In March 2012, borough resident Caroline Van Hemert and her husband Patrick Ferrell (Pat) set off on a 4,000-mile journey from Bellingham, Washington to the Arctic Wildlife Refuge–a distance more than two-times the length of the lower 48. This month she released her book about their journey, “The Sun is a Compass,” in Haines.
Van Hemert read excerpts from the book at the Haines Borough Public Library last Friday, but earlier that day she spoke with the CVN about what inspired the six-month trip, how the couple prepared for it, and some of their biggest surprises along the way.
Van Hemert had been conceptualizing a grand trip to the arctic for at least a decade, she said. It all started with one of the first adventures that she and Pat had done together, building a birch bark canoe on the headwaters of Wind River, a tributary of the Chandalar River. That trip ended early, she said, because they ran out of food and birch bark. So, they resolved to think bigger.
In 2012, 33-year-old Van Hemert had recently finished her PhD in wildlife biology, and was sick of staring into microscopes.
“I needed to transition from looking into a microscope to looking outside with my eyes,” she said.
She and Pat were thinking of starting a family, and Van Hemert’s father had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease.
“We couldn’t wait forever,” she said.
They got busy planning a trip rowing from Bellingham to Glacier Point, across Lynn Canal on boats and across the mountains on skis, canoeing from Whitehorse to Dawson City, traversing the Brooks Range on foot, and boating with packrafts up the Mackenzie River to the Arctic Coast.
“We had a lot of packing to do,” she said, “There were just a lot of logistics involved. We largely resupplied through the postal service, so we had to be prepared well in advance.”
But preparation wasn’t always enough. They wanted to use row boats instead of kayaks so that the transition to hiking and skiing would be easier on their legs. But when they went to purchase boats, there weren’t any available. Pat had to build the boats himself, said Van Hemert.
“(We) shipped the boats down just before we left on our rowing section for the Inside Passage, and the boats had never been in the water before, and the boats had never been rowed before,” she said.
Another unexpected challenge, said Van Hemert, was the threat of starvation.
After reaching the arctic, the couple couldn’t cross the Brooks Range where they had planned to and were forced to take a different path. Knowing that this new path would take them much longer, they cut their food rations down, said Van Hemert, anticipating a food resupply by plane at the headwaters of the Noatak River.
“(It was) the one food resupply that required air support. There was just one the whole distance of our journey and that one almost turned disastrous, because the plane wasn’t able to come for a very long time,” said Van Hemert.
She and Pat split a tablespoon of olive oil and a granola bar between themselves for five days.
“We were out of food and we were essentially starving, and we had no way out,” she said. “That was one of the hardest experiences and ultimately one of the most dangerous.”
Finally, the couple received their food supply and continued their journey to the coast.
“We ended up going on the Mackenzie River, and, on paper, that looks like a great route. You know, a river that flows north to the Arctic Coast. That’s exactly where we’re going, but that was the low point of the trip for sure.”
They were in packrafts, paddling on slow, flat water in a headwind and in parts, she said, it seemed like the currents actually ran backwards. To make matters worse, the headwind wasn’t enough to keep the mosquitoes down.
“It basically defined everything we did in a day—the mosquitos,” Van Hemert said, “I thought I’d seen mosquitos before. I grew up in Alaska. I’ve done a lot of trips here and in Canada, but it was like nothing I’d ever experienced.”
They stopped cooking meals outside and rehydrated food with cold water. Van Hemert felt so desperate, she said, that she even peed in her food dish.
Over the course of their journey, Van Hemert had been stalked by a predatory bear, flirted with starvation, and watched as Pat’s boat capsized before her, but this was the only time she ever really considered quitting, she said. “It was just so miserable and so maddening and there was just no real way out,” she said.
“But it seemed like whenever things got as bad as you could possibly imagine, at some point there would be some transition to make it all seem, not only worth it, but like it all happened for a reason,” said Van Hemert.
She recalled that, while waiting for their food supply on the Noatak, they encountered the Western Arctic Caribou Herd on their fall migration.
“We saw them crossing the river, and then we kind of heard more animals coming and we ducked down in the bushes. Feet or less in front of us, a caribou bull stepped between Pat’s legs. A calf came up and sniffed him. If we hadn’t been delayed for days because of the food, we wouldn’t have seen all this. We would have been gone; we would have missed it.”