Arctic Refuge Base Camp- Mills Custom

Meet your guide at the Arctic Wild World Headquarters at 4 pm in Fairbanks.

We fly north from Fairbanks in our chartered plane, passing the Yukon River and then the peaks of the Brooks Range. We land on an improvised landing strip next to the river with towering peaks all around.

Your interests help govern our activities. We ascend the nearest peak and watch Dall sheep grazing, or plan a big loop hike, up one drainage and down the other. Driftwood fires, overnight (or longer) backpacking trips, bird watching, you name it. With 24 hours of daylight and more wilderness than we could explore in a lifetime, our energy and imagination are the only limits to what our days in the wilderness will hold. The only thing we can’t do is star-gaze!

Pack-up and await our pilot’s return. Weather permitting the plane arrives mid-day to shuttle us further north to an area where we expect to find caribou and good hiking.

New hikes, new vistas, new adventures. We spend our time exploring the area looking for caribou and other wildlife. More hikes in hopes of placing ourselves in a hidden location in the path of the caribou. There will certainly be times when no caribou are present, but there is no end to the beauty of the arctic.

If the caribou have failed to appear or have traveled beyond our camp, we can elect to have the pilot return and shuttle us to a new location. If the current camp is perfect, then we enjoy another day of wilderness solitude and with luck, more caribou.

A final hike and a final night in camp. Perhaps we hike to the Arctic Coast this day. Perhaps 10 thousand caribou stroll through camp. One never knows.

One last walk along the river and one last breakfast under the enormous sky. Weather permitting our pilot returns to fly us back south through the Brooks Range and across the breadth of northern Alaska arriving back in Fairbanks in time for a late dinner.