ARCTIC NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Alaska – Over twining rivers and gray-visaged mountains we fly, peak after peak, until suddenly the land lies down, verdant and soft.  

Water pocks the tundra with lakes and ponds, marshes and rills. Streams rush to the sea, which shimmers blue where it meets the shore but is frosted white in the distance with pack ice on the Beaufort Sea. With a thump, our bush plane lands on a gravel patch, and we spill out the door like laundry, uncrumpling from the tiny plane. 

The gravel of our impromptu runway meets a black sand beach. I head there, as geese wing overhead, and the sun coaxes steam from the sand. We immediately have company. Caribou. 

 All big-eyed curiosity, the bulls stare at us from under heavy racks of antlers. With their barrel bodies and stick-thin legs, they don’t look particularly graceful. Until they move. 

Easing across distance like smoke, they leave us, carrying on with their caribou day, as they have here for thousands of years. We are witnessing lives perfectly adapted to this remote and wild place, that we, a small group of writers and a photographer, have come to see. This is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the world’s great redoubts of nature, home to more than 200 species of birds, and some our nation’s most charismatic mammals: caribou and grizzly bears, wolves, wolverine, polar bears and musk ox — wild creation that needs big space.  

We have just landed on the coastal plain of the refuge, one of the most fragile and fought over pieces of public land in our country, caught in a fight that has continued over the same thing for decades. 

Oil. 

The coastal plain, at 1.5 million acres, is not very big, just a slice of the 20-million acre refuge, the nation’s largest and most northern. But it is its biological heart. Here, in the northeast corner of Alaska, wedged against Canada’s Yukon and the Beaufort Sea, a soft sponge of tundra overlays the permafrost. This land holds the memory of the Porcupine caribou herd, inscribed in their trails across the tundra over generations of migration. For these animals also hold the memory of this land, to which they annually return. 

The herd, some 143,000 animals strong, travels the longest land migration of any animal on earth, migrating across approximately 78,000 miles of remote landscape in northeastern Alaska, into the Yukon and Northwest Territories of Canada. They traverse the Brooks Range, a snowy magnificence extending for about 600 miles east-west across the state, entirely above the Arctic Circle.  

Pregnant cows confront frozen rivers and steep mountain ranges to arrive in the coastal plain of the refuge to birth their calves, and fatten on spring’s bounty of cotton grass, a protein-rich sedge that flourishes on the tundra. The caribou remain here through summer in the fresh coastal wind, escaping bloodthirsty mosquitoes. Then they return through the mountains to their interior winter redoubts, subsisting on frozen lichen they paw up through drifted snow. 

The coastal plain is also home to the densest aggregation of polar bear dens on Alaska’s North Slope. Following steep population declines of as much as 50% of the southern Beaufort Sea polar bear population, due primarily to shrinking sea ice limiting their ability to hunt, polar bears were listed throughout their range as a federally protected species in 2008. As sea ice continues to decline due to climate change, these bears are more dependent than ever on the coastal plain. Most of the coastal plain has been federally designated as critical habitat for polar bear survival. Yet it is not protected as wilderness, and has been targeted for years for oil development.  

The refuge has a complex origin story that holds the roots of today’s conflict. The Eisenhower administration established the 9-million acre Arctic National Wildlife Range in 1960 to preserve its immense ecological value. Congress in 1980 more than doubled the reserve to its present size, and renamed it the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. At that time, much of the refuge was designated as federally protected wilderness.  

But Congress, compromising with development interests over potential oil and gas reserves, punted on wilderness designation for the coastal plain, leaving it open to oil development. 

The push and pull over drilling and protection of the coastal plain has continued between Republican and Democratic administrations for decades. U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., has been a defender of the refuge in Congress, leading a filibuster to block drilling, and repeatedly introducing and co-sponsoring legislation, along with U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., to designate the entire coastal plain as protected wilderness. Indigenous subsistence uses would continue. 

Alaska’s congressional delegation and governor unanimously and strongly support oil and gas drilling, as well as removal of protections on public land that would prevent it. They joined President Donald Trump in a news conference in October 2025 announcing “bold steps to expand energy, local control and land access in Alaska.”   

