The Brooks Range – Claude Fiddler

Ever since Bob Marshall declared the Brooks Range “the last great pristine wilderness” far northern Alaska has been held in esteem and wonder by explorers and conservationists alike. In the early 20th century, conservationists such as Marshall and Olaf and Mardy Murie already feared the threat of burgeoning western civilization on this remote and vast landscape.

With those threats in mind, the Murie’s lobbied successfully to set aside a third of the Brooks Range as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), not only to preserve the landscape, but to assure that the migration routes and calving grounds of the great caribou herds would remain intact.

Both Marshall and the Murie’s had close, respectful relationships with the native Gwich’in people and their advocacy for protecting the north was as much for the landscape as it was to protect the Gwich’in way of life from industrial expansion and exploitation. Then, in 1977, the construction of the Trans Alaska Pipeline put a 20th century swath through the heart of it.

The images in Claude Fiddler’s new book: “The Brooks Range; Journey, Life & Art in the Gwazhal” exemplifies the wilderness aspect of the range. Over a twenty year period Fiddler made more than a dozen trips into the Brooks Range. Away from his home range of the Sierra Nevada, Fiddler ventured into a range of unknowns, physically, visually and perhaps, spiritually.

But it would be unfair to say “The Brooks Range” only delves into the physical beauty of place, it also includes raw images of 21st century life north of the Arctic circle. Additional essays of adventure, life and future of the range by authors Roman Dial, Adeline Raboff, Caroline Van Hemert and Nancy Lord complete a sense of place.

Now, the Gwazhal is in a state of uncertainty. As the vast caribou herds dwindle, what will be required to provide for the arctic villages in the 21st century? With new roads like the Ambler slated to be cut deep into wilderness, 1.5 million acres of ANWR opening for oil exploration, the battle to protect and preserve the far north is far from over.

“The Brooks Range” is a timely release, presenting the viewer with a landscape little changed from what Marshall experienced, while instilling an awareness and a call to action to keep it that way.

Claude Fiddler’s new book of photographs of the Alaska Brooks Range, or Gwazhal, made during many visits to these Arctic mountains in the past 20 years, is something different from most collections of mountain photography.

While there are many breathtaking vistas of these primordial peaks, with striking light and atmospheric effects, Claude also brings us not only into the mountainous landscape but the journey to them and through them, as though we, the viewers, are standing next to him, intimate with his gaze as he treks and stops and looks—taking in all that is before him—and then makes a photograph.

Not just any photograph; but a photograph which captures his omnivorous vision, from which no detail, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, escapes him. From subtly colored lichen clinging to ancient weather-beaten rocks, to a dead caribou fawn cradling itself on a fresh bed of green ground cover sprouting momentarily in the brief Arctic summer, to remote mountains shrouded in fog, ominous and beautiful at the same time, to large swaths of this awesome, almost alien terrain that has existed for millennia.

Viewing these photographs, one sees this unworldly and foreboding landscape, which seems indifferent to everything but wind and light, through the eyes of not just a master photographer but of a man whose vision has been honed by years of walking through the world and absorbing all of it through his body, his eyes, his mind, and his soul.

This is what Claude puts on the pages of this book of photographs for us to partake in.

I’ve never visited the Brooks Range, and now, having seen Claude Fiddler’s exquisite portfolio of photographs, I feel I may not need to. His images are so gorgeous, immersive, and transcendent that all I may need to do in the future, were I to have a hankering to go and see and experience for myself the region, is enter the pages of his book. The images in it are that good.

Let me begin with the book’s first photograph – “Storm clouds and peaks at Sheenjek and Hulahula River divide.” The image is split horizontally. The upper half is mottled gray cloud, with hints of blue and yellow, suggesting an opening or a closing of the sky. A storm has recently arrived, or is on its way out. Either way, it’s a turbulent sky. The terrain below is still, so that a tension arises in the image.

The clouds just touch the peaks – a sea of them dissolving into the horizon. Beneath the convergence of sky and land is another divide formed by two rivers. Snow dusts the upper slopes, while a riot of green, yellow, and bronze hues descends to the waterways. It could be spring or autumn. It looks cold, but not wintry cold.

As the book’s opening image, “Storm clouds and peaks at Sheenjek and Hulahula River divide” does its job admirably well. It sets a stage of rugged terrain, atmospheric turmoil, and fast-changing light. It speaks of exploration, and an artist’s pursuit of adventure and beauty in a remote land. It evokes awe and the mystery of a spiritual landscape – which the Brooks Range, known as the Gwazhal, is held to be among the indigenous people of the region.

The other photographs (80 in all, made over a 20-year period) are as good as the opening one. Each contains the jaw-dropping beauty of an Ansel Adams alpine photograph and color palette of one by Richard Misrach. What sets Claude Fiddler’s work apart is that he combines both in a single image. The terrain is rendered at majestic scales and in breathtaking hues.

The book contains scenes of human despoilation as well as untouched wildness, and explanatory words by the author as well as short essays about nature, spirit, memory, and an adventurous life by writers well-versed in the Alaskan Arctic and Brooks Range. All are fitting companions to the imagery. A gorgeous map is also there. But I keep going back to the images.

