ARCTIC TRIP 2006
has begun...

Check later for updates along the route.

To hear Clinton talk about Madness, click here.

ARCTIC TRIP 2004
is chronicled below.

I was only ten years old when the madness took me. A wide-eyed kid, weaned on stories of unpunished villains, unconquered mountains, and the tales of the Malamute Kid, I remember crouching by a campfire in the Yukon wilderness as our fishing guide cast the spell. The legend of the Mad Trapper and the Arctic Circle War - a terrifying manhunt across the roof of the world in 1932 - had everything a boy could want: adventure and mystery, gold and murder.

Even better, it was true. ...........................................................................[Click on Pictures for Captions]

Over the next two decades, the Mad Trapper followed me every time I went into the mountains to straddle ridges and hang from my axes. He tracked me into the courtroom, too, where my day job was to put far less robust criminals in jail. There was no way any of those strutting malefactors in their saggy baggies could run for ten minutes, much less 48 days, wearing 20-pound snowshoes in temperatures that burst the glass of mercury thermometers.

Then five years ago I tackled another childhood fantasy and became a writer. The success of my crime-and-climbing novels convinced me to pursue my other dreams before I lost my grip on them. Foremost among these was to join the manhunt in the land of Jack London. I needed to answer the question I'd been asking myself through years of winter mountaineering in Colorado and Wyoming: Could I take the Mad Trapper? No one had ever repeated-or even attempted-his winter route over the Canadian Arctic's Richardson Range.

The stranger made an impression when he walked into the trading post. His build was remarkably powerful and his blue eyes radiated hostility. People assumed he was a fugitive from the States, perhaps in search of some fabled lost Klondike gold mine. He barely spoke while buying $700 worth of ammunition and gear.

His presence was so unsettling that the local missionary reported his presence to a RCMP post 40 miles upriver, and a Mountie was dispatched to interrogate him. The stranger gave little information other than a false name: Albert Johnson.

A few days later he disappeared into the wilderness.

We made far less of an impression when we staggered into a Dawson City bar 72 years later. Half-blinded by the mid-day darkness and with our eyeballs frozen by the 35 below cold, we bellied up to the bar in serious need of some confidence, even if alcohol-induced.

The local drink was something called a "Sour Toe Cocktail." The bartender produced a jar of salt that contained six frostbitten toes. He took one with a particularly long, yellowed nail and plunked it down into a shot of whiskey.

I was desperate to show Mark and Taylor, the two climbing partners I was dragging 3,500 miles north, that I was man enough to lead them in the footsteps of the Mad Trapper. I resolved to take the toe into my mouth, drain the shot around it, then defiantly spit the foul thing onto the bar.

But with the first scratch of the nail on my upper lip, my courage faltered. It took everything I had just to hold the whiskey down. The toe never passed my teeth. It was an ominous sign, for the next day we'd be casting off on the final leg of our approach, the infamous Dempster Highway.

On Christmas Day, 1931, a native trapper mushed into the RCMP post and complained about someone springing his traps in the vicinity of Rat River. Constables King and Bernard hooked up their dog teams and made a two-day journey north to the frozen river, where, on a knoll above it, they found an 8'x12' cabin. The occupant stared out at them from behind a tiny window but said nothing and wouldn't open the door. Frustrated and half-frozen, the constables rode on to Aklavik for a search warrant.

They returned with reinforcements on New Year's Eve. Corporal King approached alone to serve the warrant. As he raised his hand to knock, he was shot in the chest-right through the door. An epic 20-hour, 80-mile mush to the nearest doctor in 40 below temperatures saved King's life.

The Dempster Highway roughly parallels the Peel River as it flows north, the route the Mad Trapper took when he first entered the wilderness. He rode the river in a bark canoe; we skated on snow in Puffy, my big white pickup.

Although the Dempster's gravel surface is popular in summer with tourists, in the winter we saw only one other vehicle. Thumping muffled music, we rolled through a never-ending night, seeing little but stars, black spruce, and the silhouette of the Tombstone Mountains. Occasionally a burly moose would give us a thrill by juking and jiving in the headlights as we slid - usually sideways and screaming - past him.

