Gates of the Arctic: The Park You Cannot Drive To

There is no road to Gates of the Arctic National Park. There is no trail either. If you want to go, you charter a small plane from Coldfoot or Bettles, fly into the Brooks Range, and land on a gravel bar. Then you are on your own in eight and a half million acres of roadless wilderness above the Arctic Circle, with no ranger station waiting, no visitor center, no maintained path of any kind. It is the least-visited major unit in the National Park System, which is not a coincidence. It is a design.

The name came from a man who should never have survived the summer he chose it. In nineteen twenty-nine, a forester named Bob Marshall walked north from the mining settlement of Wiseman into the Brooks Range carrying his own pack, relying on the knowledge of the Nunamiut Iñupiat people he encountered, whose families had known every valley and river crossing in this country for generations. Standing at the entrance to a high pass where two peaks faced each other across the river, Marshall wrote in his journal that they formed the perfect gates to a wilderness beyond. He named the left peak Frigid Crags and the right one Boreal Mountain. He called the country beyond them the Gates of the Arctic.

Marshall returned twice more before his death in nineteen thirty-nine. Between visits he had cofounded the Wilderness Society in nineteen thirty-five and spent his remaining years arguing that some portion of the American landscape should be left entirely alone, not managed for timber or grazing or sustained yield but left the way it was. The idea was radical enough in his era that it took forty more years to accomplish.

The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, signed by President Carter in December nineteen eighty, created the park and preserve. The legislation also guaranteed subsistence rights within its boundaries to the Nunamiut Iñupiat, whose permanent community at Anaktuvuk Pass sits inside the park's borders, the only community in the United States that lives within a national park. They had been following the Western Arctic caribou herd through this country for at least twelve thousand years before Marshall arrived to name the gates they had always known.

The park receives fewer than fifteen thousand visitors a year. Most national parks see that many in a weekend.