Custom Trips

Utukok River Rafting in the
Western Arctic

We're expanding our trip offerings to an area we feel is of huge importance- the incongruously named "Natl. Petroleum Reserve-Alaska" (NPRA). Encompassing the largest single unit of public land in our nation, this vast tract of land in the Western Arctic, lying between the Brooks Range and the Arctic Ocean, is one of the wildest and most remote areas on the continent. Designated as a speculative "petroleum reserve" in 1923, and containing rich deposits of natural gas, coal and hard rock minerals, this vast wilderness is also the summer home of millions of migrating waterfowl and shorebirds, and the 450,000 caribou of the Western Arctic herd.

Drawn by our desire to raise awareness about the potential development threats to the most critical habitat areas of this wild land-as well as our own personal excitement to explore "farther out there" than we'd ever been-we've done several custom trips in this rarely visited land, and now want to offer these trip options to others.

The Utukok Uplands, north of the far western Brooks Range, is a vast expanse of rolling tundra foothills, plateaus and mesas, with uninhibited views to every horizon. It's also the calving grounds for the Western Arctic caribou herd. On this relaxed pace rafting trip, we'll be floating a segment of the upper Utukok River as it cuts through the Utukok Uplands, exploring enticing ridges on day hikes, as well as paddling a river run by only handfuls of people. The location and timing of this trip is designed to potentially encounter huge numbers of caribou as they move through the river valleys after calving, along with the grizzlies, wolves, foxes and wolverines that often follow the herd.

Because of the extremely remote location and complicated air logistics, we need a total of 6 participants to run this trip--so please inquire early.

Trip Details
We don't have set "daily itineraries" since all of our trips are true wilderness expedition-style trips, where we build in flexibility to respond to weather and water conditions, animal sightings, etc. Here is a sense of the general flow of the trip:

Each trip leaves Fairbanks in the early morning of the trip start date, so you need to be in Fairbanks by at least the day before that. We're scheduled to be back in Fairbanks by late afternoon/early evening of the trip end date. We recommend leaving at least a day's leeway at the end of the trip in scheduling other travel plans, since there's always a chance of getting weathered in at the pickup point.

We'll be doing a relatively short portion of the river on this trip, spending 3-4 days rafting down the river, with 3-6 hours a day on the water. There will be more layover days on this trip than some of our other river trips, where you can go for long or short day hikes or just relax in camp (not everyone has to do the same thing).

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