At the ferry crossings we simply bounced down onto ice bridges and skidded across. In what our watches called evening, we stopped in the middle of the road for more than an hour to stare up at a brilliant green tornado arcing across a black sky - the Northern Lights. The silence was so overwhelming that we could hear our pulses moving the tiny hairs in our ears.

The Mounties returned to the cabin in force on January 9th , when it was even colder. The posse consisted of nine men, 42 dogs, and nine pounds of dynamite. The man who'd called himself Johnson the previous summer answered their shouts to surrender with nothing but lead. For the next 15 hours a gunfight raged around the cabin.

It seemed unbelievable that one man was holding off nine. A decision was made to dynamite the cabin. A charge was warmed in armpits and groins then lobbed onto the roof. When the smoke cleared, a Mountie approached with a flashlight to examine the rubble, only to have the light shot out of his hand.

Frozen and bewildered, the Mounties again retreated.

The only facility between Dawson and the Mackenzie Delta is Eagle Plains, a government-sponsored outpost with food, drink, beds, gifts, gasoline, and aviation fuel (planes equipped with skis can land right on the highway). One person was running the entire complex when we arrived - a tattooed and studded young woman partially dressed in tight jeans and a halter top.

She served us beer and split pea soup in the empty Mad Trapper Lounge, asking, like everyone else we'd met since entering the Yukon, "What are you fellas doing up here, ay?" It always led to more questions and the inevitable conclusion that we were idiots. Our standard answer became one that was designed to end the questioning: an unshaven, six-foot-six Mark scowled, "We're bounty hunters, ma'am."

Throughout January, teams of Mounties and volunteers combed the foothills of the Richardson Range. It should have been simple-a man wearing a pair of homemade 20-pound snowshoes was no match for well-supplied teams of dogs that could travel up to a hundred miles a day. But Johnson was almost unbelievably swift as well as shrewd. He would often run backwards in his snowshoes to fool those tracking him, or he would double-back and attempt to ambush his pursuers.

The Mounties were awed by his speed and endurance. They found his efforts super-human. They couldn't understand how he kept on running and fighting in the extreme cold when he couldn't even pause to light a fire.

Newspapers all over the continent began picking up the story. "ROUTS MOUNTIES IN ARCTIC BATTLE - Trapper, Though Demented, Holds Cabin on Yukon Trail After Two Attacks" began the New York Times' front page coverage. Then, over the following weeks, "MAD TRAPPER FLEES INTO ARCTIC NIGHT," "MAD, HUNTED TRAPPER KILLS CONSTABLE," "SILENCE CLOAKS FATE OF MAD ARCTIC KILLER," and "ARCTIC KILLER KEEPS UP RACE FOR ALASKA LINE."

The Dempster Highway ends at the town of Inuvik, unless you want to drive on sea ice to Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic Ocean. With my truck so overloaded with skis, crampons, ropes and dehydrated dinners that it was riding on its pads, we took a pass.

Inuvik, population 3,500, is the largest Canadian town north of the Arctic Circle. It boasts a department store, a vegetarian café, two bookstores, and a brightly lit library with free Internet access. When the pilot I'd been negotiating with via radiophone told us he couldn't fly until the temperatures rose above -40, we set about exploring all five of the town's bars.

Thankfully for our health, the pilot phoned the next morning. He let us know that the temperature on the lake had risen to negative 38. He was pretty sure he could get his plane into the air.

At one point the Mounties managed to corner him in an ice canyon. Once again he refused to yield, answering their pleas with disturbingly well-aimed shots. Despite the Mounties' vastly superior position and firepower, Johnson managed to hold them at bay. He killed one who tried to charge his hiding place. While the dead man's comrades retrieved the body, Johnson cut hand-and-foot holds in a vertical ice cliff with his hatchet and escaped.

After warming the engine for a couple of hours with a portable gasoline heater, we ripped the doors off the little Cessna 175 and stuffed in the skis and sleds. An hour later, in the midday twilight, I had a glimpse of the Richardsons from the air. They were bigger and steeper than I'd ever imagined.

