Kobuk Valley National Park ⓘ

Gold Found on the Kobuk! read a letter from prospector John Ross to the San Francisco Chronicle , claiming to have found $50,000 worth of gold on the Kobuk River. The year was 1898, and the gold rush at Klondike was beginning to wane. The rich goldfields at Nome were still a year away from being discovered, and disillusioned prospectors, tired of depleted claims in the Yukon and steep royalties levied by the Canadian government, were eager for an easier and less crowded score. Stories like Ross’s soon sparked the Kobuk River Stampede and a flood of would-be prospectors hoping to get lucky and strike it rich poured into what would later become Kobuk Valley National Park.

During the spring of 1989, whispers of gold were everywhere. Stories of arctic rivers glistening with gold nuggets made news on both coasts. Captain Cogan of the whaling ship Alaska convinced 40 prospectors to buy passage to Kotzebue, Alaska with a fictitious story of a prospector who found $15,000 worth of gold in just two hours of panning on the Kobuk River, and the lure of the reputed riches on the Kobuk River attracted the interest of investors as well. The Kotzebue Commercial and Mining Company, founded in early 1898 before the claims of gold had been verified or any of the company members had set foot in the Kobuk Valley, raised a million dollars to fund mining operations in Arctic Alaska and purchased a steamer named the Agnes. E. Boyd , one of the largest boats to ever navigate the Kobuk River. During that heady spring, the rumors of gold and endless riches convinced some 2,000 would-be prospectors to make the trip to Kotzebue, Alaska with dreams of striking it rich in the remote Kobuk Valley.

More than half of the 2,000 prospectors that arrived in Kotzebue in July of 1898 turned back when local Friends’ missionaries and Inupiaq Eskimos swore that no gold had ever been found in Kobuk Valley, but the rumor of riches proved to be too strong a lure for some. Eight hundred men made their way up the Kobuk River and established thirty two camps where they waited out the long winter. During the cold, dark months, the men didn’t stray far from their camps. Little prospecting took place, and even less gold was actually found. Instead, the miners focused on recreational pursuits. Camps organized lecture series and discussion groups, and ice skating became so popular that extra skates were made from saw blades. Most of the prospectors, many of whom were from Southern California, survived the harsh winter, but others lost their supplies or their lives to the elements, the river and disease.

When the ice thawed in the spring of 1899, the prospectors learned that gold had been discovered at Nome, and most of the men abandoned the Kobuk empty-handed. Proving how much of prospecting depended on luck, Erik O. Lindblom, one of the “Three Lucky Swedes” who discovered the first gold at Nome, had been a passenger on the Alaska ’s voyage north to Kotzebue the previous spring. During a stop at Port Clarence, he learned that no gold had been found on the Kobuk River and abandoned the Alaska before it sailed through the Bering Straits. While his former shipmates wintered along the frozen Kobuk River, Lindblom found the first gold nuggets in what would become the Nome mining district and made a vast fortune in the ensuring gold rush.

Trace amounts of gold were eventually discovered on tributaries of the Kobuk River and small mining districts were established in the nearby Cosmos Hills and along the Squirrel River years later, but only small amounts of mineral were ever extracted. Perhaps a more lasting legacy of the Kobuk River Stampede was the large numbers of outsiders it brought to Northwest Alaska for the first time. The arrival of the miners had a profound impact on the native Inupiat, who had still been living the semi-nomadic subsistence lifestyle of their ancestors. The miners hired the Inupiat as guides and assistants, introducing them to western goods, tools and wage labor. Missionaries, teachers and trades followed in the miners’ wake and soon the Inupiat had settled into permanent villages, disrupting a millennia-old way of life.

The Kobuk River Stampede also attracted the attention of the US Geological Survey. The failed gold booms along the Kobuk and other rivers in northern Alaska drew attention to the need for better maps and more knowledge of the terrain. A fleet of government scientists were dispatched to Alaska’s uncharted north to create maps and discover its economic potential, and USGS surveyors mapping the Brooks Range in the early 20th century were among the first to document the existence of Alaska’s black gold – oil.

The story of Arctic archeology is dominated by one towering figure – J. Louis Giddings. A tall, soft-spoken man, he was nevertheless one of the loudest and most respected voices in his field. During his twenty-five years of fieldwork in Northwest Alaska, Giddings worked on five major excavations. He was instrumental in the identification of several previously unexplored cultures and the discovery of many of the most important sites in Arctic archeology. His work at the Cape Krusenstern beach ridges and Onion Portage formed the basis of the modern understanding of the human history in Arctic Alaska. Although he arrived in Northwest Alaska thousands of years after its first inhabitants, he is an instrumental part in the telling of their story.

