Hiking through Alaska – a report

What would you say if someone told you they wanted to walk across Alaska wearing trainers?
Manuel: Great idea – we did the same...

What route did you choose?
Lukas: The Brooks Range, one of the most remote mountain ranges in the world, is around 200 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. We crossed it from east to west, covering 1,300 kilometres by foot and 600 kilometres by boat in 59 days. We traversed the entirety of Alaska, from the Canadian border to the Bering Strait.

Trainers sound like an unconventional choice, let’s put it that way. You doubtless put a lot of thought into your footwear, though?
M: We actually put a huge amount of thought into it. The whole project was utterly mad, but that’s what made it so exciting. One of the major challenges was doubtless that we’d be continually crossing swampland and lots of chilly streams. There was no option of taking our shoes off, not least due to the risk of injury. So, we opted for lightweight, open trainers so the water could run out of them as fast as possible. We kept them on, no matter what we were walking through: our feet were basically always soaking! We called it ‘wet hiking’. We wanted to travel light and we ultimately took things to extremes...

So how much did your backpacks weigh?
L: Without food, they weighed around nine kilos each, including our tent and all our equipment. If you include food, that figure was more than 20 kilos.

So, did you really take things to extremes?!
L: We really couldn’t have done it with any less. We just had a single pair of shoes and one change of clothes with us. We took no GORE-TEX®, opting for ultra-light jackets instead: they weigh half as much. We left our GPS, rope and the like at home – and the same went for our stove.

No stove?
M: It was too heavy. Instead, we took Esbit cubes with us to heat water for expedition meals. But 85% of our food was cold: we ate crackers with tartare mayonnaise almost every day. Plus lots of nuts and chocolate bars...

Sounds yummy...
M: We got by. Our goal was simply to get as much energy-dense food as possible. We created tables with products and their nutritional value, and used this as a shopping list to buy half a million calories in Fairbanks. That’s what we needed for 60 days, or thereabouts. And then we left entire shelves in Walmart bare... Ultimately, we had an energy density of 4,500 calories per kilogram of food in our backpacks. That’s basically the same as bacon...

That must have been a fun shopping trip...
L: It was just bonkers. All told, we spent five days shopping. One day, we spent USD 1,000 and the cashier told us she’d never seen a till receipt that long. It was genuinely about a metre and a half in length! Plus, in the USA, they check that everything in your trolley is actually on the receipt. The woman was visibly overwhelmed and asked if we were giving the food to children in need. After all, we had bags and bags of M&Ms and other sweets in the trolley...

M: Lukas said we were going to eat it all ourselves…

Did you plan the entire tour with as much precision as you did the food?
L: Yes, for sure. We joked about it ourselves, saying it was only possible thanks to our nit-picking levels of Swiss precision. We made lists detailing the weight of every piece of equipment and drew up pages and pages of contingency plans, right through to an overview of the ranger’s signs we’d set up if the satellite phone gave up the ghost. We made an agreement with our parents that they’d organise a fly-over with a bush pilot if they didn’t hear from us in 72 hours.

You were 24 when you completed the tour, the youngest of just ten to 20 people to have undertaken this crossing. Where did you get the self-confidence and the experience?
M: We met in the SAC’s youth organisation in 2012 and spent a lot of time together in the mountains. We’ve got plenty of experience, especially in traditional Alpine mountaineering. That stood us in good stead in Alaska.

L: That was particularly true during the first two weeks of the tour, when it snowed all the time and there was lots of old snow on the ground. From the Alps, we simply knew what to do in conditions like that.

M: I’d been to the Brooks Range before we set off on the tour. I was 20 when I went for the first time, and I’d now say it was in a burst of youthful enthusiasm. I went without any suitable equipment, on my own, and probably put my life at risk.

L: I’d had a bit of experience in the wilderness during three weeks in Mongolia. But neither of us had ever done a project of this size, and we had hardly any experience, either, in that respect.

M: A year before the project started, I took a special trip to the Brooks Range with my brother to carry out research and test out concepts that Lukas and I were considering for the project. It was crucial for us to get a sense of what distance we could realistically cover each day so we could plan the gaps between our food stockpiles.

