Retired from college teaching, still healing from combat in Vietnam, Joe Wilkins found peace and solace in some of the most remote wilderness in the United States – Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. For a dozen years he volunteered for the National Park Service, accompanying rangers on patrols into remote corners of this 8,472,566-acre preserve in northern Alaska. He took many photos and kept careful notes of the places and people he encountered in his travels there, and in this photo-memoir he shares his experience of this remote and remarkable landscape.

Wilkins’ photography is the strength of this book. Most photos have captions, but some do not, and the scene or anecdote depicted without a caption are grist for his text. Many of his photos are stunning, especially those of a backpack into the Arrigetch peaks in the Endicott Mountains of the Brooks Range. On this trip he and his companion encountered days of cold rain and mist, grizzlies, roaring streams, incredibly dramatic mountain faces, and maybe a few bugs, all qualities of many Alaska wilderness treks. Sharp fins of rock tower into the sky, dusted with snow. The Arrigetch are a popular destination for climbers, and the backpack patrol aimed to determine how climbers were impacting this part of the range.

As I read I found Wilkins’ writing style uninspiring, not up to the quality of his photos, yet the book works as a portrayal of the place and his deep love of it. I have not been to Gates but have visited other parts of wild Alaska, and Wilkins’ photos of lakes, rivers, wildlife, wildflowers, misty days, and raingear-clad explorers captures what it’s like up there. If you travel in Alaska backcountry, and most of Alaska is backcountry, you must have a high threshold for discomfort and be prepared, as Wilkins advises, for all sorts of challenges: cold rain and occasional hot sun, bears contesting your presence, lots of bugs, annoying ankle-turning hummocks of cotton grass, risk of injury with no likelihood of assistance, all of which contribute to the essence of a wilderness experience.

Wilkins divides his book into six chapters and an epilogue. We travel with him into the Arrigetch, then on wild rivers – the Alatna, John, Kobuk, Noatak, North Fork of the Koyukuk, and Tinayguk. He travels these rivers in an inflatable canoe and tiny Alpacka rafts, encountering caribou, moose, wolves, grizzlies, and other denizens of these watersheds, sprinkling his account with natural history tidbits. The only way in and out of some of these rivers is by float or bush plane and he shares many aerial views of braided rivers and, in the next chapter, lakes and lesser streams. He visited and photographed Walker, Galbraith, Takahula, Wild, Agiak, Amiloyak, Ernie, Pet, and Oolah lakes. Collectively the photos from the air, the rivers, lakes, and ridges of mountains, tundra, river rapids, wildflowers, campsites, and wildlife offer a sense of this place that might only be exceeded by trips there, and the wilderness traveler in me salivates at the prospect.

The final two chapters describe the airports and airstrips and some of the “remarkable people” Joe encountered on his many trips in Gates. These are appropriately short chapters which explain access to this remote area and acknowledge some of the people who have made his experiences up there possible. Their brevity is appropriate because the book is about the wilderness, and Gates is truly the preeminent wilderness national park with very little development in and around it.

Anyone thinking of traveling into Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve would gain much from this book. The photos alone will give a sense of what the rewards and challenges of such a trip would be. The text offers helpful advice on how to get to parts of this vast park, what to prepare for, and what gear might make a trip safer and satisfying. For those of us who cannot make the trip, Wilkins provides ample fodder for good armchair adventure, and his final words say much.

Backpacking through the Brooks Range is akin to walking or dancing on thin ice. A single misstep during any one of the tens of thousands of steps I take each time I visit the arctic wilderness could have life-changing or life-ending consequences. I understand that reality, and I have taken reasonable precautions. But as the Alaskans might say:

This has been a time for me to dance!