I thought it’s about time I posted some malamute photos – I guess I am missing these dogs with not having travelled to the Arctic last winter.
  So here they are, a picture of obedience, all watching and waiting for their master’s voice, and that is definitely not mine, I just happen to be standing next to Joe Henderson with camera in hand. It’s a remarkable thing to see but Joe’s relationship to his dogs is so close that he just has to give the command and the team instantly springs into action, a simple “ok” and the power of twenty two malamutes’ eager fury is unleashed, a formidable force that moves thousands of pounds of expedition gear through deep untracked snow all day long. Anybody who owns a dog knows that training a pup can be a handful but training twenty two head strong malamutes to not only obey voice commands but to work together in unison, putting aside doggish distractions and team rivalries, is a remarkable feat and boy can they be distracted and unruly when they are not at work!
Camp time is filled with little light provocations
and playful revenge
that tests each of their limits and strengths, they really do like nothing more than to play, posture and settle scores within the pack hierarchy.
At times the posturing amongst “teenagers” can be fierce, this is Howdy trying out his snarling, snapping best, asserting his own sense of his position within the pack, but Tip and Dino really are not having any of it, their placid demeanor says it all, they can see through the posture and they are not bothered.
Other “teenagers” in camp, like Petra, can’t get enough of us humans
and will pull any kind of stunt
to give you a big wet lick.
Joe’s malamutes are brought up from birth with heaps of human contact and love and they are like family. As fierce as the dogs can be in their own social order they are the gentlest of human companions and this seems to be at the crux of Joe’s relationship to his team, their trust and respect for him is absolute and they will follow his every word.
FURTHER READING: To read more about these amazing dogs, visit Joe Henderson’s website and check out his magazine articles: www.alaskanarcticexpeditions.com/articles.html
In winter the boundaries of land and sea become blurred and can be a little unfathomable. Often there is no easy telling whether you are on solid ground or floating on ice, and were it not for the occasional tideline of flotsam you would not have any idea that you were on the beach at all.
In sheltered bays great swathes of twigs, trunks and stumps collect along the shoreline, perfect for firewood.
Impressive as some of these logs are, and a little ambitious as firewood, the really big question is where do they all come from? There is not a standing tree in sight, nor do any grow anywhere near Alaska’s north coast. Apparently they come from Canada, washed down from deep inland along Canada’s longest river, the 1080 mile long Mackenzie River, and then on out into the Arctic Ocean where they drift with the currents, become locked in sea ice each winter, and eventually get tossed up on an Alaskan beach – a long, long journey.
In the same way that you might pick up a shell on beach I have kept a small log from this beach, at first selected as firewood but at the last minute reprieved and saved as a memento.
A little theatrical maybe, but I’ve made a stand for my log and it lives on display in my home. I think it looks a touch hyperreal almost like a cartoon log, anyway it’s much admired for it’s twisting growth and shiny patina and never fails to charm with the possibilities of its life story. It’s speculative but my best guess, from asking around, is that it is black spruce from a tree that grew on the banks of the Mackenzie in an exposed and windy spot, which gave the wood its pronounced twist.
I hadn’t thought much as to the specifics of its age until the other day when I was in Rome and visiting the botanical gardens. Looking at the label for two tall stone pine trees, it declared, with a little pride, that these one and a half foot (forty five centimeter) girthed trees were over 200 years old. It got me thinking of my log.
On my return I sanded and polished the end of my log, I needed to count the growth rings. To my astonishment this two inch (five centimetre) wide log is in excess of one hundred and fifty years old. Now that is slow growing and I can only image just how old some of the big logs on that beach were!
Much of the Arctic north of the treeline, away from the classic destinations and the hyperbole of adventure, can be flat and featureless and more than a little desolate.
Still, it has its charms and on a grey day as the clouds thicken it creates its own kind of subtle and nuanced excitement, a perceptual challenge, a disorientating experience where the landscape loses definition and has little measurable depth beyond the immediate foreground.
Snowy white and light conspire to create a world that is not only challenging to see in but also to photograph. It is an interesting question, what can and can’t be photographed? My archive of Arctic photos has a heavy bias and to look at it you would think the sun was always blazing, the skies blue, the mountains steep and dramatic and of course we try to look heroic too as we pose or pass by the camera in parkas and snowshoes. In a sense everything appears picture perfect, but the actual reality of the Arctic, the one that keeps drawing me back year after year, is a very different one, it is more opaque and not so visible to the camera and to my eye it is no less stimulating for it.
 Sometimes the only reference point in a world that can appear to have lost it’s third dimension is yourself, all around space appears to close in. Travelling forward you strain your eyes and try to determine where you might be heading, occasionally you might glimpse something shadowy, a large object in the distance, at last you have something to aim for, only to see it pass by you thirty seconds later, a small log embedded in the sea ice. Or more seriously there was the time we saw a grizzly bear up ahead, prematurely woken from his winter slumber, scary, and it initiated a full state of alarm on our part, only to see him mutate into a small seal nearby that then promptly vanished down a hole through the ice!
A grey day in the Arctic is never boring and is often mind bending.
.
It may be surprising to some that I am not a great believer in the significance of photographs, perhaps a heresy and doubly so as I am a professional photographer, a peddler of seductive images. Still when it comes to the Arctic I can’t help myself and I am seduced, as many of us are, by the Arctic’s extraordinariness and the possibility that I might just be able to bottle some of it and take it home. After a trip a few images amongst a stream of many become my mementos, just as this image from 2009 has done.
