The small armada of three 18-foot-long yellow rafts slide effortlessly above the bright gravel until the river canyon narrows and we plunge into class 3, roiling white water.
“Forward paddle”, Kyler yells.
We pull into the froth, skirting boulders and sweepers along the banks.
All blue sky and white water today but it will change.
We are floating the Tatshenshini River starting at the end of the dirt road at Dalton Post in the Yukon, ending up at Dry Bay, Alaska, traversing 130 miles of the largest protected wilderness on the planet.
At 37,223 square miles, this wilderness, comprised of contiguous Wrangell/St. Elias and Glacier Bay National Parks in Alaska, and Kluane and Tatshenshini Alsek Parks in Canada received UNESCO World Heritage Site status because of its superlatives – an almost undisturbed and difficult to access expanse encompassing the world’s most massive coastal mountains, largest non-polar ice cap, and longest, most spectacular glaciers. It supports endangered species like Grizzly and the Glacier Bear (a unique color phase black bear), wolves, Dahl sheep, moose, goats and a number of rare plants. The “Tat” merges with the much larger Alsek before pouring into the sea, providing an ice-free corridor for the movement of animal and plant species and enriching the coastal waters that sustain a thriving fishing industry.
Brian McCutcheon, co-owner of R.O.A.M. Adventures is this journey’s engine; the guy who scored one of the scarce permits. He’s the consummate salesman yet uncannily comfortable in the wilderness. At 6’5” he comes across as half Don Draper and half Yeti.
We are not yet in the heart of our journey when Brian tells the story of 4 Russian rafters.
“There was an accident and their raft was damaged. Two of the men stayed with the boat and were picked up a couple of days later. The others decided to walk out, going downstream deeper into the wilderness. They didn’t survive”.
We are 15 – Brian, 3 other guides and 11 guests, mostly strangers, who will form a makeshift family for a dozen days in a place where if anything goes sideways, consequences may prove grave. Dumping overboard can be a life and death matter as hypothermia occurs quickly in frigid water. A medical emergency of any kind is challenging. Rescue is not impossible but absolutely terrain and weather dependent and the weather tends to notoriously awful.
Lesson No. 1 from the Tatshenshini, – This is not a trip to Disney Land.
“The river doubles in size everyday”, Brian promises.
And, it does. From the first clear rapids, the river, swollen by myriad streams coloring it a milky coffee, spreads wide and braids into many channels.
“The configuration of the river has changed since I ran it in June – the water is a lot higher,” Kyler notes.
Even so, the river is so shallow in places, we hear rocks clanking together on the bottom. Depth is hard to gauge in the murky water. We thread our way through tight passages; if one of the heavy boats gets stuck, it’s difficult forcing it back into the current. Rafters have spent miserable nights stuck on stranded rafts
We dodge trees strafing the water, log jams and gravel bars so silted they can suck your boots off.
The land changes, too. The mountains loom higher with great blankets of pink fireweed flung across their Irish green flanks.
Any long float trip requires prodigious planning and logistics. This one is especially challenging for it requires getting customers in and out of Canada repeatedly, lining up shuttle drivers and arranging air transport from Dry Bay back to civilization. In this unforgiving place, nothing can be left to chance. And nothing is
Massive coolers stocked with frozen meat and fish; storage containers for dry food; collapsable metal tables; cutlery and dishes; cook tops and propane canisters; folding chairs; circus-sized tarps in case of rain; the “groover”, a portable toilet (because everything has to come out with us) and toilet supplies; some 30 brightly colored dry bags for tents, sleeping bags, footwear, clothes and personal belongings; enough alcohol to stock a liquor store; a guitar; occasionally a blue kayak and 15 people – it strains belief that all this stuff which will sustain us for 11 days, with a little extra in case of an emergency, will fit on just three inflatable boats.
The routine of river life defines our days and we quickly adapt to its rhythm.
“Fire-line”, Brian shouts and we disembark to form a haphazard tail to pass bags and equipment to shore. We’re not very efficient and after 11 days, don’t improve much. Our line always dissolves as we race from one raft to another, grabbing stuff willy-nilly as it is passed toward the front of the boats.
But we get the job done, everything comes out but the outsized coolers. Tomorrow morning we will reverse the process and load everything back on to be methodically strapped in place.
