistence Regional Advisory Councils (RACs) and the Federal Subsistence Board.

The Commission for Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve has eleven designated "resident zone communities" in the vicinity of the park that have special privileges regarding subsistence within park boundaries. These communities are Alatna, Allakaket, Ambler, Anaktuvuk Pass, Bettles, Evansville, Hughes, Kobuk, Nuiqsut, Shungnak, and Wiseman.

The Commission is comprised of nine local rural residents representing geographic, cultural, and user diversity from within the region. SRC members are appointed by the Governor of Alaska (3 members), the Secretary of the Interior (3 members), and the federal subsistence RACs (one each from the North Slope, Northwest Arctic and Western Interior RACs).

The SRC generally meets twice a year in April/May and November. Meetings are advertised in the Federal Register on-line and on our Gates of the Arctic Facebook page , and meetings are open to the public. Public comments are always welcome.

People have lived in the Brooks Range for more than 13,000 years and thousands of archeological sites in Gates of the Arctic document this history and people's strong connections to the land. Today Athapaskan and Inupiat descendants and various Non-Native Alaskan peoples call the area home. Traditionally, populations were small and mobile, moving throughout the year among a series of camps to harvest seasonally available foods. It was not until last century that people settled in permanent, year-round villages. Today there are eleven resident zone communities directly associated with the Park, and many people continue to conduct subsistence activities within and around the park and preserve.

People of European descent first began to visit the Central Brooks Range in the 1880s. Military explorers assigned to map this previously uncharted territory struggled up rivers and over mountain passes. Prospectors followed, searching for signs of placer gold and struggling through long winters in rough mining camps. Government scientists came to examine and record the intricacies of the natural and cultural history of this previously undocumented place. More recently the introduction of recreational adventurers seeking untamed places has added a new page to the history of the region.

The links below will take you to specific sections of our site where you can read in greater detail about the various efforts and projects which the staff has been involved in over the years. You can also go over to the Park News page and check out the most current efforts by reading our new Resource Briefs .

Gates of the Arctic has one of the most extensive and best preserved archeological records of any park in Alaska. National Park Service archeologists employed by the park actively work to research, document, and preserve these tangible remains of the past that consist of landscapes, sites, and artifacts. Read More...

The Museum Collections for Gates of the Arctic document the cultural and natural history of the Central Brooks Range and are used for research, interpretation, and resource management purposes. Read More...

Located entirely above the Arctic Circle, Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve protects 13,000 square miles of arctic ecosystem. Established in part to preserve its natural features, wildlife, and scenic beauty, the park provides habitat for nearly 900 different species of plants and animals that thrive in the oftentimes harsh climate. Located at the northern end of the Continental Divide, the park was formed by land-building forces that created the Brooks Range and carved peaks and valleys from ice and wind. Today, this intact and undeveloped landscape provides scientists with evidence of the past, present, and clues to an ever-changing future, as a warming climate continues to impact today's arctic. For the Koyukon and Inupiaq people that call this park their home, nature and culture are tightly linked. The living and nonliving components of the ecosystem are often connected in ways that are obscure, or are very complex and unexpected. Science (both western science and local knowledge) is essential in understanding these connections.

The story of summer in the Central Brooks Range is one of spectacular abundance—millions of insects, lush new plant growth, prey for the predators.

In fact, the availability of food is so great that birds undertake long migrations to arrive here in time to breed and to raise their chicks on a protein-rich diet of mosquitoes and other prolific insects. Some birds have come unimaginable distances, like the arctic terns that fly all the way from Antarctic waters—the longest migration of any bird in the world.

Caribou trek from their boreal forest wintering grounds to their calving areas on the coastal plain, sustaining themselves on lichens along the way. Grizzly and black bears leave their dens with cubs born the previous winter. Small mammals like arctic ground squirrels, lemmings and voles, emerge from their winter homes to feed and frolic once again in the open air. Whitefish, northern pike and grayling feast in the rivers and lakes.

For all of the abundance of summer, it is a fleeting season…and for eight months each year the deep cold and scarcity of winter prevails.

Insects and seeds suddenly become scarce, so most of the birds are forced to migrate—or starve. The few species that remain have made special and often surprising adaptations. Ptarmigan for example, have feathered feet that act like snowshoes allowing them to walk and forage atop the powdery surface. And they’ve learned to dive or burrow down into the snow, which insulates them from the much colder air above.

Caribou and moose move to the boreal forest, sheltering among the trees, eating twigs and scratching for browse under the snow. Voles and lemmings live in chambers tunneled through the snow, spending their winters active and in relative warmth, eating food cached in summer.

Some animals fatten up before winter and do not have to eat. Ground squirrels go fully into hibernation, while black and grizzly bears spend many months in a lighter, sleeplike dormancy inside their dens. Some fish become inactive after retreating to deep still waters under the ice of rivers and lakes. Beavers keep snug within their lodges and live mostly on stored food.

Winter survival for animals of the central Brooks Range means adaptation to scarcity and bitter cold.

Birds, like people, come from all over the world to visit Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Each spring, birds make extraordinary journeys, from distant places, to return to the Arctic to access the summer’s bounty of food resources and a super abundance of daylight— both enhance their ability to provision and care for chicks. The mostly mountainous and vast area of the park provides ample space for alpine species to breed. Long stretches of Wild and Scenic rivers , that originate in perennial snow fields high in the mountains and carve their way down steep slopes into broad valleys, provide other species with riparian habitat along the river to nest and raise young. Positioned entirely above the Arctic Circle, the park’s warm, productive summers bathed in sunlight are mirrored by dark, cold winters with typical temperatures ranging from 0 to -50°F. Although the vast majority of Gates of the Arctic’s birds are migratory, a small group of hardy residents remain throughout the year, even during the coldest and darkest winter months. Regardless of their winter strategy, all the birds are important members of the park’s ecosystems. The long-awaited arrival of migrants marks the end of food scarcity for many animals and the beginning of a short summer that burgeons with life once again. Predators like arctic and red foxes, short-tailed and least weasels, and arctic ground squirrels feast on bird eggs and chicks in order to feed their own young. Avian predators include Long-tailed Jaeger, Common Raven , and several raptor species including Short-eared Owl, Northern Harrier, and Merlin.

This cultural icon and highly adaptable bird is found virtually everywhere in Alaska, from the urban environment to remote wilderness.

Golden Eagles that spend the breeding season in the Brooks Range complete some of the longest migrations for the species.

The calls of the common loon symbolize the vast, pure, undiminished wildness of the North Country.

Connects the North American Arctic to the South American Pampas and Campos with its marathon migration.