Trump has given oil development on the coastal plain a huge boost in both his first and second terms. He opened it to drilling in his first term, which President Joe Biden then reversed, and now he has opened it again. In a 2025 tax and budget bill pushed by Trump, Congress mandated at least four sales of leases of public land in the refuge for oil development by 2035, to spur industrial investment.  

But on the coastal plain, big industry so far has stayed away, concentrating leasing interest elsewhere in the Arctic, where costs for development are lower, because drilling infrastructure is already in place.  

None of that exists on the coastal plain — not yet. No drill pads, no oil wells, no haul roads, no helicopter pads, no desalinization plants, no man camps, no power plants, no gas flares, no gravel pits. 

Instead, there is vast space, an unsullied wild perfection, a quiet so deep it is dimensional. It is a place where an unspoiled American landscape still exists, at a grand scale, an American Serengeti, surging with wildlife following the great cycles of nature. And that, for the founders of the refuge, was exactly the idea. 

Our plan was to fly to a campsite overlooking the coastal plain and explore its tussocks and tundra and the foothills of the Brooks Range. 

Alaska had other ideas. 

Pinned under a low cloud ceiling and tumble cycle of rainstorms, we waited out the Arctic’s famously changeable and ornery weather most of a day in a visitor center — basically a trailer — on a gravel runway outside Arctic Village, a remote Gwich’in village about 100 miles above the Arctic Circle. As rain drilled the roof, I read posters on the wall, curled by years and moisture, recounting the philosophy behind the creation of the refuge, to preserve intact for future generations something of the nation’s original frontier.  

What soaring commitments — to restraint, to keeping for future generations a vast sweep of wild, open country intact, where the great processes of nature could unspool, and animals live their long evolutionary destinies, unmolested by us. A place where we could confront the vulnerability of our short little marshmallow-soft mammalian lives amid an indifferent nature and relearn our place on this planet. 

Declared Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who grew up in Yakima, in his book “My Wilderness: The Pacific Northwest” (Doubleday, 1960): “This last living wilderness must remain sacrosanct. This is a place for man turned scientist and explorer, poet and artist. Here he can experience a new reverence for life that is outside his own and yet a vital and joyous part of it.” 

But it was time to get going. Dirk Nickisch, our pilot, was arriving in Pumpkin, his bush plane of the eponymous color, landing it amid the puddles. 

Nickisch identified a path Pumpkin could thread through mountain passes to put us down in the refuge — at least until the weather really cleared, and we could perhaps try again for the coastal plain. 

We were barely up and flying when he bumped us onto what he affectionately called The Aircraft Carrier, an expanse of gravel so big and so flat it seemed engineered, in Spring Creek, a jewel of a mountain valley tucked in the interior of the refuge. We hauled out our gear and got the tents up, making a cheery valley encampment amid mountains painted with cascades of gray scree. 

At just a week after the summer solstice, there would be no nighttime. So we headed out to explore the willow thickets along the graveled and stony banks of the creek, keeping an eye out for bears, and swatting at a bedevilment of mosquitoes. Despite the cool, wet weather, these bugs were out in force, providing a 24/7 buffet for birds drawn to America’s Arctic in Alaska for the breeding season.

You may think of the refuge as a remote and distant place — but you are very likely intimately connected to it by your backyard birds. Some 200 species of birds have been recorded in the refuge: shorebirds, ducks, songbirds and birds of prey, including some of the nation’s most charismatic species, from snowy owls to loons. Birds from six continents and nearly every state in the U.S. flock to America’s Arctic in Alaska — nearly all of it public land — every year to breed.

Motion catches my eye and atop a gray rock, I see a fluffy chick, perched sleepy-eyed, and nagging its parents for food with a buzzing call. We have come upon a family of northern wheatears, here all the way from sub-Saharan Africa to raise their chicks.

The baby is just starting to get some of its adult feathers, and it can walk, run and even fly. But it’s hard to imagine that in just a few short weeks it will have the endurance to make it all the way to its winter home. But for bird parents hustling mosquitoes all over the Arctic, that is the job.