Everyone pitches in but a dervish named Chris shoulders a lot of the heavy lifting. Despite greying hair, he bounces everywhere with the energy of a teenager, toting bags, putting up tables, folding chairs and erecting tents. Experienced rafters, he and his partner, Daiva already know what to do.
Daiva, it must be said, is equally useful but in a more managed way. She’s also a bit of a mother hen, keeping a wary eye out for everyone else, especially those less experienced in the wilderness.
This trip is not to everyone’s taste. Chris and Daiva who own a publishing company in Nelson, confess they like nothing better than tromping around grizzly country, an avocation relatively few share.
Likewise, our other Chris, from Asheville, North Carolina, relishes casting herself into places demanding to be met on their own terms. With a restless and daring spirit twinned with a quiet, bookish soul she frets about her flower garden back home. Recently she retired from her job as a pharmaceutical chemist in New Jersey. “While I was working, I kept pictures of 3 places I wanted to travel to tacked up on the wall in my office”, she told us. “Once I completed a trip, I’d replace the photo of it with another. It kept me sane”.
It’s fair to say, everyone on this trip has a similarly high tolerance for, or more accurately, a need for the unpredictable, for the stretching of comfort zones. Otherwise why would we be here and not lying on a beach?
Before staking out our tents, we establish the kitchen. Tables snap in place, the propane canister is attached to the cook stove, washing station set up, kitchen buckets filled and cold beers set out – although this bunch is rather moderate in its alcohol uptake.
The kitchen is the heart of the camp but Evan is its soul. He is one of Brian’s old rafting buddies from years past, and in his other life, a home builder and businessman in Kamloops. But here, he is a river guide and the genius behind the gourmet meals and the mixer of elixirs for soothing sore throats; a 50 some year old family guy and outdoor enthusiast channeling an ancient domestic spirit.
“It’s a group effort”, he says about the meals. Yeah, we know but………
Some evenings, he sits in a low chair in the sand picking at his guitar.
“I don’t think I remember all the words”, he says as he starts one song, then another, sometimes remembering the words, sometimes not. Doesn’t matter. We listen anyway.
The river is the overwhelming presence in our lives but we manage several hikes to stretch our legs and get to know another side of this ecological complex.
Walking isn’t easy. The brush tends toward daunting and the terrain steep but we hike 3,300 vertical feet to the top of Goat Peak on a precipitous, re-purposed goat trail that Brian put into use decades before.
But first, we cross the aptly named Sediments Creek – a wide gravel bar cut with many thick, brown, melt-water streams, the frigid water boiling over into our rubber boots. The streams will be even more hazardous when we return, more bloated with glacial melt than in the morning.
Olivia grabs the offered hiking pole and plunges calf-deep into the frigid stream. She and her daughter, Brisa, live in the Bay Area. Brought here by a twist of fate, they never thought they’d find themselves in the Canadian wilderness. They are city folks. This is the first time Olivia has even slept in a tent. Nevertheless, they make wading glacial streams look as easy as crossing a city street and all but fly up Goat Peak, leaving the bulk of us huffing and puffing behind.
We crush though an Eden of head-high geranium, cow’s parsley, fireweed, and false hellebore rioting together in an immense wet meadow before emerging onto the misty heather above tree line.
The effort rewards us with fleeting views of rugged, snow capped peaks and plunging valleys which we store in our memories because we’ll see little high mountain scenery for much of the remainder of the journey.
We find Brian and Brandon on an adjacent prominence at the edge of the plateau.
Brandon races motorcycles in the Nevada desert for fun. He’s game for almost anything, marching through the dripping Canadian woods like he’s done it all his life. With the heart of a golden retriever packed into the frame of a small bear, a million dollar smile and impish little laugh when he chooses to pull it out, he is a camp favorite. Sometimes he even outflanks Chris from Nelson in assuming the hardest physical work.
“Yo, bear.”
“Hey bear”.
“Bear, bear bear”.
You do not want to surprise a bear. The bears here are wild and want nothing to do with us but we carry bear spray and make a lot of noise, allowing them the grace to retreat.
It’s natural to fear bears but mosquitoes kill far more people than do bears every year. For that matter, so do bees. It’s generally our own hubris which instigates bear attacks. A Yosemite ranger was reported to have said that there is a fine line between the most intelligent bear and the dumbest tourist. Brian relates that one year a guest left a piece of chocolate under his pillow in his tent. A passing bear sniffed it out and took a swipe. The tent suffered but no one was hurt in this cautionary tale.