Giddings was born in Caldwell, Texas in 1909, but both his professional and personal passion soon drew him to the land of the midnight sun. After earning his BS from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1931 and studying at the University of Arizona, he was hired as an anthropology professor by UAF in 1938. The following year, Froelich Rainey, a fellow professor, invited Giddings to join his summer excavation near the village of Point Hope, 150 miles north of the town of Kotzebue. The excavation uncovered the first remains of the Ipiutak civilization, a previously unstudied culture that carved intricate masks and figurines out of ivory two thousand years ago. The Ipiutak ruled over an extensive empire stretching from the Bering Straits to Point Barrow for nearly a thousand years. It was Giddings’ introduction to fieldwork and Arctic archeology, an experience he described as “more dramatic to me than the opening of Tut-ankh-amen’s tomb,” but it was his solo trip down the Kobuk River in search of wood samples the following summer that would ultimately define his career.

At the University of Arizona, Giddings had studied under A. E. Douglass, the father of dendrochronology. Dendrochronology is the science of using tree rings to date a piece of wood, and therefore objects made from the wood. A tree’s growth rings vary from year to year as a result of environmental conditions. The better the weather, the larger the growth ring. Over time, a tree’s growth rings form a pattern that can be matched to the growth ring patterns of other trees in the area. When a tree is freshly cut, each growth ring can be matched to an exact year on the modern calendar. If a section of a known growth ring pattern matches the pattern in a piece of old wood, such as a piece of timber used in an old house, archeologists can date when the wood was cut and the house was built.

Dendrochronology is invaluable as a way of dating historic artifacts and sites, especially in the years before radio carbon dating. Giddings, who was interested in the arrival of humans to Northwest Alaska and the development of the local Inupiaq culture, hoped that collecting wood cores from trees along the Kobuk River would allow archeologists to date when people first arrived in North America.

Maps of Alaska’s Interior were still more of rough sketches in the first half of the twentieth century. When Giddings’ embarked on his journey in July of 1940, his map showed a 50 mile wide blank space between the headwaters of the Kobuk River and the nearest town. Undeterred, he flew to the village of Allakaket on the Koyukuk River and set off on foot towards the Kobuk River with only a 40 pound pack, a compass and a rifle for hunting. Missionaries in Allakaket were so concerned that he would die in the wilderness that they sent a letter to the president of UAF begging him to launch an aerial search for his remains. For six days, Giddings battled stifling heat, rough terrain and unending assault from mosquitos before arriving on the banks of the Kobuk River. There he built a crude raft out of driftwood and floated down the Kobuk for three days before arriving at the fish camps of Henry Stocking and Roxy Douglas 20 miles from the village of Shungnak.

Daisy Tickett, who was a young child when Giddings floated up to her family’s camp, later recalled Giddings’s remarkable arrival: “The arrival of Mr. Giddings..., I always thought it may have been July or August, but he arrived at the time we were in summer camp...His raft was remarkable in that it was very short and small and seems like it was constructed to sit on it by placing several pieces of wood. It was in the afternoon when we see a stranger in view on a raft. The stranger stopped in front of us and got off. So that was Louis Giddings who arrived.”

With help from local residents, Giddings continued his trip down the Kobuk to the village of Kiana, stopping periodically to take tree cores and conduct rudimentary excavations. He returned the following year with a graduate student and hired eight local men to assist with more in-depth excavations, including the Onion Portage site. This was arguably his more important find, but he didn’t recognize its age or significance until much later.

Following a stint in the military during World War II, Giddings returned to the Alaska where he spent another summer working on the Kobuk River. He then turned his attention to the coast and spent four seasons excavating at Norton Bay on the Seward Peninsula. At the site of Iyatayet, he uncovered a second previously unexplored Arctic culture, the Denbigh Flint Complex, which dated to 4,000 BCE.

Throughout the 50s, Giddings established himself as an expert in Arctic prehistory and earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, but it was the excavation of the summer of 1958 that truly set him apart from his peers. That summer, with the help of Almond Downey, a native of the village of Noatak, Giddings left Kotzebue in search of old beach ridges. Beach ridges form when the prevailing winds and ocean current cause big sediment dumps along a shoreline. Eventually, the sediment grows high enough that waves no longer wash over it and a new beach is formed. Over thousands of years, a series of ridges form, stretching out into the ocean with the oldest beaches now miles away from the water.

