Down the River: July 2009

Alright, So I got around to putting up pictures from the Tatshenshini trip fairly quickly but since then I have been working 12-14 hr days and haven't had the time to write about it... so here's a brief summary of what happened on that 10 day trip..

Rigging for the trip was a bit different then a lot of the rigs I have done... mostly due to the fact that we were the last trip out of the warehouse and didn't have a lot of gear left for out trip. So we ended up custom fabricating most things... Everything from a 2 burner stove to building new frames for the rafts... Also finding fresh produce that would last the duration of the trip proved to be a bit difficult seeing that Haines only gets a shipment of food once a week and we happened to be shopping for food towards the end of that week...

The drive to the put in takes about 3 hours from Haines and is located in Dalton Post, Yukon Territory. It's actually the same place we take out from our previous runs down the Blanchard River. We left Haines the evening before the customers were supposed to arrive to rig boats and camp out at the put in.. We nicknamed the site for that evening "Camp Buggy Hell" because of the horrendous amounts of mosquito's that made the already tedious task of rigging rafts even more frustrating..

The first day on the river was pretty cold and is the only day with major rapids. They are all fairly easy read and run class III and IV rapids that kind of blend together at the water level that we had. With all of the hot weather we have still been having the river was running at a strong 140,000 cfs. To put that into a bit of perspective the rivers I usually run down south peak at around 4,000 cfs... Sometimes it felt like we were rafting on more of an ocean than a river..

We made it through the canyon with only a slight mishap of punching through a hole that could have definitely flipped us if luck wasn't on our side... and happened to put a small puncture in the floor of the raft somewhere along the way. Since we use bucket boats up here and not self bailers the floor isn't inflated and gets punctured a lot easier if you happen to run over any rocks...

The next few days on the river the scenery just kept getting better and better... we left the smaller canyon and headed towards the confluence with the Alsek river where the river volume doubles in size.

We had planned to camp right above the confluence at an amazing campsite on Melt Creek but we were forced to move camp at about 8:00pm due to a bear who was stalking our camp. We had just finished de-rigging the boats and I was in the kitchen chopping veggies for our meal when I happened to look up and see a huge, 1,000 lb, grizzly standing not more the 200 feet from out camp and walking towards us. I immediately yelled "Bear in camp!" and grabbed my bear spray. We tried our best to scare the bear off by yelling and banging pots and pans together and even throwing huge rocks at him..all with little affect. After a few good blows the the head the bear merely stood up to get a better look at us and then turned and walked away. We gathered the rest of the customers together and began breaking down the camp as a group since the bear kept lurking around our camp. We would occasionally go out after him and try to scare him further away but he just kept coming back around and staring at us. It was pretty erie staring back into something that big and powerful.

After the fastest camp breakdown and rigging of rafts in history we floated down the final part of the Tat and into the Alsek river. We probably went another 5 miles that night before we set up camp again and finally made dinner.

The next few days were filled with enormous glaciers pouring into the river and some of the most spectacular scenery I've ever seen. We had to portage around Alsek lake due to an ice jam that hasn't broken up yet despite the hot weather we've been having and we rowed past iceberg's that were up to 30ft tall.

Our last day we rafted all the way to Dry bay which is on the coast and is home to only a handful of fishermen. We broke down the boats and crammed everything into 3 small 4 seater planes and made the flight over glacier bay national park back into Haines. It was one of the highlights of the trip for me. We would fly within feet of the mountains peaks and then take steep dives down into the valleys and over the glaciers. Our pilot, Drake, had been doing this for years and really gave us an amazing ride.

I think this was one of my favorite river trips so far.. and was way different then anything I have ever done before.

Since I've been back in Haines I have pretty much been working non-stop which has been great. We are in the middle of a huge heat wave that has sent out temperatures up into the 90's.. an unheard of thing around here. This dry hot weather has fueled a few huge forest fires up in the interior and we are starting to get smoked in by the northern winds. You can barely see the mountains around us and soon they are going to have to stop allowing flights in and out which can be a dangerous situation since the only way to get to hospital is by brush plane...

The Salmon have started running up the rivers and is making for some really good Eagle viewing. we regularly see eagles swoop down an catch a Salmon and then a flock of other come in and try to steal it away from him..

The salmon have also brought out the bears and we are seeing them more and more along the river banks feeding and wandering around town.

The 4th of July was pretty mellow. We had a combined BBQ with the other guiding company in town, Alaska Mountain Guides, and then went out on one of our drivers large tug boat to watch the fireworks from the water.

That's about all I have for now..