The pilot and I landed on lake ice five miles from where Johnson's cabin had once stood, and more than 100 miles from our hoped-for pick up point on the west side of the range. When the pilot took off to retrieve Mark and Taylor, I was left alone in the dark and silence for two hours. It was so cold that each breath burned my throat going in, then, coming out, coated my face with ice.

To keep from freezing - and panicking - I put on my skis, harnessed a sled, and started to break trail. On the lake's ice, it was a piece of cake. But when I tried to force my way overland, I discovered an obstacle as horrible as the cold.

The willows rimming the lake formed an almost impenetrable fence - thorny, grasping, and supporting a neck-deep moat of soft snow. By the time Mark and Taylor landed, my "trail" had progressed only 20 feet off the lake. They'd unloaded and the plane was gone by the time I'd disentangled myself and returned to the ice.

After a huddle, we headed for a part of the lake where the willows looked less dense. We'd skied a few hundred yards, hauling our sleds, when I heard a sharp pop. The buckle of one of my boots lay in the snow. I tucked it in a pocket and continued. Five minutes later, another pop and another buckle in the snow. By the time we'd wrestled our way far enough through the willows to justify a camp, all my buckles were gone.

It was gloomy night. Bad, but not bad enough yet that we needed to break into the pharmaceuticals in the medicine kit. Instead we entertained ourselves by drinking slushy Jagermeister and marveling at the way our urine crackled just as it hit the snow.

In desperation, the Mounties' commander requested a plane, something that had never before been used in a manhunt. Days later WWI ace "Wop" May - the man who decoyed the Red Baron to his death - arrived in his Bellanca monoplane. He began searching from the air as well as ferrying men, dogs, and supplies forward. The tracks he found led directly into the Richardson Mountains - peaks rising 6,000 feet off the Delta, just as a blizzard was sweeping down from the Beaufort Sea.

The Mounties sealed the only two passes, just in case, then breathed a sigh of relief. There was no way a man who'd been living off the land for more than 30 days - without shelter, food, or the warmth of a fire - could scale the peaks in a blizzard. It was impossible. He would surely die trying.

The next morning I woke up feeling hopeful. We were alive after a night at 50 below, and Taylor had already started a fire. Mark laid bacon in a pan then filled the tipi with confetti feathers when he accidentally bumped the hot stovepipe. I grabbed a boot shell, confident I could figure something out for buckles. When I crammed my foot inside, the tongue broke off in my hand.

Duct tape wouldn't stick in the cold, and we had nothing that would keep my foot in the boot and the boot on the ski. I managed to hobble a few miles behind Mark and Taylor, touring the willow-choked landscape where the Arctic Circle War had begun, but we didn't get far.

What would the Mad Trapper have done? Killed a moose and sewn a new mukluk. Woven a pair of snowshoes out of the damn willows. What did we do? We warmed up our rented satellite phone.

Two weeks later, after the blizzard had passed, a native trapper discovered peculiar tracks on the west side of the mountains. They were heading toward Alaska and going strong.

The Mounties were astounded. But they were also determined to live up to their unofficial motto of always getting their man. May's plane was dug out of the snow, armed with homemade beer-bottle bombs, and put to work ferrying men, dogs, and guns over the mountains. Men on skis and sleds began crisscrossing the region. Five days later one team of Mounties, coming around an oxbow bend in the Eagle River, ran head-on into their prey.

Johnson turned to flee. He'd run only a few steps before one Mountie knelt and fired at his back. Johnson whirled and snapped off his own shot. Incredibly, he struck the Mountie dead center, the bullet passing through his elbow, knee, and chest.

Johnson soon found himself surrounded from the banks of the river, and with a plane bearing down on him from the sky. He burrowed into the snow and ignored their calls for surrender. He was hit nine times before he stopped shooting.

That night I huddled in my bag one last time, the hood cinched down to an opening the size of a quarter. A wet mask of ice clung to my beard and I tried not to think about sleeping in a warm bed the next night. I tried, too, not to confuse the bottle of Jagermeister in my right hand with the pee bottle in my left.

Despite all our training and modern gear, the truth was that we were no match for the Mad Trapper. We couldn't have caught the Mad Trapper's crippled grandmother. I consoled myself with the knowledge that this was just the first round.

I'd be back.

RETURN TO HOME PAGE