Coastal people who rely on the ocean for food and transportation will choose to live as close to the water as they can – waterfront property has always been the most valuable real estate. This means the remains of the most recent culture will be found on the beach ridge closest to the ocean while older cultures will be found on beach ridges further back. The further a culture is from the ocean, the older it is. Giddings hoped to find a series of beach ridges old enough to have been used by all the different Arctic civilizations, allowing archeologists to firmly date them in relation to each other.

Downey, who worked with Giddings for two decades, guided the crew across the Kotzebue Sound to the windswept shores of Cape Krusenstern, just south of the Krusenstern Lagoon. Here, Giddings discovered a series of 114 parallel beach ridges stretching inland for nearly three miles. Over the next five years, excavations uncovered the remains of 200 generations of people who had hunted and fished along the shores of Cape Krusenstern. Every known Arctic culture plus several new ones were represented in the beach ridges’ 6,000 year history.

The Cape Krusenstern beach ridges were a remarkable find, one that allowed Giddings to show when different cultures existed in relation to others, but using beach ridges as dating method was unorthodox. Skeptics argued that there was no proof that every group of people would live on the beach ridge closest to the water. Giddings needed to find a site that matched the sequence of cultures found on the beach ridges, but stacked one on top of other. He needed to dig deep.

In July 1961, Giddings took a break from the excavations at Cape Krusenstern to return to Onion Portage on the Kobuk River. During his first visit, he had abandoned the site after excavating just four recent house pits, but he had always thought that there was more to be found. Twenty years later, he returned to Onion Portage to see what he had missed. The answer was… a lot. Onion Portage would turn out to be one of the oldest and best dated sites in not just the Arctic, but all of North America. It would be the most significant find in Giddings’ long and illustrious career.

When Giddings first arrived on the Kobuk, local villagers told him that they would gather at Onion Portage, named for the wild onions that grow along the banks, to wait for the caribou to arrive on their yearly migration across the Brooks Range. They would wait until the caribou were crossing the river, then shoot them, a method known as intercept hunting. As Giddings began to dig beneath the floor of his previously excavated house pit, it was soon apparent that its inhabitants were not the first people to recognize the strategic position of Onion Portage. It was exactly the site that Giddings had been looking for.

Giddings returned to Onion Portage in 1964 to continue excavations. As his crew worked, it quickly became apparent that people from cultures along the coast and new, inland cultures had been coming here to hunt for thousands of years. Ultimately, the excavation found evidence of nine different cultural groups dating back 10,000 years at Onion Portage. It is one of the best-dated sites in all of North America, and the most significant find in Arctic archeology.

Louis Giddings died as a result of complications from a car crash in December, 1964. During his three decades of work in Northwest Alaska he greatly expanded the understanding of human occupation in the Arctic. His passion and dedication inspired a generation of future archeologist who continued his work in what is now Cape Krusenstern National Monument and Kobuk Valley National Park.

Like its namesake, Paatitaaq has layers. It has layers of history that tie cultures together, past and present. Archeologists, like Giddings and Anderson, dug down through the strata to peel those layers back and show us how people thousands of years ago lived and how people today are shaped by those that came before. Archeologists have identified many archeologically defined groups of people that have inhabited and utilized the area throughout the millennia and have given names to the groups based on how long ago they made use of the Kobuk Valley. A few of the names are: Western Thule, Arctic Woodland, and Denbigh. Triangulating evidence, including the last glaciation (Wisconsin Glaciation), evidence of people using this area dates back 8,000-11,000 years.

In addition to the bones of caribou and other subsistence animals, many tools were found here. Among the most common were microblades and scrapers. These would have been used to hunt caribou and then process the animal. Other artifacts were found with ancient structures. Remains of tent-like structures were found as well as larger oval structures. These larger oval structures were most likely “men’s houses”, or kashim. A kashim is a place used for ceremonial practices and community activities. Inside these structures artifacts that relate to tool and weapon making were found. The making of tools and weapons were considered male activities, leading archeologists to think the oval structures are kashims. Tools were also found. Objects that would be used to drill holes, skinning knives, scrapers, knives, and wood working tools are some of the examples of tools found. They were made of obsidian, stone/chert, bone, and antler-all of which were found within the kashim.