Bears are intelligent and curious. Evan and Mike – another of Brian’s old rafting pals – tell of a float trip where a grizzly followed them for hours, coming ashore across the river when they made camp, watching them inquisitively at a respectful distance before finally moving on. Bears usually become a problem when habituated to people. Bottom line, don’t do anything that allows them to feel comfortable with you.
The “Tat” is rife with bears but we see disappointingly few although we nearly always see their fresh-looking, long clawed tracks, along with impressive piles of scat, on sandbars when we crawl out of the boats. Neither do we see moose or wolves – only their tracks etched into the sand.
We are the A-Team, Evan, Mike, Olivia, Brisa and me. I don’t remember why we’ve declared ourselves so but nobody challenges our position.
Mike is a guide and retired fireman whose stories tend to start with, “You are going to think I’m really stupid, but”… as he launches into hilarious tales about his multi-year power struggle with a garbage marauding bear (Mike won by default); and the trial by fire – or rather near-drowning – to which he unwittingly subjected his fiancee (she married him anyway); and trailing a mountain lion up a dead-end road on skies to be abandoned by both his very sensible wife and equally sensible dog (they all survived and are still together).
When we pull onto a sand bar for a pee, Mike sinks over his boot tops in quicksand and is forced to instruct us in the proper self-rescue technique.
With his self-deprecating good humor and generosity, Mike occupies the serene center in the controlled chaos of the trip; his unflappable presence smoothing down the bristling that happens when people are crammed together for too long.
The days meld together in fog and low clouds which we often have now. The river widens and grows muddier with glacial silt. Bedraggled young bald eagles, the mottled color of the ground on which they sit, are mere stumps rising from the shore. If they survive, it will be 5 years before they achieve their mature appearance and begin to look like the fierce fishermen we so much admire.
We sometimes glimpse sprawling glaciers and glorious peaks but we are tethered to the river, the one certainty in an impressionistic landscape.
It is first come, first served for campsites but unofficial protocol among rafters respects a group’s negotiated request for a particular spot.
We’ve been hopscotching down river with another group who agree to let us have the Melt site just above the confluence of the Alsek and Tat where suitable areas for large groups are few.
Brian is furious when we find the group has already claimed the camp. The weather is coalescing into a deepening sea of fog and rain and we are running out of options. We settle for a nearby saturated sand bar and hurriedly wade across numerous rivulets to find the least sodden tent sites. Six of us manage to erect the heavy tarps over the kitchen, tethering them to deadmen fashioned from buried driftwood to keep them from collapsing in the wind and floating away in the rising river.
The rain continues through the night and into the morning. The rivulets are now streams and over our boot tops in places; the deadmen underwater. Mike moved his tent when water pooled inside during the night but the rest of us stayed relatively dry. We are all glad to move on in case it has rained harder upstream sending higher water our way.
We’ve been lucky. Despite the less than ideal weather, we’ve had enough sun and breeze to dry out our gear each day. There is nothing more demoralizing than crawling into a sopping tent at night. But this presents a conundrum. Mosquitoes hammer us when the weather is pleasant. Which is worse – a biting insect or a biting wind-driven rain that drives them off? At least, we can”t have both.
Today is a sun day. We are at the Walker glacier which still plunges into the river unlike so many which have retreated back into the mountains. We will not see the sun again until we reach the take out.
Our attempt to reach the toe of the Walker Glacier is stymied by high water in a lake settled between the river and the glacier which covers the trail from previous years, driving us into the alders. After a thrash through nearly impenetrable brush on the crest of a moraine, we return vanquished to camp and its mosquitos with a renewed respect for the toughness of this land.
Brandon cannonballs into the cold, murky water first, closely followed by his wife, Jennifer. This is Jennifer and Brandon’s first expeditionary adventure and first visit to the Yukon and Alaska.
Jennifer is an elementary school teacher with an uncanny knack for anticipating a need before anyone else suspects there will be one. Want an extra plastic bag? Check. A healthy snack? Check. Benedryl for a bad bug bite? Check.
Like all the best teachers, she cares passionately for children not her own. But her empathy extends in all directions, a trait everyone senses very quickly.
“She’s a treasure”, Giovanna once remarked. We agree.
As we cut through the individual ridges of the coast ranges, rain becomes more frequent and fog nearly constant. The river yawns across monstrous valleys worthy of the glaciered mountains that feed it, so vast the staccato whorls of the river now swell and dip like ocean waves. For all we know, we’ve been spit out into the Pacific.
