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WHAT TO DO ABOUT ONE OF AMERICA'S LAST


WILD PLACES


The Brooks Range in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript for the best
experience.
By Juliet Eilperin
, 
Carolyn Van Houten
and 
Alice Li
October 22, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EDT
Deputy Climate and Environment editor Juliet Eilperin, photojournalist Carolyn
Van Houten and video journalist Alice Li hiked dozens of miles, navigated swarms
of mosquitoes and flew in a 1970 Helio Courier to report this story....more
Deputy Climate and Environment editor Juliet Eilperin, photojournalist Carolyn
Van Houten and video journalist Alice Li hiked dozens of miles, navigated swarms
of mosquitoes and flew in a 1970 Helio Courier to report this story....more
20 min
312
Sorry, a summary is not available for this article at this time. Please try
again later.

Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ranks as one of the wildest places on
Earth. In the winter, it’s a haven for some of the last polar bears that
traverse land and sea. In the summer, millions of birds descend to build their
nests and gather fuel for their journey south.

The Porcupine caribou herd embarks on one of the longest land migrations of any
mammal on Earth, from their winter range to their calving grounds in the refuge.
As they walk, their tendons make a distinct 'clicking' noise.
The Porcupine caribou herd embarks on one of the longest land migrations of any
mammal on Earth, from their winter range to their calving grounds in the refuge.
As they walk, their tendons make a distinct 'clicking' noise.
Listen
35 sec
SettingsOptions



Map locating the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge within the state of Alaska.

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Alaska

CAN.

U.S.

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Alaska

CAN.

U.S.

People have fought over this expanse, as large as South Carolina, for half a
century.

The battle pits many Alaskans, along with the oil industry and Republican
officials, against environmentalists, most Democrats and many wildlife
scientists.

The question of who gets to determine its fate — and whether to dig up the oil
and gas that lie beneath it — could be decided this fall.

CHAPTER ONE


THE WHALING FEAST

KAKTOVIK

Map locating the village of Kaktovik on the coast at the northern edge of the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Kaktovik

CAN.

U.S.

Arctic National

Wildlife Refuge

Kaktovik

CAN.

U.S.

Arctic National

Wildlife Refuge

The sun beat down on Kaktovik residents as they gathered in a circle for their
whaling feast, Nalukataq, one day in late June. They had hunted three bowhead
whales in the fall, and hundreds of pieces of quag, the frozen meat, and muktuk,
the blubber and skin, now sat in black plastic totes outside. About half the
members of the 250-person village turned out to celebrate.

Kaktovik Mayor Nathan Gordon Jr., decked out in the emerald-green ceremonial
atikluk that his mother sewed for him, made sure his 3-year-old had enough to
eat. Gordon — 29, with angular glasses and a ready smile — also serves as a
member of the polar bear patrol, keeping a lookout during the feast.

His life is filled with all of the rituals that have defined life here for
centuries — hunting for caribou and making it into jerky that he can share with
his grandmother and other relatives, and stalking Dall sheep in the mountains of
the Brooks Range. But almost all of his livelihood comes from the taxes that oil
and gas companies pay, which flow into his local government.

“It’s all oil tax that pays for all the work I’ve done since I started working,”
Gordon offered.

Gordon epitomizes one of the paradoxes of this place. Environmentalists and
lawmakers, many of whom are far away, want to protect it. But some of the people
who live here are frustrated by how they’ve been stopped from developing it.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is about the size of South Carolina,
in June.

Kaktovik is the only human settlement within the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge. It became encircled by federal land in 1980, when Congress expanded the
refuge to its current size. But unlike many other Alaska Natives, they’d been
unable to profit from that land until President Donald Trump signed legislation
opening up the reserve at the start of his term.

Still, opposition has stifled any projects, causing local frustrations.

When he’s not dressed up, Gordon wears a sleek down jacket by Eddie Bauer,
though he’s not very impressed with its quality. “I’m not going to Patagonia,
though,” he said, alluding to the outdoors retailer’s longtime campaign against
drilling in the refuge. He even chided the town’s lobbyist, who lives in
Anchorage, for sporting Patagonia gear.

