WINDS WERE POURING out of northwestern Alaska's Brooks Range at 45 knots, hurling our helicopter in oscillations that reminded me of crayfish swirling in a pot of boiling water. It was close to midnight, and the sun of the Arctic high summer was throwing a glare on 4 Papa Alpha's windshield. The pilot, Mad Mel Campbell, was smacking a stick of gum and wearing a grease-stained, pumpkin-orange flight suit with a .44 Magnum strapped to it. His face was wrapped in a gray beard, and the end of his nose was missing, hacked off years before during skin-cancer surgery. Earlier in the day, he'd given me the lowdown on his life so far: born in Nebraska, worked as a chopper pilot in ten different countries, two tours flying in Vietnam, three divorces. A guy who's been through all that, I figured, wasn't going to let the wind take him down. "There's a three-crash phenomenon with helicopter pilots," Mad Mel said. "If you can survive that many, you're OK."

"How many have you had?"

"Three."

Mad Mel was delivering me to Utukok, a remote temporary field camp in the western Brooks Range, where a team of U.S. Bureau of Land Management archaeologists was spending the summer searching for evidence of the first Americans. It is believed that these Siberian nomads crossed the Bering land bridge—a dry-land passage between Asia and North America that became submerged approximately 10,000 years ago—during the last ice age, around 20,000 years ago, a time when you could stand in what is now Los Angeles and watch saber-toothed cats stalk mammoths. My journey had begun two days earlier at the Fort Wainwright Army Base, in Fairbanks, Alaska. There, I boarded a single-engine Cessna Caravan loaded with supplies and bound for "the Slope," as locals call the North Slope, that vast expanse of largely unpeopled tundra lying between the Brooks Range and the Arctic Ocean. After a three-hour flight, the airplane dropped through a purple-rimmed hole in the clouds to land at a gravel airstrip on the tundra marked by a collection of tents, a parked helicopter, and a hand-painted sign reading, WHEN YOU ARE HERE, YOU'RE STILL NOWHERE. We were 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle, 160 miles west of the nearest road (which was gravel), and 200 miles from Barrow, Alaska, the closest town.

Getting that far was the easy part. Mad Mel and I then holed up in a tent for 24 hours while we waited for a break in the weather to attempt the final 125 miles to Utukok. That morning we'd made our first attempt but turned back 44 miles from our destination, in the face of a strong headwind.

"What's that gauge you're always looking at, Mel?" I asked.

"Fuel."

"What about it?"

"With this headwind, we'll be arriving with minus one gallons."

We started our second attempt at 11 P.M., and one hour into the flight we were bouncing up and down and tacking into the wind, our heads turned slightly to the right to see where we were going. I wrapped my hands around my waist to keep my internal organs in their proper places. I didn't relax until an hour later, when Mad Mel pointed out the windshield to a collection of eight tents in a narrow pass bordered by snowfields and steeply pitched mountains—my home for the next ten days.