On this day Joe Henderson and I, and his all important malamutes, are mid way across a 120 mile traverse of rolling tundra. Over several days we have travelled from the Brooks Range mountains that you can see in the distance, bathed in evening sunlight, and are heading for the Arctic Ocean to the north. We are camped next to a lake, which is invisible beneath the snow, the tents are set and the dogs are picketed, it’s a tranquil evening. I am standing on a low bluff photographing as the mountains briefly reveal themselves, a photographic moment. The day has mostly been overcast with a heavy lid of cloud and we have travelled through an all white terrain with little in the way of graspable features, not an easy day for photography with a flat light that fails to render more than two dimensions and is tricky to navigate in three. It’s little wonder, with such a sensory void all around, that I find myself daydreaming, and I am sure that I am not the first person to analogize seafaring with arctic travel, but on this day it did feel like we were at sea in a rolling oceanic swell with only dead reckoning to guide our course. Hove to that night and with this brief appearance of the mountains I regained my bearings and confidence in photography’s ability to distill a little bit of the Arctic.
For me one of the greatest pleasures of winter travel is food; cold and labour conspire to create raging appetites quite unlike anything I ever experience at home. Taste is accompanied by a total awareness of food as fuel – a palpable sense of sugars dissolving into your blood stream and surging around your weary body- food never felt so good.
…and what could be better than freshly baked bread, this is bannock an exceptionally simple bread. It’s made from flour, baking powder, water and a little salt, mixed into a dough and cooked in a frying pan. A thick chunk slathered in melty butter tastes so good that’s it’s a wonder that it’s not more widely eaten beyond the campfire.
…and these are Alexandra’s Conover Bennett’s bunkers, a slightly sweat, crispy frybread, totally evil and I cannot get enough of them. They taste so, so good, think of something close to a fresh hot doughnut miraculously produced on a camp stove. They are made from the same dough as bannock but with the addition of a little sugar and spice, nutmeg or cinnamon work well, and then they are fried in oil, in this case the rendered fat from our crispy bacon.
Bannock is highly improvisational by nature and has many variants that reflect its rich history. Traditionally eaten right across North America by Native Americans, trappers, lumberjacks, prospectors, in fact anybody with a fireside seat and a hungry tummy.
The basic proportions of an American bannock are:
1 cup of flour
1 tsp of baking powder
a little salt to taste
a good slurp of fat, perhaps 1-2 tbs
Water – enough to make a dough
You’ll need a 3 or 4 cup mix for a large frying pan sized loaf – mix together the dry ingredients and fat and then add enough water to make a soft dough. Flatten the dough into a hot lightly oiled frying pan and move off the heat a little, the addition of a lid at this stage will help the dough to rise higher and make a lighter bread. Make sure you are not burning the base of your bread, but aim to flip the bread over after 10 minutes and then cook uncovered for another 5 to 10 minutes, or until you get a nice hollow ring from tapping the crust and the bread is no longer doughy. When ready tear off chunks and enjoy with melted butter!
Variants and refinements are many and recipes sometimes add sugar, powdered milk, powdered egg (for more of a cake-y batter), flavourings, meat, veg, deep fry the dough, wrap it on a stick and hold it over the fire, it’s a broad church.
A post this time not from Alaska, “the last frontier”, but from what English settlers would have considered the first frontier, New England. Alaska and New England not only share a pioneering heritage but Maine, in the north of New England, marks the southern extent of the boreal forest – a vast swathe of trees that extends across Canada, north to the Arctic and west for over 3,000 miles to Alaska.
Ever since reading childhood staples like The Call of the Wild, northern forests have played deeply across my imagination. Not just the forests themselves and their charismatic cast of bears, wolves, beavers, lynx, but the stories of the people who traditionally made these forests their homes, the Innu, the Cree, the Ojibwa, the Gwich’in and many others including the hunters and trappers who followed in their trails.
Garrett Conover and Alexandra Conover Bennett must have gotten the call of the wild at a very young age and they have made a life out of it. Piecing together loose threads of information spread across books and aural accounts, and with a reassuring amount of trial and error, they have relearnt the traditions of travelling lightly through the winter forest.
Perfecting not just the use of hand hauled toboggans, but a whole supporting web of knowledge that makes camping and travelling in the icy cold not just pleasant but a profoundly rich experience.
Hand hauled tobbogans
The Conovers are dedicated sharers of their knowledge and some of the funniest people I have had the pleasure of meeting. Not a lunch or an evening went by without a hilarious exchange of great anecdotes, much laced with the evocative language of the trail, bannock, bunker, babiche, wanigan, mukluk, slush scoop, even familiar words like anorak regained much of their cultural flavour. For your own taste of their wisdom I can highly recommend their book: Snow Walker’s Companion, Winter Camping Skills for the North.
Breaking trail down Pine Stream heading to Chesuncook Lake.
Camp for the night amongst the hushed calm of snow ladened pines, firs and spruces.
Ben McNutt of Woodsmoke collecting a “stick” for the stove. Part of the nightly activity of laying in a pile of neat logs for cooking, drying and pleasure.
Garrett collecting fresh river water from the chiselled ice hole.
The end of another fine day and a single crepuscular ray to dazzle us before turning in for night.
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