Kaktovik Mayor Nathan Gordon Jr.

Like many in town, Gordon supports Trump — the ring tone to access his voicemail
features the former president’s voice, warning, “Don’t look at your message,
it’s fake news” — and a framed copy of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act with
Trump’s characteristic thick black script sits in the Kaktovik Iñupiat
Corporation’s office.

Gordon’s father serves as the corporation’s chairman, and when his oldest son
got elected to the board, “my dad taught me the goal was to open up [the
refuge]. He sort of passed the torch on.”

Kaktovik — or Qaaktuġvik in Iñupiat, which means “sifting net” — sits on the
northern edge of Barter Island, where the Inuit had traded for centuries. A
hundred years ago, a fur trading post established the town as a permanent
settlement. The fur trade started to crash in the late 1930s, and the U.S.
government began to generate some jobs in the area as well as reshape it.

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First, federal agencies hired locals as they mapped the Beaufort Sea coast. Then
they established a radar site on the island for the Distant Early Warning
system, forcing Kaktovik to move slightly to the west to make way for a runway.
Military authorities made it move twice more.

The village resembles many North Slope towns, with wide gravel roads that
scatter dust as ATVs speed past, and streets with quirky names like “You Know
Ave.” Metal siding on the buildings aims to protect them from the harsh
elements.

Nicholas Gordon slices muktuk, or aged whale, to serve during the whaling
festival in Kaktovik.

Volunteers pass out whale meat to residents in Kaktovik.

Residents like Charles Lampe, a 48-year-old whaling captain who also serves as
president of the village corporation, take pride in the resources that surround
them, beyond just the bowheads offshore.

Lampe spoke into a megaphone with a tone of defiance before he and others
distributed the rapidly defrosting whale to those who had gathered by the beach.

“There’s nothing that’s going to stop us from doing this, because this is who we
are as a community, as a people,” he declared.

Lampe rejected the idea that drilling on the refuge would imperil the animals
there: “If there was any possibility of development imperiling our way of life,
we wouldn’t allow that,” he said as he oversaw the distribution of the next
course.

Among the celebrants is Marie Rexford, who was decked out in beaded boots and
earrings in the shape of a whale’s tail. She joked that she can now revel in the
fact that she’s 61: “I’m finally an elder.”

Marie Rexford, an Inũpiat resident at the refuge.

Many Iñupiat customs, like its reverence for age, remain the same. But the
lifestyle in this remote part of Alaska has changed. Rexford’s late
mother-in-law was a reindeer herder, following the caribou as they moved.
Rexford was raised here, and after years of opposing drilling on the refuge,
she’s come to embrace it.

“I want to be like everyone else, order things,” she explained, referring to
online shopping.

There is at least one person here who disagrees: 77-year-old Robert Thompson,
whose wife hails from Kaktovik and who moved here decades ago. At the whale
feast, he plunked down his cooler and sat with his back to the speakers and the
long table crammed with offerings of all kinds: fried bread, fruit, berry pies
and iced cakes.

Thompson has journeyed to Washington more than a dozen times to urge lawmakers
to keep the refuge untouched. Now heavyset with gray hair, Thompson used to work
construction until he started protesting drilling. “The jobs dried up,” he said.
“I didn’t get hired.” He became a wildlife guide.

Slices of mukluk that are about to be served to the community on June 28.

As members of the community came around again and again with different foods —
caribou soup, bread, creamy whale blubber and dark-red meat, glistening in the
sun — they gave Thompson his fair share. But even as he held out a plastic bag
to collect it, he didn’t engage in small talk. Thompson was well aware that many
see his activism as denying them an economic opportunity.

“They think everyone will be a millionaire,” he said. He added that while he
sees a warming planet as threatening every animal he and others hunt, “nobody’s
taking it seriously. With these climate issues, why can’t other people see it?”

Robert Thompson, 77, moved to Kaktovik decades ago.

