Sketching North
Report from Dalton Highway Artist Residency Part One
This year I am so honored to have been selected as the artist in residence for the Bureau of Land Management to do a week-long residency along the Dalton Highway. I planned to travel north along the Dalton (also called the Haul Road) August 15-22, leaving Fairbanks and traveling to Coldfoot to spend two nights, and then to travel to and spend the rest of my week at the Toolik Field Station. In this post I’ll share my experience and sketches from the first two days heading north to Toolik. In the next entry I’ll share about my time at the field station on Toolik Lake. I’ve been out on the tundra in Western Alaska, but I have never been north of the Brooks Range in the interior (though I was also very lucky to get to do an artist residency in the Gates of the Arctic back in 2010, which you can read a little about here and to have spent some time in the Brooks Range). I was very excited to get to see the North Slope.
On Tuesday morning mid-August I jumped in a government truck at the BLM office in Fairbanks with Laura, a seasonal ranger who also had grocery orders for folks in Coldfoot. I had two duffle bags with rubber boots, my zero degree sleeping bag (super glad I had both of those things), a bunch of art supplies, my camera, a few days of food, and whatever else I thought I might need. It had been hot in early August in Fairbanks and I wasn’t sure what the weather was going to be like up north.
We drove to Yukon crossing where the Haul Road crosses the Yukon River and met up with another ranger, Tyra, who runs the Interagency Visitor Center in Coldfoot. Tyra explained some of the history of the highway, land management of Alaska, and has a background in geology so we would stop at lots of rivers and look for rocks :) We talked about how much of the protected land in Alaska and on either side of the Dalton Highway came about as a reaction and a balance to building the oil pipeline. Even Toolik Field Station where scientists research climate change and the arctic came about and exists because there is a road there, and the road is there for the oil and the pipeline.
I stayed in Coldfoot in a little cabin that used to be a visitor center and the next day we got to hike up Marion Creek to the falls. I loved taking some time to travel north and to spend two nights in Coldfoot before we left the trees behind. The boreal forest starts to change in the arctic; the trees get smaller and the understory is often mostly reindeer lichen. It was magical.
My sketching strategy was to sit down and work on a landscape sketch if I was in a place with nice weather where I could spend a while. The fall colors were lovely and changed each day and as we traveled north. My camera blends all of the colors on the landscape together so don’t seem as vibrant as they do in person, so it was fun to spend time capturing this. For quicker sketching sessions I like to do some simple color swatches and to take note of what I observe with my different senses. I’d also collect some fallen spruce cones or leaves to sketch later in the evening when I had more time.
I collected some reindeer lichen to make cyanotype prints from. Cyanotype is a good way to capture these branching complicated structures and I’ve been having fun brining some supplies with me.
Near the falls at Marion Creek we found some iron precipice which I collected to make paint from. I usually keep little bags in my sketching set up to collect things but this time I had to improvise an envelope from a page from my sketchbook. It was striking to see the orange stain next to the blue-white water of the rest of the creek.
On the hike back I took an hour to stop and sketch the landscape. I had a hard time getting the mountains right in the distance so I used a grid to help me with the proportions in that part. I usually sketch loosely with pencil, then refine that drawing with pen and then add watercolor. While I let the watercolor dry I enjoyed some snacks, berries along the trail, and sitting in the sun by the river.
After my day in Coldfoot, Tyra and I took the next day to drive up to Toolik. The leaves kept changing and the trees got smaller. The weather got colder and more cloudy as we went. I didn’t have much time to sketch, but it was nice to stop at all the pull offs and take photos and spend some time.
There is a wayside at the “last spruce tree” which actually isn’t there anymore. Once we got up to the Chandalar the trees pretty much disappeared and the landscape opened up with vast tundra. The colors were striking: red, orange, and yellow tundra with strips of green near wet areas and purple-gray mountains in the distance to contrast. We made it to Toolik Field Station where I got to spend the rest of my week enjoying the tundra, the rain, and learning about the scientific research that is happing there. More on that in my next post, but thanks for journeying along with me this far.
What a great idea to take cyanotype paper with you! I also want to make myself a little grid window now too.
Thanks so much for sharing this! I always loved looking at the Dalton Highway section of the Milepost (long before the Internet). One of the pictures had a person biking the highway and I always thought that seemed like an amazing thing to. I love that the Dalton Highway Artist Residency is a real thing and that you're the artist. How wonderful.