For a trip that was dominated by gray skies, I find it ironic that many of my images from the Noatak are anchored in the color blue. It’s not the bright blue of a clear-day sky, rather it is the deep blue of late evening, or that of the open ocean, dark and churning.
The clouds, subjected to the relentless wind tearing over the valley from the south were ripped to tatters, streaks of open sky above glowing through the gray. Or the clouds were shaped and formed into long UFO-like lenticular clouds, gliding through the wind-shattered air.
On rare evenings, patches of clear sky allowed the clouds and water to merge into almost the same hue and intensity of blue. The Noatak, in flood, ran gray and murky in the daylight, but upon evening, the silty water reflected the sky in a million facets. The surface appeared jeweled and shining, unlike any clear-running river I’ve seen.
