Travel Reference
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the winter, never to be heard from again, and I believe him implicitly. I think there may be
places up here that even the Inupiat haven't gotten to yet.
About fifty minutes into the flight John banks left through a notch between two hills
and says apologetically, “It's more spectacular on a clear day.”
The horizon dead ahead is an edge of white gold. The immensity of dark green spruce
is suddenly and inexplicably swamped with wave after wave of golden sand that the wind
has built into a small ocean of dunes. John circles once and says, “Now if we can just find
the airport.” I peer intently through the windshield as we descend. A series of airplane
tracks materializes between two dunes and we land.
I step out into a world unlike any other in Alaska. Baring a few extremely hearty spe-
cies of flowers, one of which looks like a minature lupine, there is no vegetation. The si-
lence is absolute. There is a small breeze, which means no mosquitoes, a good thing.
We are alone on this desert. We hike to the top of the nearest dune, from which we can
see more dunes rising and falling into the horizon. A small creek, one bank impossibly
thick with more spruce, winds through them.
The only thing missing is the camels. I've been a lot of places in Alaska and I've seen a
lot of strange and wonderful things, but I have never seen anything odder or more weirdly
beautiful than the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes. I wish that my father was with me, and then I
don't, because I am with a pilot and pilots don't do emotional. I think John knows,
though, because he hugs me twice when we got back to Kotzebue.
Kotzebue itself perches on a sandbar at the northernmost end of the Baldwin Peninsula,
which divides Kotzebue Sound from Hotham Inlet, and which at one point is so narrow it
is in real danger of becoming an island. A Russian navigator, Otto von Kotzebue, was the
first white man to see it in August, 1816. Yet another explorer looking for that elusive
northwest passage, he left his name behind and moved on. Today's Kotzebue is a bustling
town of 4,000. Mostly Inupiat, it's the market town for coastal and interior villages from
Shishmaref to Ambler. The two- and three- and even four-story buildings are built on pil-
ings above the reach of the wind-whipped waters of the shallow sound, and when you're
approaching it in a small plane, with the unsetting Arctic summer sun circling around to
the west, the skyline looks like a little New York.
