2 Best Sights in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, The Bush

The Porcupine caribou herd, with nearly 200,000 animals, migrates through Alaska's Arctic and Canada's adjacent Vuntut and Ivvavik National Parks, flowing like a river of animals across the expansive coastal plain, through U-shape valleys and alpine meadows, and over high mountain passes. These migration routes demonstrate the interconnected nature of the region's lands and waters, and how arbitrary human boundaries seem.

The Arctic Refuge includes one of the few protected Arctic coastal lands in the United States, as well as millions of acres of mountains and alpine tundra in the easternmost portion of the Brooks Range. Hundreds of thousands of birds, caribou, and other animals move across the Arctic Refuge during their annual migrations, relying on the area to nurse and feed their young while finding refuge from insects and predators. The Iñupiat and Gwich'in peoples have also relied on the lands of the Arctic Refuge for their food and ways of life for thousands of years. The Gwich'in consider the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge a sacred place because it feeds and protects the Porcupine caribou herd, which in turn feeds and provides the cultural foundation for the Gwich'in people. The quest for oil in the coastal plain has become a divisive issue that pits corporate interests and proponents of oil extraction against those seeking to protect traditional ways of life for generations to come. A lease sale of land in the coastal plan occurred in January 2021, but any further oil and gas activity or industrialization has been put on hold.

The coastal area of the Arctic Refuge also provides critical denning grounds for polar bears, which spend much of their year on the Arctic Ocean's pack ice. Other wildlife include grizzly bears, Dall sheep, wolves, musk ox, and dozens of varieties of birds, from snowy owls to geese and tiny songbirds. As in many of Alaska's more remote parks and refuges, there are no roads here, and no developed trails, campgrounds, or other visitor facilities. Counterintuitively, for such a notoriously brutal geography, the plants and permafrost are quite fragile. The ground can be soft and wet in summer months, so walk with care: footprints in the tundra can last 100 years. Plan for snow in almost any season, and anticipate subfreezing temperatures even in summer, particularly in the mountains. Many of the clear-flowing rivers are runnable, and tundra lakes are suitable for base camps (air taxis can drop you off and pick you up).