The Brooks Range is Full of Magic 

Something really special about summer in Alaska is the short but magical window when we can access some of the most wild, remote places. One of the most special? The Brooks Range. Located within the Arctic Circle, I can’t help but keep coming back to these mountains.

This trip consisted of myself, Luc, and our good friend Will. The three of us hiked and packrafted our way around the Delong Mountains, surrounded by wildlife, sweeping vistas, and endless sunlight

How We Planned Our Brooks Range Trip

Planning to spend time in this extra-wild area takes a lot of effort. The Brooks Range does not have any roads or developed trails. A successful trip in this wild place requires hiring a bush plan to take you to a remote landing strip and doing lots of research to find good routes nearby.

Lining up the timing also feels like threading a needle. We try to go late enough so that the snow has had time to melt away for easier walking, but early...

Hey there! 

I recently had the opportunity to have a chat with on the Connect with Sheila Botelho Podcast. Sheila is a certified health coach,  lifestyle entrepreneur, and mom of two, best known for her online wellness programs, mentoring, and self-love passion. Her podcast focuses on how to connect to your soul's calling and take action on it. 

We covered a lot of ground in this short interview, and I hope you'll enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed chatting with Sheila! 

The title of this podcast episode is: Building a Strong Body & Mind

Topics covered include: 

• My role models for the active life I now live: 3:57
• How I combined my passion for the outdoors and mental health and started my business: 5:16
• Cultivating mental strength: 10:26
• Luc and mine's traverse of the Western Brooks Range: 17:09
• Gaining courage to step into new experiences: 18:56
• How to put the nervous system to work for us: 22:41
• The evolution of faith in my life: 30:50...

Luc and I had lots of ideas about potential summer trips for 2020, but when COVID hit and rural villages across Alaska shut down-- with rightful concerns about limited medical infrastructure and intergenerational trauma from the Spanish Flu-- we knew we needed to adapt our recreation plans to keep us self-supported, out of villages & on the road system.

Luc put his trip-planning skills to work and came up with a ~350 mile loop that started & ended on the Haul Road, got us out to the Sadlerochit Mountains (which we'd wanted to explore since we floated past them in our 2017 Arctic Refuge Traverse) and incorporated a food drop that some friends of ours already had planned. We pulled in Will Koeppen (the pics in this post are Will's, & I'd encourage reading the daily journal entries he posted on his Instagram, starting here) and hit the road.

My biggest take-away from this trip was how well the nervous system and mind/body...

In June 2019, my husband Luc Mehl, our friend Josh Mumm, and I set off on a three-week traverse across the Western third of Alaska's Brooks Range. Luc and I had traversed the two other thirds of the Brooks Range in previous summer trips, and were curious to see what we'd find on this final and most remote section.

We started on the Ambler River, on a drainage we'd floated past on a previous trip and had wanted to check out at the time. Then it was raining, cold, and the Ambler was a flooded muddy brown color, so even though we were tempted to stop we didn't. This time it was pretty different! 

Luc & I had done some walking along the Noatak River a few years back in the worst tussocks we'd ever seen, so we were mentally prepared for slow and tricky travel. Incredibly we found the opposite -- lots of nice hard, flat-ish ground, and much brush. 

But the best part was that the further west we traveled the more caribou trails we ran into. By the...