Today, Andrew and I are embarking on one of the greatest adventures of our lives! For the next eighteen days we will be floating more than 250 miles down the Kobuk River, a wild and remote river just north of the arctic circle in western Alaska. It's technically an unguided trip, although we are going with two other guys one which has done the trip before, a retired wildlife officer and our good friend, Didier Lindsey, a wildlife photographer. The goal of the trip is to photograph one of the most spectacular animal migrations in the world. The western arctic caribou herd, made up of 400,000+ caribou, migrates 350-400 miles twice a year, once to their calving grounds on the North Slope and once to their wintering grounds in the Kobuk Valley. We hope to see them or some of them as they swim across the Kobuk River and maybe even crossing the Kobuk Sand Dunes. Today we will fly from Fairbanks to Bettles, then from Bettles to Lake Minakokosa. By Sept. 28, if all goes well weatherwise, we should be flying from Kiana to Kotzebue, then Kotzebue back to Fairbanks. After that we'll be zipping down to Death Valley to start work on Oct. 6th. You can keep up with our location throughout the next few weeks with our spot beacon site at Find A+J.
No one knows the ways of the wind and caribou.