46 Fun Facts About Gates of the Arctic National Park

Gates of the Arctic holds which distinction among America's national parks?

The northernmost US national park, Gates of the Arctic lies wholly above the Arctic Circle; its name comes from two facing peaks an explorer saw as the doorway to the far north.

About how many visits did Gates of the Arctic record in 2021?

About 7,000: the park logged 7,362 recreation visits in 2021, the fewest of any US national park, because no road leads into it.

The crest of the Brooks Range in Gates of the Arctic marks the northern limit of what in Alaska?

Trees stop at the Brooks Range: spruce forest climbs its south side, but beyond the divide only scattered balsam poplars stand on the tundra.

The million-acre wilderness named for Bob Marshall, who christened the Gates of the Arctic, lies in which state?

Montana's Bob Marshall Wilderness, more than a million acres straddling the Continental Divide, was named in his honour after his sudden death at 38.

Which two mountains, facing each other across a river, did Bob Marshall name the 'Gates of the Arctic'?

Frigid Crags and Boreal Mountain frame the North Fork of the Koyukuk like a gateway; passing between them in 1929, Marshall felt he was leaving the world of man behind.

What did Bob Marshall title his bestselling 1933 book about more than a year in a Koyukuk gold camp?

Arctic Village (1933), a bestseller, portrays Wiseman, the gold camp Marshall first used as a base in 1929 and liked enough to return to for more than a year.

Which conservation group did Bob Marshall help found in the 1930s and largely bankroll in its first years?

The Wilderness Society drew most of its early funding from Marshall; 25 years after his death at 38, it helped win passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act.

Which president proclaimed Gates of the Arctic National Monument under the Antiquities Act?

Jimmy Carter proclaimed the monument on 1 December 1978, using the Antiquities Act to protect Alaska's proposed parklands while the lands bill was stalled in Congress.

Which 1980 law turned the monument into today's park and preserve?

The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), signed 2 December 1980, made the monument a national park and preserve; the 1971 Native Claims Settlement Act had triggered the federal land review behind it.

Gates of the Arctic's park and preserve cover about 8.5 million acres, slightly more than the whole of which country?

Belgium would fit inside the park and preserve with room to spare, yet the park has not a single road or trail.

Which amphibian, found as far north as Gates of the Arctic, survives winter by freezing solid?

Wood frogs flood their cells with glucose as ice forms, a natural antifreeze that lets them spend the winter frozen in the leaf litter and thaw out alive each spring.

With no roads or trails leading into Gates of the Arctic, how do most visitors get there?

By bush plane is the usual way in: air taxis fitted with floats or tundra tires fly visitors from the gateway villages, and the rest hike in from the highway to the east.

Which road runs just east of Gates of the Arctic, close enough for visitors to hike in from it?

The Dalton Highway, built in the 1970s as the haul road for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, runs 414 mostly gravel miles north from Livengood; hikers leaving it must ford a river to reach the park.

Which Iñupiat settlement sits in the middle of Gates of the Arctic, outside the wilderness designation?

Anaktuvuk Pass, at the head of the John River, grew up after the last semi-nomadic Nunamiut bands gathered there in 1949; its land was left out of the wilderness around it.

The Nunamiut of the central Brooks Range share a word root with Canada's Nunavut; what does Nunamiut mean?

People of the land: the name shares its root with Nunavut, 'our land'; unlike the coastal Iñupiat, who lived on sea mammals and fish, the Nunamiut hunted the inland herds.

What does the name of the park's Nunamiut village mean in Iñupiaq?

Place of caribou droppings is what the Iñupiaq name means: the village lies on an ancient migration route that the herds follow through the Brooks Range twice a year.

Before Alaska, Bob Marshall and his brother George climbed all 46 High Peaks of which New York mountains?

The Adirondacks were the Marshalls' summer playground: from the family camp on Lower Saranac Lake, Bob and George, with their guide, became the first to climb all 46 High Peaks, a feat today's 'Forty-Sixers' still chase.

The pipeline haul road crosses the Brooks Range east of the park at which pass?

Atigun Pass is the highest point on the haul road, which crosses the Continental Divide there, and freight bound for the oilfields is hauled over it even in midwinter.

Which animal of Gates of the Arctic's high alpine ridges flees to rugged 'escape terrain' when predators approach?

Dall sheep, the white wild sheep of Alaska's mountains, graze open ridges and meadows but stay close to cliffs too steep for predators; mountain goats live only far to the south.

Which sport fish of Gates of the Arctic's clear streams is known for its large, sail-like dorsal fin?

Arctic grayling carry a large, colourful sail of a dorsal fin, and in the brief Arctic summer they feed voraciously on drifting insects.

Which lake, a National Natural Landmark in Gates of the Arctic, feeds the Kobuk River?

Walker Lake, on the south slope of the Brooks Range, is part of the Kobuk's headwaters; it is one of many mountain lakes left in basins that glaciers scoured out or dammed with moraine.

Six Gates of the Arctic rivers share which designation?

Wild and Scenic River status covers the Alatna, John, Kobuk, Noatak, Tinayguk and North Fork Koyukuk, all added to the national system on the day the park itself was created.

The Noatak River rises in the park and runs west across Arctic Alaska to which sea?