Among my favorites are “Stream and fall color in Romanzof Mountains,” which looks like a watercolor painting, and “Clouds and hills at Drain Creek and Kongakut River,” for its quality of light and the way it lays bare the exoskeleton of the planet. But there is no ‘best’ picture in this book. They all are wonderful.

I moved to Mammoth Lakes, California in 2015 as a young photographer, excited to experience all the Sierra had to offer. Each summer, I yearned for the melting of the last snows on the trails leading to the high country. There was no feeling better than stuffing my camera into my backpack and setting out into the wilderness for an adventure.

Each trip was a series of discoveries where I gained firsthand knowledge of places that, to me, had only existed in the abstract on maps. On those trips I frequently found myself alone in remote basins, watching sublime light bounce off the landscape. In those moments I often felt like I was the first person to discover those fantastic places.

But of course I wasn’t the first person to visit any of those remote Sierra locations. People had lived among them for thousands of years. And photographers had been exploring them with cameras in hand for over a century. But when I came across the works of these photographers, it did nothing to diminish the joy of my own discovery.

This is how I first came to know of Claude Fiddler. I purchased a copy of his beautiful book, The High Sierra: Wilderness of Light. Within its pages I found photos that hinted at hundreds of adventures in the Sierra. At the time, digital photography was exploding in popularity, but seeing Claude’s film photos in print was entirely different.

More importantly, the photos in that book have a “realness” so profound that it evokes a deep sense of Being There. When I look at the photos in The High Sierra, I can almost smell the mountain air and feel the wind on my skin.

Fast forward 10 years to 2025, I had opened my own fine art print gallery in Lone Pine. One day a man walked in and introduced himself: Claude Fiddler. Our conversation quickly turned to the mountains, his High Sierra book, and the power of photo books.

It was a surprise and honor when, months later, Claude asked me to review his latest book on the Brooks Range. I’ve been to Alaska a few times, but never the Brooks Range. When I asked what drew him there, his answer was simple: “There’s something special about the light up there.”

Having now studied the hundreds of photos in this collection, I can tell the Brooks Range is a place that guards its light carefully, releasing it in controlled bursts. To capture it, you must live in the landscape and learn its moods.

For example, the photo on page 29 shows clouds struck by sunset light after days of rain and gray skies. Every image tells a story of patience, effort, and presence in the landscape.

The photo on page 42 may seem like simple rocks, but closer inspection reveals mosses and lichens in dozens of colors. In a landscape of peaks and valleys, such details are easily missed unless you have a deep eye for nature.

As I leaf through these pages, I am struck by a paradox: almost no trees, animals, or people appear, yet the book feels full of life. Snow on peaks, tundra color, and a curled caribou fawn all tell stories of existence, death, renewal, and endurance.

In this way, The Brooks Range does something essential in art: it helps us understand the world anew, ignites imagination, and connects us emotionally to a place we may never otherwise experience.

For as long as I can remember, I have always loved photography. Some of my earliest memories are hiking and taking photos with my father, Robin Ingraham Jr. The landscape always spoke to me. My dad bought me my first camera when I was three years old and taught me as I grew up. I learned to see the landscape's elements—streams, mountains, and meadows—as intertwined shapes and colors.

The Brooks Range: Journey, Life & Art in the Gwazhał by Claude Fiddler captures the essence of the vast Brooks Range landscape in Arctic Alaska. (Gwazhał is the Gwich’in name for the range.) Fiddler juxtaposes landscapes with human elements in and around the mountains. The Gwazhał is a land few of us know, in many ways unimaginable.

Fiddler’s lens captures wild rivers flowing through enormous valleys, storm-laden skies above endless mountains, and glacier-carved landscapes. Though most of the ice has retreated, remnant glaciers remain clinging to the peaks. Claude and his contributors—Roman Dial, Adeline Peter Raboff, Caroline Van Hemert, and Nancy Lord—share stories of patient exploration in Arctic Alaska.

The photos and stories depict the hardships and dedication behind producing The Brooks Range: Journey, Life & Art in the Gwazhał, a compilation of decades exploring the Alaskan backcountry.

Indigenous people have lived here for thousands of years. Fiddler’s photos evoke ethereal moods created from cloud-veiled peaks above glacial-carved valleys. Some images reveal the harsh Arctic wilderness, while others show the struggle of existence in this remote environment—a contrast of beauty and survival.

Over twenty years, Claude ventured far from his Sierra Nevada home, enduring numerous expeditions to produce this collection. His contributors reveal their enduring bonds with the land and its history.

Roman Dial provides history from early humans to modern Arctic Alaska and shares personal encounters in the Gwazhał. Adeline Raboff describes the formation of the Brooks Range and ancestral stories. Caroline Van Hemert documents caribou migration along the Noatak River and its lasting impact. Nancy Lord examines land management and what is at stake for the future.

Claude Fiddler’s photographs demonstrate a masterful balance of geometric complexity, focal depth, and elegant light values. Images like Approaching Storm, Fire Creek convey scale and atmosphere within the Arctic mountains, where clouds obscure peaks and distort perception of distance and depth.