The 2017 law signed by Trump, which overhauled federal taxes, mandated at least
two lease sales of 400,000 acres each on the refuge’s coastal plain by the end
of 2024. Kaktovik Iñupiat Corporation, long ago created to profit from the land,
had planned to conduct seismic tests to assess the potential for recoverable oil
lying beneath the refuge. But it did not meet a 2021 deadline for conducting
three reconnaissance flights to detect polar bear dens, at which point Interior
Department officials denied authorization for the tests.

Energy exploration takes place during the winter and poses a potential risk to
the bears, which are listed under the Endangered Species Act and the Marine
Mammal Protection Act.

CHAPTER TWO


THE CARIBOU HERD

THE COASTAL PLAIN

Map locating where Post reporters spotted a herd of caribou.

Kaktovik

Caribou spotted

CAN.

U.S.

Arctic National

Wildlife Refuge

Kaktovik

Caribou spotted

CAN.

U.S.

Arctic National

Wildlife Refuge

The Porcupine caribou herd — numbering roughly 218,000, according to the most
recent count in 2017 — navigates a tortured existence. Cows drop their babies
nearly simultaneously, around June 1, making it harder for wolves and birds of
prey to pick off individual calves. Then as mosquitoes, bot flies and warble
flies begin to harass them, the caribou make their way toward the coast, where
the breeze offers some relief. A single caribou can lose more than four pounds
of blood in a single season due to insects, according to the National Park
Service.

The animals were just beginning to shift over from Canada in late June as the
bugs descended upon them. From the air, the caribou resembled small grains of
brown rice, scattered across the land. On the ground, they moved in the
hundreds, led by one or two females, seeking nutrition from the sedges in the
soil and the breeze that offers them relief. Diverging from the herd can be
deadly: One evening, golden eagles fed on two calves that had become separated.
A pale Arctic wolf, blood visible on its muzzle, stalked an errant caribou the
next morning.

A hard of Porcupine caribou passes through the refuge every year. (Carolyn Van
Houten/The Washington Post)

As members of the Porcupine caribou herd cross the refuge, the sounds of their
hooves hitting the ground are audible.
As members of the Porcupine caribou herd cross the refuge, the sounds of their
hooves hitting the ground are audible.
Listen
43 sec
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Parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge remain covered in ice during the
summer, providing the caribou with a temporary respite from insects.

As the herd migrates across the refuge's coastal plain, a handful of older
females take the lead.
At this point in the migration, bulls have joined the rest of the herd in the
journey.
Jaegers, who sometimes dive bomb other animals, harass a caribou on the refuge's
coastal plain.

A lone caribou, separated from the larger herd, wanders over the tundra.



Back in Kaktovik, Gordon was tracking the herd’s movements — scientists
collaborating with the Porcupine Caribou Management Board periodically posted
maps based on satellite tags attached to about 100 cows and bulls — though they
don’t provide a precise location. Three bright orange bottles of hide-tanning
formula sat on his desk. Gordon’s 10-year old had killed his first caribou this
past winter, and the mayor was eager to go out for another hunt.

But for the Gwich’in, whose range stretches between Alaska, Yukon and Northwest
Territories, the Porcupine caribou herd is even more central to their worldview.

The Gwich’in Steering Committee’s spokeswoman, Tonya Garnett, 46, lives in
Fairbanks. But she grew up in Arctic Village, just across the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge’s border and about 90 miles from the herd’s calving grounds. In
the fall, the caribou would pass by and the hunt would begin.

“You can’t plan it. You have to wait,” she said. “Fall time is the best time.”

Map showing the range of the Porcupine Caribou herd in the U.S. and Canada

Range of the

Porcupine Caribou

Kaktovik

Refuge

CAN.

U.S.

Range of the

Porcupine Caribou

Kaktovik

Refuge

CAN.

U.S.

Range of the

Porcupine Caribou

Kaktovik

Arctic National

Wildlife Refuge

UNITED STATES

CANADA

Range of the

Porcupine Caribou

Kaktovik

Arctic National

Wildlife Refuge

UNITED STATES

CANADA

Kaktovik

Range of the

Porcupine Caribou

Arctic National

Wildlife Refuge

UNITED STATES

CANADA

Villagers would never shoot the females who led the herd — they feasted on the
followers. But a few weeks shy of Garnett’s 10th birthday, after President
Ronald Reagan green-lit seismic testing in the refuge to explore for oil, the
Gwich’in gathered in a new community hall they built for the occasion to discuss
what they should do. Unlike other Alaska Natives, who had established
corporations with the money they received for relinquishing land claims, the
Neets’ai Gwich’in of Arctic Village and Venetie had held on to 1.8 million acres
of their ancestral homelands but had few sources of income.