The Chukchi Sea receives the Noatak at Kotzebue Sound; a national preserve was created to protect the river's mountain-ringed basin, whose ecosystem remains intact.

What is the tallest mountain in Gates of the Arctic National Park?

Mount Igikpak, in the Schwatka Mountains near the head of the Noatak River, is the park's highest point, well west of the two 'Gates' peaks that gave the park its name.

What does Arrigetch, the name of granite spires in Gates of the Arctic, mean in Iñupiaq?

Arrigetch means 'fingers of the outstretched hand' in Iñupiaq: the spires are hard granite that glacial ice and running water carved free as the rock around them wore away.

Gates of the Arctic straddles a continental divide separating the drainages of which two oceans?

The Pacific and the Arctic: south-slope rivers join the Koyukuk and the Yukon on their way to the Pacific, while those north of the crest drain to the Arctic Ocean.

People first moved into the Brooks Range at roughly what point in the past?

As the last ice age ended, more than 12,000 years ago, hunters were already using the Brooks Range, and thousands of archaeological sites in the park record the peoples who followed.

Where is the headquarters of Gates of the Arctic National Park?

Fairbanks houses the park's headquarters; no road reaches the park itself, so visitors set out from the city for the small gateway villages.

Who may hunt inside the national park section of Gates of the Arctic?

Local rural residents for subsistence are the only hunters allowed in the park itself, a right Congress wrote into the law that created the park, for Native and non-Native villagers alike.

The proposed Ambler Road, which would cut across the southern preserve of Gates of the Arctic, is meant to reach what?

A copper mine is the goal: the 1980 act that created the park also provided for a road corridor across its preserve to the Ambler Mining District's copper deposits.

The Brooks Range is named for Alfred Hulse Brooks, who for two decades was Alaska's chief what?

Geologist Alfred Hulse Brooks ran the US Geological Survey's Alaska work from 1903 until his death in 1924, and the range was given his name the following year.

Which institution in the park's Nunamiut settlement tells the story of the Nunamiut and the Brooks Range?

The Simon Paneak Memorial Museum, named for a Nunamiut elder who recorded his people's knowledge with visiting scientists, holds Nunamiut tools, clothing and oral histories; it sits on village land inside the park.

Coldfoot, a gateway town for Gates of the Arctic, is said to be named for prospectors who did what?

Lost heart and turned back is the tale: gold-rush travellers are said to have got 'cold feet' about pressing on north, and the name stuck to their camp.

Which large fish-eating member of the whitefish family, also called inconnu, runs up the Kobuk River to spawn?

Sheefish can reach 60 pounds in the Kobuk country and may travel 1,000 miles in a summer; they winter in brackish bays, then run upriver to spawn.

How did Bob Marshall become wealthy enough to fund his Alaska expeditions?

He inherited part of his father's estate when Louis Marshall, a wealthy New York lawyer, died in 1929; the money paid for his Alaska trips and his causes, yet he went on working all his life.

Which three towns are the only settlements along the 414-mile road that parallels the pipeline?

Coldfoot, Wiseman and Deadhorse are the only settlements on the haul road; Coldfoot, a gold-rush town left empty for decades, came back to life in the 1970s as a pipeline camp and truck stop.

The federal reserve north of Gates of the Arctic was set aside in 1923 to supply what?

Oil for the US Navy was the aim: President Harding created Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 4 as the fleet switched from coal, and it is now the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska.

By the United States' definition, the Brooks Range forms the far northern end of which mountain system?

The Rocky Mountains end in the Brooks Range by the US definition; Canada instead stops them at the Liard River in British Columbia, far to the south.

Which is the only US national park larger than Gates of the Arctic?

Wrangell–St. Elias, at 13.2 million acres, is the largest US national park; it and second-ranked Gates of the Arctic were both created on the same day in 1980 by a single act of Congress.

Which protected area lies just east of Gates of the Arctic, on the far side of the pipeline corridor?

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge begins just beyond the pipeline corridor; with Kanuti refuge to the south and Noatak National Preserve to the west, the park is flanked on three sides by protected land.

Aufeis can block channels on rivers in Gates of the Arctic; what is it?

Layered sheets of overflow ice, or aufeis, build up as freezing rivers flood over their own ice again and again through the winter.

Park Service operations are run from a ranger station in which tiny town south of the park?

Bettles, home to fewer than 25 people and cut off from the road system for most of the year, still houses the park's ranger station and a visitor centre beside a tiny store and post office.

Which peak did airborne surveys in 2014 confirm as the highest in the whole Brooks Range?

Mount Isto, far east of the park, took the title from Mount Chamberlin, which old maps had sometimes shown as the range's highest and which now ranks third.

The only village inside Gates of the Arctic belongs to which vast Alaska borough, which also takes in Utqiaġvik and Prudhoe Bay?

North Slope Borough, strung along Alaska's Arctic coast, also takes in the park's mountain village and supplies its electricity, piped water and sewers.

Bob Marshall began his government career in 1925 with which agency?

The U.S. Forest Service hired Marshall as a young forester; his 20-mile-plus hikes on days off startled co-workers, and he later returned to head the agency's recreation office.

The pipeline highway just east of Gates of the Arctic featured in several seasons of which reality TV series?

Ice Road Truckers switched to the highway for several seasons from 2009, trading frozen lakes for 414 miles of mostly snow-covered gravel.