Throughout the day, soft Arctic light reveals gray and brown mountain landscapes alongside melting glacier walls. Tundra vegetation adds vivid color against cloud-filled skies. Rugged life contrasts with stoic mountain beauty.

These photographs reveal an eternal landscape, present across past, present, and future. Yet as Nancy Lord’s afterword suggests, such permanence may be an illusion. Still, Fiddler’s book renders the Alaskan landscape timeless in a world forever in motion.

There are artists whose work you follow the way you follow a river — not always knowing where it leads but trusting the current. Claude Fiddler has been that kind of guide for me. I first came to his photographs through the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin, landscapes I know with intimacy, places where his camera seemed less like an instrument of capture than of listening.

In those earlier books, including his previous Inside the High Sierra, Fiddler’s great gift was restraint: he stepped aside and let the land speak, offering images so unmediated they felt less like photographs than like memory itself.

The Brooks Range: Journey, Life, and Art in the Gwazhal marks something new. I have never stood in Alaska’s Brooks Range, that vast and imperiled spine of the Arctic, but I have followed its fate with growing urgency since the late 1990s. To encounter this place at last through Fiddler’s eyes is both a gift and a provocation.

What surprises and moves me most about this book is the shift in Fiddler’s photographic language. Where his Sierra and Great Basin work presented landscapes with documentary fidelity, many of the images here veer toward abstraction, as though the land itself demanded a different kind of attention. Lake Peters Reflection shimmers between document and dream. Swirling Cloud and Fall Color above Canning River becomes a visual argument about impermanence. Dead Caribou Fawn and Nucleus Mountain achieves tenderness and scale in a single frame.

Whether this transformation arose from Arctic weather, artistic evolution, or the Brooks Range insisting on its own terms, the results are extraordinary. More than once, I felt I was looking at the ghost of Eliot Porter, hovering just behind Claude’s compositions.

As I have come to expect from Fiddler’s books, the photographs are deepened by outstanding essays from Dial, Raboff, Van Hemert, and Nancy Lord — each one earning its place beside the images. But this volume breaks new ground by making room for the people who call this landscape home.

For the Gwich’in and Inupiat, threats to this land are not abstractions — they are threats to identity, memory, and survival. Their presence here is essential.

Nancy Lord’s closing essay finds the heart of what this book means: that simply knowing these mountains exist — largely unmolested by the modern world — is enough to sustain hope for caribou, wolves, tundra flowers, deep silence, and the cultures tied to them.

There is one final irony I cannot let pass. Claude Fiddler’s finest work — the zenith of a long career rooted near home — comes not from familiar ground, but from a far edge of the earth. Perhaps that is how it should be. The best journeys take us somewhere we could not have predicted and return something we did not know we needed.

When Alaska comes up in conversation, one needs to specify which Alaska. There are many. Is it Southeast, a fisherman’s paradise surrounded by ice fields, fjords and great glaciers? The volcanic islands stretching out to Russia? Maybe the vast interior, or Anchorage, a city evolving from one damned rush after another.

Claude Fiddler has provided another view. His new book, a presentation of the land seen through the lenses of his cameras, is a stunning look at this little-known wonderland of peaks, rivers and valleys. A land so different that it appears almost fictional: river plains covered by miniature trees, mountains where the characters of speculative fiction seem to live.

It is a wondrous look at one of Earth’s genuine remaining wild places. The author allows a pause between the photographs by including essays from Roman Dial, Adeline Raboff, Caroline Van Hemert, and Nancy Lord, along with a personal account of a late spring trek that includes moments of humor and danger.

The essayists provide histories of the region, the lives of those who inhabit it, a journey alongside migrating caribou, and reflections on the risks posed by efforts to open protected Arctic lands to exploitation.

Some readers may notice the photographs of small communities among the wilderness images. They reveal a people who once moved with the caribou and maintained seasonal encampments for survival. Though now settled in modern villages, their traditions and ancestral spirit remain present in hunting and fishing practices.

Years ago, I hiked, camped, and lived in wild Alaska. Through these photographs and essays, Claude Fiddler offers a powerful return — a reflective journey back into that landscape and its enduring spirit.

It would be hard not to underestimate how much effort must be expended to gather the views of our great, northern wilderness that you’ll find in Claude’s Brooks Range collection.

In 1985, I spent 21 days traveling 350 miles down the Noatak River. It was three days before a single aircraft of any kind crossed the sky — and it was a Super Cub. Northern Alaska is a giant place, way, way off the beaten path.

Nowhere else will you find so much of this faraway range in pictures, many quite good ones at that, doing more than just letting you see this chilly place where so many caribou roam and the solace of the wild is so abundant.

—Joseph Holmes

Fiddler’s artistic sensitivity to varied geographical scales and perspectives captures a dynamic landscape alive with the movement of light, color, and form.

But in contrast to his earlier books The High Sierra: Wilderness of Light (1995) and A Vast and Ancient Wilderness: Images of the Great Basin (1997), Fiddler encountered in the Gwazhał what he calls the “otherness” of the landscape.

—Claude Fiddler