Living the life of the caribou

Imagine an incessant whining of mosquitoes, caribou hair so pervasive it sticks to food and covers clothes, a week trapped in a tent sharing a single sleeping bag, not enough sleep, not enough food, months without a shower.

Two Canadian adventurers endured that and more in a grueling five-month journey across snow and tundra in a quest to live as much like caribou as humanly possible.

Karsten Heuer, an author and seasonal Canada park warden, and his wife, Leanne Allison, a filmmaker, set out in April 2003 from the village of Old Crow in Canada’s Yukon Territory to migrate an estimated 1,500 miles with the Porcupine caribou herd.

Their trek was both political and personal. In the debate over oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, caribou have become the poster animals, used by both sides to support arguments.

Those opposed to drilling contend oil development could disturb the herd’s traditional calving grounds on the refuge’s coastal plain, used by the caribou for thousands of years before being labeled the “1002 area” to be studied for oil exploration. Hunting the herd is integral to the Gwich’in, Inuvialuit and Inupiat way of life, they say.

Drilling supporters contend the neighboring Central caribou herd has thrived alongside oil development on the nearby but much broader North Slope. They say the Porcupine herd also could fare well with cautious development of new oil fields, although scientists aren’t so sure.

Heuer and Allison, who oppose drilling, said they wanted to learn firsthand how the caribou lived and how they made their trip from wintering grounds in the Yukon to calving grounds on the coastal plain and back again.

The couple plan to tell their story with photos and film in Washington, D.C.

“We had no schedule or route plan and sometimes no idea where they were going,” Heuer said by satellite phone last fall in the last phase of the journey. “That’s been decided entirely by the caribou.”

At times they were holed up in their tent for days by blizzards, running low on food, while caribou marched on, adapted and seemingly unaffected.

Other days, they baked in heat and sunshine.

At first, Heuer and Allison raced on skis to keep pace with the Porcupine herd, traveling over mountains, fording breaking-up rivers and warding off grizzly bears.Heuer said that during spring, biologists monitoring the herd by satellite telemetry occasionally called in with tips on shortcuts to help the humans keep up with the caribou.

In late May, Heuer and Allison flew out to the village of Kaktovik in one of the planes that dropped food. They were run down and needed to fatten up before continuing.

Heuer wrote on their Web site that they had spent 10 days inside their tent on the calving grounds so as not to disturb the caribou, which had become far more protective and skittish after giving birth. They left their tent only to crawl slowly to the nearby river to fetch water when necessary. All around, they watched caribou being born.

Heuer said the time on the calving grounds confirmed to them the importance of the area to the herd. Predators are few, and the calving time is just before the bugs hatch. Heuer described it as a relatively peaceful time in a caribou’s otherwise harsh existence.

Life got difficult again for the caribou as soon as they left the calving grounds. During the post-calving migration, about 25 percent of the calves die from accidents or predation, Heuer said.

Birds migrate thousands of miles to fatten their young on the summer fog of insects, but the bugs are hell on the animals. Caribou spend the next few months trying to escape bot flies that spray larvae up their noses, warble flies that lay eggs under their skin and mosquitoes that suck their blood.

Heuer also said it was fascinating to watch large groups of caribou congregate on breezy mountain tops to get away from insects.

“We felt like we were immersed in the herd,” Allison said of the time during the post-calving migration when they were keeping pace.

“The caribou were all around us, shedding hair everywhere. The hair was all over us and in our food. And there were trails everywhere. You’d look up the sides of mountains and see caribou everywhere. It made us feel like we were part of something ancient, something that is still alive and thriving today.”