The boats are dim and blurry as we float in the cold mist like ghost vessels on a haunted sea, trying to stay within sight of each other because landmarks are indiscernible; the river has changed with its increased volume.
Into the eerie silence that has settled over us, sweet, haunting notes suddenly rise from the rear of our raft. Giovanna is singing “Le Vie en Rose” into the cold air.
Giovanna and her husband, Eugene, arrived to dinner in Whitehorse directly from the airport, she in stylish black with under-stated jewelry and he, in suit and tie, derby hat and one red shoe and one green.
A retired Superior Court judge from Ottawa, Giovanna balanced a difficult profession with a history of challenging arctic trips, one of which makes this journey seem very tame, indeed. Her petite frame belies a formidable toughness.
Eugene, a full-sized leprechaun with a wicked sense of humor and a deep Scottish burr, counterbalances Giovanna’s refinement with a depthless supply of raunchy jokes. He is our sole kayaker who is in his kayak most days, a tiny blue dot bobbing along on massive water. He is known to compose poetry in his head at night.
Alsek Lake forms below the convergence of the Alsek and Tatshenshini, a vast, grey sheet barely separated from the Alsek River by an island and some low gravel bars. Giant glaciers in the Fairweather Range to the south flow into the lake, stocking it with icebergs. Rafting the lake can be challenging or impossible depending on the amount of ice stacked at the three possible entrance points to the lake. The river current flowing beneath the ice, turns it into a strainer that can eat boaters. At least one previous group spent a worrisome night stuck on the ice hoping for a helicopter rescue.
We are lucky, cruising through the fog into the lake for a 3 night stay. We hope for a glimpse of dominating Mt. Fairweather, for this is the only place it can be seen from the valley bottom. But we see the mountains only in fits when the fog twists away momentarily before falling back in a leaden blanket.
We arrive at Bear Island in the eerie mist. Icebergs mired in liquid quicksilver and beached like dying whales blend with sea and sky in a color so flat it permits little definition. We are trapped in a two dimensional print.
Margarita night with 1000 year old ice. We hike across mud flats to the nearest icebergs but distances are indeterminable in the grizzled light. The bergs aren’t floating at the shoreline after all, so Kyler shucks his pants and wades into the freezing waist-deep water to fish out a suitable chunk of ice.
“This can’t really be in his job description.”, we say.
But Brian only nods.
At 28, Kyler, our youngest guide, is probably the only one in the group whose circulatory system will sustain the punishment. With a guileless grin, he takes on anything, whether asked to or not. (Most assuredly, nobody else in the group is going into that frigid water for ice cubes!) He doesn’t seem to mind the cold much, running around in sandals after his boots got wet. He loves it out here. With more rafting trips lined up for the season, he is living a young guide’s dream.
The margaritas enhanced with ancient ice are such a hit that Daiva – the practical, no-nonsense Daiva – suggests a slop in the mud. The women join her, prancing onto the mudflats, slipping, giggling, tracing arcane patterns with their feet. At one point, they gather in a circle – a coven of merry witches hatching mischief in the mist.
The explosions of shattering icebergs boom night and day, sending waves washing against our narrow beach. Tsunamis are an unrealized threat.
Piled up ice once blocked the exit to the river for one of Brian’s groups. Busy people with planes to catch and appointments to keep spent a consternating additional three days marooned on shore. The Canadian Park Service didn’t consider their plight an emergency and refused to allow rescue helicopters. The group waited until the ice broke and they could slip back onto the river.
Lesson No.2 – the river isn’t interested in human time frames or affairs and the Park Service only marginally so.
But we don’t have an ice problem. We wend through the preposterous ice formations, naming the fantastical figures as children do clouds. They are beautiful, yet potentially deadly. One nearby behemoth emits a long bellow as it splits; the berg rises and falls in its own wake like a ship struggling to stay afloat as we stare, fascinated, from our rocking raft.
Icebergs will flip. A boat caught too close can be trapped beneath the ice – an event we definitely want to avoid, so we keep a respectful distance while rowing to our last camp on a wide sandbar beneath a steep green wall of trees.
We roll up soggy tents and load for our final push to Dry Bay. We’re all looking forward to hot showers and proper beds. But if the gravel airstrip is saturated or visibility poor, planes can’t land. And, the weather has been sodden for days.