“I remember all the excitement at the happening,” she recalled. “It was, ‘We’ve
just got to speak for the hunt.’”

Years before the gathering, the Gwich’in had conducted seismic testing on their
own lands but opted not to drill. “It was a different time. That was when it was
new to people in Alaska,” Garnett said. “Once they saw the disturbance it could
do, it put a stop to it.”

Tonya Garnett of the Gwitch’in tribe in Fairbanks, Alaska.

The Gwich’in fought back, making common cause with environmentalists who argued
that the refuge needed to remain intact. A decades-long campaign has made the
refuge one of the best-known scenic spots in the United States, even though very
few Americans have ever gone there. Major banks have pledged not to finance any
energy development there. The biggest oil and gas companies have said they have
no interest in bidding on leases there.

“It will remain the symbolic fight until we make it impossible to get in there,”
said Kristen Miller, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League. “We’re
trying to avoid losing Alaska, death by a thousand cuts. We have the opportunity
to protect at that scale and the opportunity to lose at that scale.”

The Gwich’in have petitioned Fish and Wildlife under an executive order signed
by then-President Bill Clinton to declare the herd’s calving grounds on the
refuge — nearly 1.6 million acres — as sacred. North Slope Borough Mayor Josiah
Aullaqsruaq Patkotak, who runs the regional government, posted in mid-October
that doing so would be an “affront to our people’s ancestral lands.”

For now, the herd remains undisturbed. On an overcast day in early July, with
spattering rain, a large group of caribou rested while others moved ahead. Most
young calves stuck close to their mothers — one zoomed back and forth, over and
over again, as several adults made their way toward the coast. A scattering of
bulls, already bearing enormous antlers that had grown in the past couple of
months, tromped along, seemingly oblivious to the younger ones among them.


The Porcupine caribou herd migrates hundreds of miles each year. But their
breeding grounds are threatened by possible development.

Many in Kaktovik oppose offshore oil drilling because it could pose a threat to
whales, but they say the Porcupine caribou herd can coexist with oil and gas
infrastructure. Wayne Kayotak, 56, who works on subsistence hunting issues for
the regional government, said members of a different herd still go through
Prudhoe Bay, a longtime center of Alaska’s oil production. When it comes to
harming caribou, he said, “I don’t see it.”

But Tim Fullman, senior ecologist at the Wilderness Society, pointed to several
studies showing that caribou make efforts to avoid infrastructure especially
during calving season, and roads and other development can delay or alter their
migration. He added that a 2021 study by the U.S. Geological Survey projects
that in the coming decades, the Porcupine caribou herd will be spending more
time on the refuge than in the Canadian Yukon due to climate-induced shifts in
vegetation.

When the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went into effect seven years ago, Garnett
recalled, “everybody just thought the fight was lost.”

But the nine leases that Trump issued days before leaving office no longer
exist. Two of the companies withdrew in 2022, after Biden officials started
reassessing the auction process. The Interior Department canceled the remaining
seven, all held by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, in
September 2023.

While Interior’s Bureau of Land Management will hold a second lease sale this
year, it is unclear whether it will draw much industry interest, given the
uncertainties involved. Mead Treadwell, a Republican who was Alaska’s lieutenant
governor between 2010 and 2014 and now advises several energy projects, said in
an interview that investors are skittish on everything — including mining and
oil and gas projects — given the whiplash in Washington.

“Frankly, everything is at risk right now,” he said. “Everyone’s skeptical that
they should spend millions of dollars only to have a hammer come down at the
end.”

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While Biden has approved one major fossil fuel development on the National
Petroleum Reserve-Alaska — ConocoPhillips’s $8 billion Willow Project, projected
to produce 576 million barrels of oil over 30 years — Alaska Oil and Gas
Association President Kara Moriarty called that “an anomaly.”

