<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">KeithNyitray and his dog Smoke pause for a “selfie” along their 1,500-mile trek across the Brooks Range in 1989. Originally planned for six months, the trip ultimately took 10 month. He walked the last 300 miles “in the dead of winter” and arrived in Kotzebue frost-bitten and near starving. (Keith Nyitray photo)</figcaption></figure>

Note: Keith Nyitray will give a presentation on his Brooks Range Trek at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, January 8 at UAS Sitka. He’ll show 180 slides from the thousands he took during the trip.

Listen to the full interview with Keith Nyitray:

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There are some big walks in North America. The Appalachian Trail comes to mind, as does the Pacific Crest Trail. About 3,000 people a year set out to hike the full length of each of those. 

Keith Nyitray spent two years pondering a route that likely no one had ever attempted.

“I never knew that the Brooks Range in Arctic Alaska was actually the northern and western most extension of the Continental Divide Trail,” said Nyitray, “and I had already been doing several 100-mile treks across Southcentral Alaska, going back and forth to my homestead across the Alaska Range and working for the Iditarod. And I just wondered if anyone had done it. And that just stuck with me.”

Finally, Nyitray realized that he had better give it a try. The original plan was to travel with a partner and cover the 1,500 miles in six months, but that fell through almost immediately. He traveled to Fort McPherson in Canada’s Northwest Territories in the spring of 1989 and began the trip solo. 

For Nyitray, the trip was more about experience than a destination.

“I had no air drops, no radio, no anyone following me,” said Nyitray. “I would only resupply in the villages of Old Crow, Arctic Village, Anaktuvuk Pass,  Walker Lake, and Noatak. But in each of those villages, I had spent a couple of weeks learning about the culture, getting ready – physically and psychologically – to go the next 300 miles.” 

Even by standards of the day, Nyitray was heavily-loaded, with a pack topping out at 150 pounds. His dog Smoke, a wolf-hybrid who had joined him for many previous extended hikes, also shouldered a load. Progress, though, came very slowly.

“The first day leaving a village, I’d stumble maybe a mile-and-a-half from the village, because a 150 pound pack is pretty heavy, you know,” he said. “And then I’d have a really good meal and eat a couple of pounds. And my dog could eat two pounds, and then the next day I’d stumble three miles. By the time I got down to where my pack was 100 pounds or so, I’m already 30 miles into the journey. I’ve got a leg up now. I’m psyched into it, and I can go. And then the other thing is, my dog, as smart as he was, he never figured out his pack always weighed 40 pounds.”

Nyitray says there were many highs and lows on the trip. The highs mostly involved connecting with the residents of the indigenous communities along the route, who supported him. The lows were the things you might expect: encounters with bears, and other hazards of the wild. (One day, after being charged twice by bears, Nyitray became so frustrated that he charged a third.) But sometimes, nature delivered an unexpected high.

“I walked with 10,000 caribou one day,” said Nyitray. “They were coming down a valley, and I was going up it, so I just stopped, and I became a human rock in a river of caribou as they flowed around me.”

Nyitray expected to paddle most of the last 300 miles down the Noatak River to complete his journey, but winter set in early and the river froze , and he ended up hiking into Kotzebue, frostbitten and near-starvation, ten months after leaving Fort McPherson. Nyitray doesn’t consider his trek a superhuman achievement; rather, he says he tapped into a personal capacity everyone has, but few experience.

“You ask yourself, ‘How’s my life going?’ and a lot of people realize they’re not as good as they could be, you know,” said Nyitray. “But rather than push through that, they turn on the TV or crank the music or go to the bar or something, and they never push through getting to really know themselves. And out there, you have no one else. You have nowhere else to go. You are stuck with yourself.”

Nyitray published the story of his trek in National Geographic Magazine in April 1993. Thirty-five years since he completed the trip, he’s pleased that people are still interested. Limited to 6,000 words by National Geographic, he says “there are a lot of stories I could never publish or tell.”

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