How far away were your stockpiles from each other and how did you organise them?
L: There was always a gap of around twelve days. When we started, on the Canadian border, we had twelve days’ worth of food in our backpacks – about twelve kilos per person. That had to last us until we reached our first food stop, halfway to the Dalton Highway, where a bush pilot had left a metal tin for us. On the Dalton Highway, the next set of rations was being kept by a local resident we knew. The third had been taken to the Anaktuvuk Pass by air freight. This is the only town on the crossing, a tiny Inuit village with 300 residents. And the last food stop was the start of our boat tour, where we’d had a rubber dingy and three weeks’ worth of food flown in by a seaplane.

In other words, you constructed your plans around these food stops?
M: That was the only way we could do it. The flights to sort out our rations were the most expensive part of the expedition, so we tried to minimise them. Food was the limiting factor: we knew that if we took longer than planned on one day, we’d need to eat fewer calories the next day or walk even quicker.

Did everything go to plan?
M: Not to start with, unfortunately. With hindsight, it became clear that my brother and I had hiked the easiest section, technically speaking – so our plans were rather overly optimistic.

L: We should have set up two stockpiles at the start. Not least because the conditions early on were really tough. The bush pilot had dropped us in the Brooks Range, and we’d thought that the weather would be dry – but the opposite was true. Over the first two weeks, new snow fell practically every day. At points, we were trying to make our way through snow that reached up to our hips. In the east, though, it was the driest summer on record.

Those weren’t the only challenges you faced, right?
M: We both ended up with multiple bouts of inflammation, mostly on our tendons. This created psychological challenges, above all. We knew that we really needed rest, but had to press ahead to stop the project going down the drain. The logistical complexity and high costs meant we could hardly fly in additional food.

L: And we had to keep our food out of the reach of bears, of course. I think we had 26 encounters with bears, all told.

M: Crossing rivers was the greatest challenge. Even two years after the project, I still suffered from a kind of post-traumatic stress: I started to panic whenever I came across a mountain stream, fearful that I might have to cross it.

Explora’s managing director, adventurer Andi Hutter, also encountered quite some challenges in this region.
L: By sheer chance, he was in the Brooks Range at almost the same time as we were: we were even able to tap into a few synergies and combine provision flights, for example. Unfortunately, he needed to break off his project because a bear destroyed his equipment during a snowstorm and ate great swathes of his food.

What did a typical day consist of?
M: We’d got the process down to a fine art after a relatively brief amount of time. We set off an hour after getting up, then we walked in three three-hour blocks and had something to eat in each of the two breaks. Once we’d covered 30 to 40 kilometres, we set up camp for the night. We always divided up the tasks in the same way, like a couple that’s been married for 60 years. We didn’t plan it that way, but after a few days, it was simply no longer up for discussion. Lukas always put up and took down the tent and I cooked. Then, we slept for an hour, wrote in our diary, shared a sign of life and our position via satellite phone – and only then did we go to sleep properly. Every day was literally the same, with nothing in the way of leisure activities.

Strictly speaking, the project was one big leisure activity, right?
L: It was. But from the off, we decided that we’d see the project as our job: we viewed it as an external contract we were obliged to undertake and unable to call into question. This made it much easier for us, psychologically.

Was the crossing ultimately a dream job?
M: Yes, of course. It was a dream come true. This part of Alaska had held a special place in my heart ever since my first tour: I’d never seen somewhere so untouched. At points, we felt like astronauts in space. When a plane flew through, we found the situation truly absurd – the nearest people were just nine kilometres above us, but they were in a totally different world. To amuse ourselves, we imagined how they’d be drinking Champagne in business class while we were in total isolation, far removed from any media or external influences.

L: The solitude fascinated me, too – being on your own and journeying through an area like this, nothing for kilometres, no civilisation, no people. We started in early June and essentially experienced four seasons over the next two months: after all the snow had melted, the landscape was brown and grey. Then, gradually, everything turned green and spring came and brought the flowers with it.

M: We had bona fide 18-degree summer days with sunshine round the clock when we were on the boat on the Noatak. At times, the tent got so hot that we took a dip in the river at night to cool off.

L: As the tour came to an end, the dark nights started getting longer and the foliage took on a reddish hue. There’s a saying that there are four seasons in Alaska: June, July, August and winter.

No matter how enjoyable it was at times, it was a really hard tour. Why would you voluntarily take on a ‘job’ like this?
M: Well, that’s the million-dollar question: why would you do something like this? I’ve often compared it to a marathon. When an amateur does one, they’re looking for a challenge and an experience. They’ve got four hours of pain ahead of them: they won’t enjoy that, but the feeling that comes with crossing the finish line is indescribable. The sole difference with us was that the marathon lasted 60 days and took us through stunningly beautiful scenery.