“I’ve never seen you bastards so motivated”, Brian yells as we scurry to pile gear on the beach for the final time. He’s right. We don’t want to be late for our scheduled flight out. The large planes, headquartered in Whitehorse, are very busy during the summer, supplying outlying villages, mining camps and lodges. They may not wait long at the airport for some soggy rafters to emerge from the bush.
The sun finally cut through the fog as we swept down river. The warm, bright light buoys our spirits to an astounding degree. We will not spend a miserable night in a dripping tent at Dry Bay after all. As a bonus, we are rewarded with the sight of one last grizzly bear ambling along the shore across the river.
The group which came out the day before us is still at the airstrip, milling about, antsy and bored, waiting for their Cessna which had been grounded by fog, to fly them to Yakutat. The gear will have to wait. Maybe this is karma for having snatched the Melt camp from us a few days before. Revenge is best served up cold.
An even earlier group’s gear is still heaped at the forest’s verge.
“I don’t know when they’re going to get this stuff. It’s been here for days”, the ATV driver says. “The group waited 5 days to be picked up because of bad weather”.
“Dry Bay is a place you want to get out of as soon as possible”, Brian warned.
It’s a dismal collection of seasonal fishermen’s cabins situated in tenuous forest clearings amid dense brush populated with habituated grizzlies. The only operating facility is the airstrip. The former fish cannery is abandoned and the Park signs are fading. One hopes the marooned group had 5 days of extra food or could buy or beg fish from the locals.
A middle-aged fisherman arrives on his ATV with a long-haired dachshund in the front basket, attempting to make a deal with Brian to have construction materials flown in from Whitehorse. Much of Alaska and the Yukon is roadless, everything moves by boat or plane during the summer.
“Our charter plane crashed in May and we can’t get our fish out”, he laments. Nor, apparently, much else in.
Everything is now piled on the beach, including the heavy coolers. The metal frames are dismantled and their constituent parts stacked up before the rafts themselves are deflated and rolled into huge yellow bales like plastic hay.
ATVs transport the gear and us along a couple of miles of muddy track to the clearing at the end of the gravel runway where the planes are loaded. The pilots also serve as the baggage handlers.
We soar east into the Coast Ranges. The ice covered hulk of Mt. Fairweather at 15,266 feet in the near distance, is the tallest of many such peaks – all remote, all forbidding.
The planes seem to fly in slow-motion beneath giant awl-shaped towers punching into the sky. Mile after mile, the twisted glaciers and sheer black or rust-colored walls appear mere feet from our wingtips. Below, our monster river is a slim ribbon and the ice-choked lake a bathtub.
The ice gradually diminishes as we fly east and the mountains become lower and more rounded but we see only one road in the entire expanse – the highway to Haines.
The world didn’t stop while we were away. Evan returns to the news that a forest fire is raging 2 kilometers from his home. His evacuated family is safe along with his most valued belongings – skis and mountain bikes. Chris from Asheville tests positive for Covid which came from who knows where. A mild case and no-one else appears infected.
Tired and hungry but clean, we meet for an Italian feast the last evening, – a kind of emotional cooling down after a hard sprint.
We deconstruct the trip. Nobody says much that hasn’t probably been said many times before except Eugene who dedicates two poems to me. I didn’t check, but if he wasn’t wearing one red and one green shoe, I’d be sorely disappointed. Perhaps you wonder why Eugene would dedicate poems to me. You’d have to ask him but it’s surely a complicated story.
I must add that I and my partner, Dick, are the oldest people on the trip – a distinction of dubious merit. Dick rivals Eugene as a repository of questionable jokes and many of the younger set in energy. He also added generously to this description, filling in many details and contributing the photographs.
Brian has the final word. He stands and raises his wineglass.
“I want to make a toast to Jennifer” he begins. “Maybe not all of you know it but she postponed a serious surgery to join us in this adventure”.
“Hear. Hear”, we respond also raising our glasses in her direction. Unsurprisingly, she looks a bit abashed by the attention.
The youngest of all the guests, Jennifer not only opted for a Yukon adventure, she also meticulously arranged her work schedule to suit her own needs and wants. With everything is in its proper place, she now firmly controls an event that would have most of us tearing our hair while screaming into the wind.
The Third and Final Lesson from the Tatshenshini (curtesy of Jennifer) – Equanimity in the face the unknown.