By any measure, Biden has done more to limit development in Alaska than any
president since Jimmy Carter. He has put protections on 55 million acres of land
there, an expanse larger than all of Idaho.

By contrast, Trump touted his success in opening up the refuge during a May
fundraiser with oil executives, saying: “It’s the biggest oil farm.”

Doug Vincent-Lang, the commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game,
said in an interview that at the time of statehood, “we were kind of promised by
the United States government that we would basically be able to develop our
resources, you know, and maintain ourselves rather than being always on the
federal dime moving forward.”

He added, “I would ask the Lower 48, how would you feel if we would go into New
York state and take a whole chunk of land, and not allow any kind of use or
activity forever?”

CHAPTER THREE


THE NESTING GROUNDS

THE ARCTIC COAST

Map locating Siku Lagoon

Kaktovik

Siku Lagoon

CAN.

U.S.

Arctic National

Wildlife Refuge

Kaktovik

Siku Lagoon

CAN.

U.S.

Arctic National

Wildlife Refuge

In late June, the refuge had transitioned into full bloom. Dryas octopetala, its
bright yellow center surrounded by eight white petals, covered broad stretches
and tilted at times toward the sun to soak up its rays.

During winter, the refuge provides a habitat for polar bears to den and Arctic
foxes to roam. Lemmings — who help sustain the foxes, snowy owls and other key
predators — burrow underground, traveling in a network of tunnels. Arctic char,
which swim in its rivers, can become frozen in ice, only to be dug out by
wolverines and other denizens when it gets warmer.

About 2,000 people visit the refuge a year, according to the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service.

By summer, the ice has melted, but since much of the permafrost remains intact,
it forms ponds. As water seeps across the ground, bright green sedges and other
plants bloom and insects — including mosquitoes and bot flies — emerge,
providing a feast for wildlife here. Two hundred species of birds from six
continents nest and gorge on insects that will power their winter migration.

Tundra swans, red-throated loons, Lapland longspurs, red-necked phalaropes,
Northern pintails and semipalmated sandpipers all gathered on ponds close to the
coast, in the Siku Lagoon, snapping up bugs as they glided across the water.

Michael Wald of Arctic Wild is surrounded by insects.

Swarms of insects can quickly overwhelm other species of animals in the Arctic
tundra.
In the summer, the calls of birds and the buzzing of insects fill the air with a
cacophony of noise.
Listen
44 sec
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A pintail plucked insects from the pond’s surface, dipping its beak again and
again as it swam.

“She flew all this way, just for the bugs,” remarked Michael Wald, owner of the
guiding company Arctic Wild who accompanied three Washington Post journalists on
a journey to the refuge. “These birds don’t care a whit about temperature. They
just need food to keep the furnace going.”

Relatively few visitors make it here each year: about 2,000, according to the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The single largest national wildlife refuge in
the United States, this 19.6 million-acre stretch encompasses not only boundless
tundra but the mountains of the Brooks Range and barrier islands offshore in the
Arctic Ocean.


During the long summer days, the Arctic tundra becomes awash in wildflowers.

Martin Robards, regional director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Arctic
Beringia Program, argues that this interconnected landscape needs to remain
intact. Even a modest development will come with wellpads, camps and other
infrastructure: Robards cited a 2023 analysis by the Wildlife Conservation
Society and Audubon Alaska that identified more than “8,000 football fields of
gravel on the tundra” from existing oil and gas operations across Alaska’s North
Slope.

“That’s never going to be tundra again,” Robards said, adding that it will
deprive migrating birds and other animals of places to nest and thrive. “The
refuge with development is a city. … If we lose these big areas of public lands,
we will lose these species.”

One of the unresolved questions is who has the authority to make the decision
here. Wald, who has been camping on the refuge for a quarter-century, gave Biden
credit for protecting it but added, “The people of Kaktovik should have a seat
at the table.”

By summer, the ice has melted at the refuge. But the permafrost forms ponds.

