Flarks and strangs, pingos and palsas, I’m thinking, and even though it’s a new language, it’s one all of us on this trip are beginning to speak here on Alaska’s Noatak River, while the canoe paddles bite into the water and the afternoon breeze kicks up through low willows.

The pingo, kind-of like an ice bubble blown long ago by a glacier, is visible for miles, and the 70-foot hill of it glows like a black light at a really, really good party.

Every landscape speaks two languages, and these words we use are one — the kind of words you use when you try to fill in the blanks on a map of the Arctic.

But when the wolf goes off near camp at 1:30 a.m., its lonely cry echoing off four or five different mountains, I have to figure he’s speaking the other language of this place, the one this land keeps mostly to itself.

This is the one we’ve come here to learn.

The Noatak River flows from a watershed gathered around the sharp double peaks of Mt. Igikpak, rising 8,500 feet (2,591 m) in the Brooks Range, somewhere around 67 degrees north latitude.

Autumn is the perfect time for brilliant fall colors and incredible wildlife sightings, including the migration of the Western Arctic Caribou Herd.

It’s above the Arctic Circle, which means that tonight the sun won’t set, but around the time the wolf starts howling, the sky will take on a pale-blue glow, a gentle color that somehow reminds me of seashells on wild beaches.

It’s not easy to get to the Noatak, which is part of its beauty. You have to fly to Fairbanks, Alaska’s second largest city, then switch to a small plane for the trip to Bettles — a small lodge, a few houses and a long runway in the middle of nowhere — and then switch again to a float plane for the final hour or so of threading through the Gates of the Arctic, more than 8 million acres of protected wilderness.

Alaska Discovery, one of the oldest adventure travel companies in the state, runs trips on the Noatak twice a year, and they have this down pat. Our guides, Jeff and Mo, have that air any good river guide does: pure competence wrapped in absolute relaxation. You know these people bandage their cuts with duct tape and laugh while they do it.

The National Park Service describes the Noatak as “one of North America’s largest mountain-ringed river basins with an intact ecosystem.” That’s government language, and what it translates to, as we slide the five canoes into the Noatak’s silty current, is that the untouched mountains roll away around us, covered with tundra getting ready for winter.

The bearberry is popping a bright shade of magenta, the river banks are littered with white flowers the size of pinheads, and each night, horsetails — which look like bamboo grown by a seriously demented bonsai artist — make a perfect bed for the tents.

The river is mostly Class I and II water — flat or just enough current to make paddling a little easier as our string of canoes starts to spread out. There’s a lot of talk between boats at first, running commentary on the scenery and on lives left behind, but it doesn’t take long for the river’s silence to take over; by early afternoon, whispers seem loud, and we’re looking for ways to muffle even our paddle strokes.

It’s not an unusual group for this kind of trip: highly educated (three nuclear physicists) and very well traveled (me, the travel writer, has been fewer places than any of the other nine people). Most of them have chosen this trip because Alaska Discovery is part of Mountain Travel Sobek, and they’ve been on adventures with them around the world.

But the real draw is the Arctic itself. There’s something about the way the sun slants, still blazing, long after the rest of the world has gone to bed. It lights the tundra a shade of gold that matches the shade of fur I’ve seen on the backs of the barren-ground grizzly bears when they are fat with fish.

We’ve all been to the Arctic before, we all know we’ll be back, so over lunch on a gravel bar covered with caribou tracks, we talk about the other Arctic rivers Alaska Discovery runs—the Hulahula, the Kongakut, the Sheenjek—and think ahead to other summers.

What is it about being this far north? Paul says it’s because the Arctic is always exotic, Milt says, “the light, the animals, a vista not choked with trees. Endless, empty vistas.”

But it’s anything but empty here. On a day when I stay behind in camp while everybody else goes for a hike — the trip alternates paddling days and hiking days, giving us a chance to see as many sides of the Arctic as possible — I listen, looking for a key to deciphering the landscape’s own language, and discover just how full this place is.

The low and constant drone of the insect buzz is like a platform of sound, holding up the warbling cry of a red-throated loon, followed by the splashes of the bird running on water. A brown butterfly, the edges of its wings lined in the color you see in old barns right before they fall down, stops to check out my river-dirty socks, while a raven kwocks past in flight, a black streak against the yellow mountains.

Everything is trying to pull a last bath of sun-drenched nutrients from the impossibly blue sky.

Along the river, I spy spotted sandpipers and Arctic ground squirrels. Dall sheep browse the cliff opposite, and about an hour ago, something very large — bear? caribou? moose? There are signs of all three on the muddy river bank— charged across the river, out of the water, and was gone before I could even stand up.