Over the next few days, Kil'iii entered a world with almost no humans. "Bears were everywhere on the beaches," he said. One day, an orca breached completey from the water only two hundred yards from his boat. Another day, he witnessed what he described as the finest moment of his trip - a floating bed of kelp upon which over a hundred fifty sea otters were congregating.

I am interested in whether Kil'iii's experience offered any possibility of adding wisdom to the idea of North America being populated by ancient boaters.

Kil'iii, who considers himself an average paddler, explained that an Aleut paddler would have been a much stronger paddler than himself.  He explained how he had seen native Northwest paddlers in high surf. "The surf becomes heinous, but these people were skilled, and twenty or thirty of them in a boat could land in five to six foot surf."

"Tell me about your paddling hat?" I asked.

"It's based on an aleut style, but made of raw-hide and coated with linseed oil. It lasted the whole trip. The shape decreases wind resistance, and of course shielded me from the sun, but also blocked water reflection."

I asked Kil'iii that if he was able to do this trip alone, how difficult would it have been for ancient paddlers, 14,000 years ago, to cross Beringia and paddle to Oregon.

"Honestly, they would have had a good time. I traveled alone. I cooked all my food over fires and the resources were plentiful. Even though the land resources were bitter, it wasn't berry season, the estuaries were filled with shellfish, and fish were everywhere. At one point, I camped on an Indian midden, just eleven feet off the beach. Now, these shellfish middens are much newer than fourteen-thousand years ago. But they tell about the sea's bounty."

He continued, "Remember that they would have been traveling with umiaks too...large skin boats that can carry twenty people. Most of the west coast of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest are not as surfy as Oregon waters."

I asked him more about physical fitness and the journey.

"You know, for most of the trip through and beyond Alaska, you don't need to be a strong paddler. It's all protected water."

"Would they have taken the inside or outside passage?" I asked.

"You know, they would have followed the resources, so they would have taken the route where they could find the most food. A lot of whales take the outside passage, but the inside passage has more shellfish."

I asked Kil'iii if he felt any loneliness or fright while away from civilization for so long. He said no. "Once you get used to the sounds, you don't notice how different that world is. You develop a faith in the natural world and in understanding the patterns out there, and you forget there are no people.

He would have enjoyed traveling with a large group of friends, but "this was a very different kind of trip. You learn a lot, and you have a lot of time to think. The one thing is, you feel very small. I would see thousands of tiny little jellyfish throughout this trip, pumping and pumping in one direction. But the current was going in a different direction and they were just being pulled along by it. Man, I thought, we think we are something special, but out there, you realize we are at the mercy of natural forces."

The next day, I drive the 75 mile road to Teller, an Eskimo fish camp on a sandy spit in a vast inland waterway.  The way to Teller is long.  Treeless mountains extend in every direction.  The road to Teller is an inland, not coastal route.  In winter, this tundra landscape turns to snow – an impossible march by foot?

Perhaps more answers lie in the progress of technology.  The Inupiat Eskimos, “Nice day for a walk?” they say when I come, were products of the advanced technologies of Asia 5,000 years ago.  But the North Americans would have been a different story altogether; we can learn much more about them, and where they could survive, when we know what technology they had to support their forays into new geography.

This means I need to get back to Oregon, and pack up my truck, and go east.