One of the hardest questions policymakers must weigh is how to protect the
southern Beaufort Sea’s polar bear population. As sea ice has dwindled, its
numbers have dropped from roughly 1,600 in 2000 to about 900 in 2010, the most
recent estimate available.

Fish and Wildlife polar bear biologist Ryan Wilson said the population appears
to have stabilized but added, “Everybody agrees the long-term picture,
especially for the South Beaufort Sea population, isn’t particularly great.”

Wilson said he believes there’s a way to explore for energy on the refuge
without doing undue harm — “if oil and gas was going out there and we didn’t
have any oversight that could be problematic for polar bears, but that’s not how
it works.”

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Other researchers, including Polar Bears International’s Chief Scientist
Emeritus Steven Amstrup, disagree. Amstrup, who used to work for the U.S.
Geological Survey, said dens on the North Slope “are widely scattered” and hard
to predict because the bears don’t go back to the same place every year.

“We’ve got a population that’s already in jeopardy,” he said. “So if you have a
population that’s already declining, the prudent thing to do is to minimize
other impacts on that population.”

In fact, polar bear viewings had been a source of revenue for Kaktovik in recent
years, as some had taken tourists out in their boats to see the animals on ice
floes or ambling along the spit at the end of the beach. The village still bears
the vestiges of an operation that brought about 650 visitors to town in 2018,
according to Fish and Wildlife: A handful of aging vans have black-and-white ads
slapped on that tout Kaktovik as the “polar bear viewing capital of the world.”


A snowy owl peers across the tundra at dusk.
During winter, the refuge provides a habitat for polar bears and Arctic foxes.
Polar bears feed on whale carcasses in Kaktovik in July.

But residents said some aspects of the tourism boom backfired. Visitors booked
so many seats on the limited number of flights in and out of Kaktovik that
people couldn’t travel to critical medical appointments. One elder couldn’t get
cataract surgery in time to save her vision in one eye. Fish and Wildlife
established requirements for boat captains that meant only some qualified to
take tourists out on the water.

“It was a good, bloody quick buck,” Kayotak said. “I would get out on my boat,
then the Fish and Wildlife Service came in.”

Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman Laury Marshall said in an email that the agency
started developing a specific permit in 2010 for “boat-based polar bear viewing
to ensure safe, lawful and professional guide operations.” The tours stopped
during the coronavirus pandemic in May 2020.

While the tourists might be gone, the polar bears continue to visit Kaktovik’s
shores.

Just before the whaling feast, crews had cut off aged scraps of whale that
weren’t suitable to eat and left them on the far edge of town. Within a couple
of days, a sow and her two cubs came to feed on them, chewing contently as
seagulls swirled around them.

As humans reshaped the landscape, the animals were creeping closer.

A bear paw print at the refuge.

ABOUT THIS STORY

Design and development by Emily Wright. Audio by Bishop Sand. Graphics by John
Muyskens. Editing by Olivier Laurent, Nicki DeMarco, Joe Moore, Zach Goldfarb,
Monica Ulmanu and Allison Cho.

Porcupine Caribou range via The Last Great Herd.

312 Comments
Juliet EilperinJuliet Eilperin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The
Washington Post, editing climate and environmental coverage. She has written two
books, "Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks" and "Fight Club
Politics: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives." @eilperin
Follow
Carolyn Van HoutenCarolyn Van Houten is a Pulitzer Prize-winning staff
photojournalist at the Washington Post. From Afghanistan to Antarctica, her work
has taken her around the world covering breaking news, climate, health, and the
human condition. Carolyn was a recipient of the Overseas Press Club's Robert
Capa Gold Medal and the RFK Human Rights Award.@vanhoutenphoto
Follow
Alice LiAlice Li is a Pulitzer Prize-winning senior video journalist for The
Washington Post, focusing on climate and environment. @byaliceli
Follow


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personalised advertising. Use profiles to select personalised content. Create
profiles to personalise content. Use profiles to select personalised
advertising. Measure advertising performance. Measure content performance.
Understand audiences through statistics or combinations of data from different
sources. Develop and improve services. Store and/or access information on a
device. Use limited data to select content. Use limited data to select
advertising. List of Partners (vendors)

I Accept Reject All Show Purposes