I watch one of the parents, about the size of a finch, snag a juicy fat bug, then drop from the top of a scrub willow to the chick and stuff it in its mouth. The chick immediately starts begging for more.

The beauty of this place is not only its grand vistas of cloudscapes, mountains and valleys, but also life unfolding in exquisite miniature. Lichen paints the rocks in swaths of vivid orange and chartreuse. A tiny forest of clubmosses cushions the ground, flecked with flowers in yellow, pink and cream. Their delicacy belies their toughness, in a place where plants may have just six to eight weeks to complete their life cycle.

A shrill cry rings out in this mountain valley, confusing at first. Isn’t that … a shorebird? Why am I hearing beach birds in the mountains? 

The tundra ponds in this broad mountain valley draw them here, seabirds from both of the nation’s coasts and far beyond. They snuffle in the muddy banks and raise their young in quiet, protected, relatively predator-free wetlands. I watch a semipalmated sandpiper zip around the rich mud as my boots sink into the muck.

On the third day, the rainstorms finally stop parading in and out, and Nickisch is back to collect us. We wing north to the coastal plain at last.  

Only after this time in the interior of the refuge, after flying over the mountains to land on that gravel bar poking into the Beaufort Sea, where the caribou took our measure, do I understand just how unique the coastal plain truly is. 

Of course the Gwich’in people knew that all along. 

Shortly after we touch down on the coastal plain, it is already time to leave. We are expected back at Arctic Village to meet some of the people who have been defending this place against oil development for decades.  

Minutes after we land, a four-wheeler is dust-deviling down the gravel runway to greet us: Galen Gilbert, first chief of Arctic Village Council. He greets us, a backup diaper sticking out of his sweatshirt pocket; he explains he’s on dad duty for his daughter, so others will take care of us.  

Elder Audrey Tritt gestures us over: She has a feast laid for us in the welcome center and has been cooking since early morning. The same trailer where we bided our time during the rainstorm has been transformed, with tables full of caribou stew and salmon salad. Youth from the village are there to help, and several beaded dresses Tritt has made hang on the walls for decor. We sink gratefully into the food. 

Second Chief Mabeleen Christian explains Arctic Village is centered on caribou, founded here because the animals walk through town for weeks on end in their migration to and from the refuge, which is just across the river. 

They cannot be who they are without the caribou, cannot eat what they must eat, or carry on the cultural practices of their people, including hunting and using every part of this animal, says Sarah James, on the phone with me later. James, 82, is a revered Gwich’in elder and principal spokesperson for the Gwich’in people on the Porcupine caribou herd, named for the Porcupine River that flows through much of its migratory range.  

James helped found the Gwitch’in Steering Committee, which represents all Gwitch’in villages on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border. The Gwitch’in are part of a larger family of Indigenous people known as the Athapaskans, numbering more than 6,000 people living in 15 communities at the northwestern limits of the boreal forest.  

The Gwitch’in declared their opposition to drilling on the coastal plain in 1988, and have remained unified in that stance ever since. The committee and tribal governments have sued the Trump Administration to block drilling in the refuge; those suits are pending in U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska. 

The coastal plain, birthplace of the Porcupine caribou herd, is to the Gwich’in too sacred even to approach. They do not travel there to hunt the caribou, “even if we are starving,” James tells me.

The defiance of the Gwitch’in is met by the adamance of Inupiat drilling defenders. History is one reason why.  

The Inupiat live along a vast northernmost area of Alaska, including the North Slope — where the oil is. They are whaling people, turning to the sea for much of their subsistence needs. The 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act extinguished traditional aboriginal land claims and hunting and fishing rights across Alaska, in exchange for transferring title to some 44 million acres of land and awarding nearly $1 billion in compensation to 12 new private, for-profit Alaska Native Regional Corporations. The Inupiat’s Arctic Slope Regional Corporation has become the largest private corporation in Alaska, with some 16,000 employees in more than 110 companies operating in all 50 states, generating $6 billion in revenues in 2025 — much of it from oil industry development.