Lying entirely north of the Arctic Circle , the ground is permanently frozen below much of the park. This impermeable "permafrost" layer prevents drainage and causes many surface areas to remain wet during the summer. Trees approach their northern limit in Kobuk Valley , where boreal forest and tundra meet. All plants that grow in the arctic must be specially adapted to survive fierce winds, biting cold, thin soils, and a short growing season. The northern tree line zigzags through the valleys of the Brooks Range and along the Kobuk River . Spruce, willow, and birch trees are found along rivers and streams, on many south-facing hills, and where drainage is good and permafrost is lacking.

The park was established to maintain the environmental integrity of the valley's natural features in an undeveloped state and, in cooperation with local Natives, to protect and interpret archeological sites associated with Native cultures. As such, natural and archeological objects are protected. Leaving them where you find them preserves these special resources for the good of residents and visitors alike.

Caribou, wolves, and bears oh my! Kobuk Valley is home to a wide array of wild mammals. Caribou are often seen trotting across the sand dunes and swimming the Kobuk River while making their migration each spring and fall. While the caribou are migrating, the moose are wading in the swampy areas feeding and keeping a close eye out for their biggest predators, the grey wolf and brown bear. If you head into the upland areas you might find a few Dall's Sheep hangout out on the mountain tops. For the lucky visitor, you might even catch a rare glimpse of one of the solitary wolverines calling Kobuk Valley their home. Total, there are 32 mammals found in Kobuk Valley national park.

Kobuk Valley is home to one of the last great migrations left on the planet. Every spring and fall, the Western Arctic Caribou Herd –a quarter of a million animals –passes through the valley on the 600 mile trek between their summer and winter grounds. In our rapidly urbanizing world, many of the great migrations have disappeared, and Kobuk Valley National Park protects this millennia-old journey that is vital to both the caribou and the people who live in their path.

There are no developed facilities in Kobuk Valley National Park, but 1,795,280 acres of remote backcountry provides a lot of room for outdoor adventures. On these trips there are abundant opportunites for observing wildlife and seemingly endless landscapes to photograph. For people with Arctic winter survival skills and personal equipment, snow machining, skiing and dog mushing are also possible. Whether you start your trip in winter or summer, stop in at the Northwest Arctic Hertiage Center to tour the museum and talk with a ranger. Permits are not required for independent travelers. Organized recreational groups do need to get a permit from the Chief Ranger. Contact the park at (907) 318-2230 for more info.

Commercial businesses provide flights when the weather is good, but plan extra days to wait in case of bad weather. Bring all your own equipment. Any winter trip requires advanced knowledge of cold weather survival. Even in the summer, hypothermia is possible, so plan ahead and be prepared. Kotzebue, AK Community programs are available throughout the year at the Northwest Arctic Heritage Center . Topics include natural and cultural history of the park, local research, workshops and children's activities. The schedule varies, so please call (907) 318-2230 before your arrival or check the events calendar to learn about upcoming programs.

Visitors at Kobuk Valley National Park display their park flag during a visit to the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes. NPS/Linda Jeschke Remember to be respectful Private land is common along the Kobuk River, so please detour around areas that show any signs of buildings, camps or residence. Subsistence is also common in the park, so be conscious of your actions and how they affect others who are enjoying the bounty that the park provides.

Far from any roads, trails or signs of civilization, camping in Kobuk Valley National Park is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Learn about the different species of fish that swim through the rivers of Kobuk Valley

Park Access Travel to our parks usually take people through either Anchorage, Fairbanks, and/or Nome. If your itinerary allows, there are some park visitor centers you could visit. The Alaska Public Lands Information Center (APLIC) has centers in both Fairbanks and Achorage that offer quite a bit of information for visitors. If you are going through Fairbanks, you would be close to the many ranger stations and visitor centers . If you are stopping over in Nome, Bering Land Bridge National Preserve is a great place to visit. Summer access is by plane, boat, or by foot. While it is possible to backpack from the Dalton Highway, through Gates of the Arctic National Park into Kobuk Valley National Park, it is logistically challenging and would take weeks. Most trips begin by taking a plane to your starting point. Winter access is by plane, snowmachine or dogs. Plan to fly into the park, unless you have your own snowmachine or dogteam. Skiing, snowshoeing, dogsledding or skijoring through the mountains or on the frozen rivers are all possible adventures. Commercial businesses provide flights when the weather is good, but plan extra days to wait in case of bad weather. Bring all your own equipment. Any winter trip requires advanced knowledge of cold weather survival. Even in the summer, hypothermia is possible, so plan ahead and be prepared.