Brooks Range

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January 14th, 2024, Master Chief Remy Allen deployed from 20,000 feet into the Brooks Range of Alaska.

He was a veteran operating entirely off the books.

The weather was a week-long blinding whiteout.

Remy had less than four minutes to process the decrypted files before the perimeter proximity sensors triggered.

Command had never intended for him to complete the extraction.

They had deployed a secondary unit to ensure both the asset and the operative were permanently secured beneath the Brooks range.

The cleanup crew was led by an operative named Henrik.

[laughs]

... it's a mouthful, um, in the Arctic, and we crossed, we hiked over the Brooks Range and then pack rafted to the Arctic Ocean.

And there's a lotta stressful moments.

There're these things called au ice, which is ice that comes over the river, and they're very dangerous, and so, uh, real fear, real stress.

[laughs]

It's a mouthful.

Um, in the Arctic, and we crossed, we hiked over the Brooks Range and then pack rafted to the Arctic Ocean.

And there's a lot of stressful moments.

He'd booked the flight through her small Fairbanks charter service three days earlier, paying the entire fee in cash upfront, providing coordinates instead of a destination name, coordinates that, when Kate checked them against her charts, corresponded to nothing resembling an actual village, airstrip, or settlement of any kind.

Just empty wilderness deep in the Brooks Range's unforgiving northern reaches, considerably farther from civilization than most of her charter clients ever requested.

She'd flown hunters to remote lodges, researchers to isolated field stations, the occasional wealthy tourist chasing photographs of caribou migrations nobody in their right mind would otherwise witness firsthand.

But never someone requesting empty coordinates with the same careful precision most clients reserved for actual addresses.

Elliot's father's remains, identified through the recovery process, were laid to rest that following month in a proper burial his family had waited over twenty years to finally arrange.

Kate flew Elliot back to Fairbanks once the recovery process concluded, their earlier tense suspicious silence replaced by something considerably warmer across the return flight's several hours.

"I owe you an apology," Elliot said somewhere over the Brooks Range's now familiar terrain.

"For the lies, the evasiveness.

it's been super you know we've had a wet cool spring and summer so far in the northwest of bc it's it's been a you know you look around the rest of british columbia and into the states and the fires that are happening and into the Yukon, Northwest Territories.

Even Alaska has, the Brooks Range has got a bunch of fires happening.

Yeah, we're kind of in that window again, affected by that ocean current.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, certainly the effects of, so they've had several icing events, winter icing events.

Now, you know, we've had them in BC as well.

We've had them in Yukon and, um but they're on a smaller scale but if we look back you know the western brooks range had an icing event um when was that in 2018 is

this a rain on snow event in the winter

They, they give me that 1% of hope that, earned hope.

Ryan Callahan, the CEO of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, whose voice you've heard across this series, was getting ready to take his infant son to the Brooks Range in Alaska.

I'm gonna go up to the Brooks Range at the end of the summer, and I am, like, quite honestly toying with the idea of taking a then, you know, three-month-old kid up there just so he can see the place and be like, "There's no tundra buggy tracks across this thing." Because once that happens, there's no getting it back.

This is an untrammeled, visually untrammeled landscape, and the, the people who came before us for 30,000 years found out that they could really live on and use this landscape and its resources in such a way that it still looks the same way today as it did back then.

When we talked with the poet Ada Limón, she kept circling back to what it means to love a place, and what that love asks of us.

And so I haven't really used it as much as I should, but I figured, you know, at some point I'll take a break from hiking and spend more time doing all of this stuff.

A dream of mine is actually to go up to the Brooks Range in Alaska and do biking, pack rafting, hiking, all of this stuff in one trip and kinda just mold it into one.

It's in...

Another, another point is I, since I spend all my time long distance hiking, I haven't been able to really, like, travel in the truck as much as I, you know, originally thought.

And if you don't wanna spend a lot of money to travel, fish, fill the freezer, th- this is our zone.

So if we destroy this, are we all expected to now, like, fly to the Brooks Range or, you know, get ocean-faring boats to find our fish? Or, like, what's, what's the plan? Because we have existing economies here, and just this is, this is where we, we recreate and why we live here.

And so w- you know, it's a very consequential decision about Deciding to sacrifice that to create electricity

Mm-hmm.

But the flight I really want to tell you about came the next year, 1925.

Somebody up there wanted to get to Wiseman, a mining settlement way up in the Brooks Range, north.

And I mean truly north, north of the Arctic Circle.

No airplane had ever flown across the Arctic Circle in Alaska.

Below him the land goes on forever.

The Yukon flats, all that braided water and swamp, and stunted spruce.

And then the ground starts to lift and buckle, and the Brooks Range comes up out of the horizon.

Gray and white and utterly indifferent.

Fat Bear 2026.

So the camera has gone live on Brooks Range.

You can go to explore.com, and there's a YouTube.

Or I think you can just go to YouTube and search, like, explore fat bear contest.

On a different reporting trip, I had the chance to spend a couple of hours on this wet, sensitive terrain.

It's beautiful, kind of like a wide-open, gently rolling prairie in between the sea and the dramatic peaks of the Brooks Range in the distance.

There are no roads, there's no noise but the wind and waves, and all sorts of wild animals depend on this place to rest, find food, raise their young.

Polar bears, caribou, a big mix of migratory birds.