Intro


Day 1


Day 2


Day 3


Day 4


Day 5


Day 6


Day 7


Day 8


Day 9


Day 10


Day 11


Day 12


Epilogue

Alsek River 2014

Day 2, Wednesday, June 25

We had breakfast fairly early this morning (pancakes and sausage), and took down the tarp. The boats were all rigged and loaded and we were off by 10:25 am. Into a hard upstream wind. OK, let’s not put a positive spin on it: the wind was brutal. Combined with the lack of current in the Dezadeash, it was clear that progress would come at a high cost. Susie and I were in Sam’s boat, along with Amalia and Sarah. Not sure at this point what the water temperature was, but the wind over the water made things sufficiently chilly that we all (clients) wanted to paddle, even though there were only two paddles. If one paddled, you generated enough body heat to stay warm. If not, even with the number of layers we were all wearing, you cooled down. For example, I wore a nylon t-shirt, long sleeve nylon shirt, thin fleece, Patagonia wind shirt, nanopuff vest, goat herder hat, Goretex rain jacket, and Helly Hansens, and a PFD, but was still cold when not paddling. The scenery was already pretty terrific in my book: huge blocks of mountains, some of the peaks of which were snow capped, on either side of the river. The river surface was about 1900 feet elevation, and the closest ridges we could see (not necessarily the highest peaks) were on the order of 6500 – 7000 feet. So maybe 4500 feet of vertical relief in at most 1.5 miles linear distance. That is impressive. Of course, they were acting as funnels for the wind. Whitecaps on the river surface and standing waves.

I was in the rear of the raft with Amalia, and we alternated chatting and paddling. We stopped after a bit less than 3 hours on the river, having made MAYBE 3 miles, and had some lunch. We had landed on river left, where there was a bit of shelter from the wind, and tried to avoid stepping in the numerous grizzly bear prints which dotted the mud on the shore. Lunch was make your own sandwiches, Pringles, and assorted cookies. Everyone ate mightily, I think because we were burning so many calories in the wind.

Operating in all this clothing can be a bit of a chore. Susie, because she had so much clothing around her upper body, including, of course, the PFD, looked like a little robot walking around. Me, well, trying to get back into the raft after lunch, I was so uncoordinated that I fell over backwards into the raft.

It being afternoon, the wind had picked up even more and you could almost sense the frustration in the guides. You could also see that they were rowing for all their worth. At some point, they tried connecting the rafts end to end, to form a chain. The idea being to see if the lead raft would break the wind for the two rear rafts. But it did not seem to help. So we beached the rafts on a sand bar, and each guide started towing his raft by hand. But it took two more people to assist, because of the wind. For example, I pushed on the rear starboard side of the raft (so as to be standing in shallow water on river right sandbar) while Amalia or Sarah walked up front, using her paddle to push the bow of the raft further away from the shallowest water. It turned out that this system, as long as we had some sand bars, actually moved us faster than just rowing the raft into the brutal wind. This was not as much fun as it might sound.

Susie was doing a good job of capturing all this in photographs, until, at one point, she got stuck in some mud. She started to lose her balance (you could see she was starting to freak out because a) the water coming into her nearly knee length boots was pretty cold, and b) she was holding her camera trying to keep it from going in the water). Sarah reached over to help Susie and fell into the water and managed to get soaked up to the waste. While Sam and the other guides were very helpful and supportive of both Susie and Sarah, by trying to get us to shore and encourage them to get some dryer clothing on, I am sure they were thinking: “This is real bullshit trying to make any sort of mileage in this wind. We have clients falling into the damn water, we gotta worry about whitecaps and hauling these big ass rafts against this wind is exhausting. We gotta throw in the towel for today.”

So we beached the rafts on river right on a very small sandy beach. The guides hopped out and took a look through the line of trees that were maybe 30 feet back from the water. I remember Sam coming out a few minutes later mentioning to me: “I think you are going to be pleasantly surprised.” So we all got out of the raft, and pushed thru the 25 foot thick row of small trees, and here was a semi-dry meadow with NO WIND!! So Sam announced that he and some other folks would take off and do a short exploratory hike, carrying the water buckets. (I am sure they wanted to see if they could find any clear water.) At least MJ, Amalia, Sarah, Susie and I spread out our HH’s and PFDs and laid down in the sunshine. It was about 4:15 pm. The next thing I knew, it was Sam speaking, saying we were here for the night. I looked at my watch and it was 5:24 pm. I never nap in the afternoon, so I knew it had been a tough day, just sitting in the darn raft. I checked the GPS, and we had made merely 4 linear miles today.

Susie and I started looking around for a semi-dry spot to erect our tent, and Amalia and Sarah followed suit. Not sure why Susie and I were so popular, but I know that Sarah likes to be close to others in bear country, and I suspect that Amalia had similar desires. As it turns out, Kluane Nat’l parks likes the raft parties to camp on river left, a mile or two downstream of where we had camped, so as not to bother the bears. However, the concept of making a couple of more miles in the brutal wind would have been crazy, as I suspect the guides were near or at their limit of physical output. Safety always has to come first. And a brief word about bears: the Tat/Alsek guidebook says that we were going thru the greatest concentration of brown bears (ie, grizzlies) in North America. I guess I would question that, as other things I have read suggest that Katmai National Park, on the Alaska Peninsula, has the greatest concentrations of bears. While we did see a few bears on this trip, and lots and lots of bear prints, nothing comes close to the experiences of Susie and me at Hallo Bay near Katmai

It was great to have a spot of sun. I think I even cleaned up a bit just upstream of the beach on which our kitchen was set up. And glad it was set up. We had an excellent beef stew, Dezadeash Slaw, and bread for dinner. During dinner, all the guides expressed their appreciation to the clients for having provided so much help on such a challenging day. We all hoped for a better day tomorrow, and had the evening dishes cleaned up by 9:30 pm. Bed time was pretty soon after that. And despite the fact that, at this time of year at this latitude (north of the 60th parallel), it never really gets dark, I never had a problem going to sleep.

Additional Photos and videos can be found here: The Alsek Days 1 - 4 album on our SmugMug Photo Album Site

You might enjoy reading a different perspective on this same trip: Sarah Boomer's Report on the Thermophile.org website

Previous day    Next day

© Roger A. Jenkins & Suzanne A. McDonald, 2014, 2016