Three federally recognized Gwich’in tribes opted out of the settlement act, choosing instead to hold onto their 1.8 million acres of land, and a subsistence way of life that depends on the Porcupine herd.  

The North Slope Borough, the area’s regional government, taxes the infrastructure used to support oil and gas exploration and development, money that funds police and fire protection, education, village health clinics and more in the borough, and Inupiat villages within it. North Slope and Inupiat village leaders have long lobbied Congress to also open the coastal plain for drilling — from which they would benefit because they have subsurface development rights there.  

But Inupiat villages have their own divisions over drilling, too. It makes for turbulent local politics. 

As for the caribou, the Porcupine herd is caught in the middle of these competing interests. The herd’s sovereignty is as old as the land, articulated in their ancient pathways across their vast migratory range, which encompasses both Gwich’in and Inupiat lands — and the potential resources so coveted by outsiders. 

The most recent lease sale on the coastal plain, concluded in June, was a dud, just like the others before it, failing to turn up interest from big industry, which instead doubled down on leasing in the Western Arctic, where development is cheaper because oil infrastructure already exists. Yet seismic testing in the coastal plain could still get underway as soon as this winter.

The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state investment agency, was one of two bidders on the Bureau of Reclamation’s lease sale. The state agency has approved spending as much as $175 million on seismic testing, permitting and regulatory work. 

Seismic testing is controversial because of the damage it does — and the coastal plain is particularly vulnerable. According to a white paper published by a team of scientists in 2019 by the University of Alaska Fairbanks, damage from seismic testing in the coastal plain because of the fragility of the land would likely be “permanent, significant, and irreversible.”  

Their peer-reviewed paper, published in April 2020 in the journal Ecological Applications, found that current regulations are not adequate to eliminate impacts of seismic testing from the heavy equipment used to prospect for oil beneath the earth, including 90,000 pound “thumper trucks” that press a metal plate to the ground, sending sound waves deep below the surface to detect economically recoverable oil reserves.

Also involved are support vehicles, bulldozers and support camps, all creating human disturbance, and heavy equipment that leaves lasting ruts.

Part of the risk is unavoidable, because it is due to the terrain of the coastal plain, which is different from flatter areas of the North Slope.

Hilly terrain covers 45% of the area, which is difficult for seismic vehicles and camp trains to negotiate. Snowfall also is variable and can even be scant, and winds high, leaving exposed land vulnerable to being torn and rutted by heavy equipment.

Plants of the moist coastal plain also are easily crushed beyond recovery. 

Wildlife is also at risk from seismic testing, and oil development, the scientists found. Polar bear mothers will leave if disturbed in their dens — a death sentence for young cubs.  

Caribou, the most abundant large animal in the coastal plain, use the entire area — which would shrink if oil development proceeds. And while most birds in the area are migratory, many, such as the snowy owl, are year-round residents vulnerable to industrial activity.

Oil development also would also be complicated and costly here, the scientists found, because global warming is shortening winters and thawing permafrost — conditions that will only be worsened by increased burning of fossil fuel. Stoking global warming also will cause additional harm far beyond the boundaries of the refuge.   

For that reason, attorneys general from 14 states including Washington in June joined as friends of the Gwich’in and other plaintiffs in lawsuits against drilling on the coastal plain, citing harm to those states’ migratory birds, as well as damage from climate change, from more violent floods to forest fires. 

Those suits are pending in U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska — with a decision that could come as soon as Nov. 20. The outcome could affect seismic testing, by upending the leasing program that allows drilling. Permits also still have to be obtained before seismic testing can occur.

Meanwhile the Gwich’in Steering Committee is keeping up the fight, and asking supporters to contact their local, state and federal officials to oppose seismic activity, oil exploration and development in the refuge.

To the Gwitch’in, there is only one answer to this decades-long controversy in this land they call Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit: The Sacred Place Where Life Begins.  

“It is a human right to me to be who I am, to be caribou people,” says James, the Gwich’in elder. 

 “They need to leave it the way it is.”  

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the weight of the thumper trucks used in seismic testing. They weigh 90,000 pounds, not 9,000.