Tatshenshini: Down the River

Note: this is our third post about the Alaska trip.  The blog software stacks posts with the newest at the top, so the introduction to the month's adventures and the photos of the people we traveled with are below in the archive, dated July 27 and 26.

Day 1, River Mile 21, Dalton Post, to Mile 32, Silver Creek

(Kluane National Park, Reserve, and Wildlife Sanctuary, Yukon Territory)

We put in. All in. We belong to the river until Dry Bay.  Steve notes this as he takes his second foot from the shore. 

Right away, the river narrows between rock walls, speeds up, and makes quick turns.  We pitch and roll through four miles of big waves, white water, and boulders.  With hardly a place to eddy out, while guides muscle the oars, everyone else either bails out the cold waves flying into the raft or hangs onto riggings with one hand and the life vests of the bailers with the other.  I pre-fret for months at home over this stretch and then wish we could run it again. We have no photos of that very wild and fast part of the river.   

 

The Map--Clipped in a Tree at Each Camp

Silver Creek Camp

Notice, though, in two of the very few photos from that day, the compact village of tents our first night out.  We’ve heard about the huge brown bears of the Tatshenshini.  The guides have told us how to respond to a bear in camp, and they turn the camp-chair bag into The Smellies Bag for snacks and toiletries at night to move them away from the tents and out to a raft on the river where the bears won't go.  For years I have dwelled upon Pam Houston’s account of her Tatshenshini run, “Wide Awake in Bear Country.”  Still, this is the last night we pitch this way.  We become newly brave when we realize that it’s warm for this time of year; since bears are grazing up high, they are less likely to be around here.  

 
And though we don't see them, they, no doubt, see us and would just as soon avoid our village where fifteen people live and where Alisa honks the kitchen horn and calls out, "Wash up for dinner."

Day 2, River Mile 32, Silver Creek, to Mile 54, Sediments Creek  

(From the Kluane, YT, into Tatshenshini-Alsek Wilderness, BC) 

The guides are in constant motion; they cook French toast and bacon for breakfast, row through the day’s 22 miles to stay in through-channels and keep running downriver in upriver winds, bring us up and leap to shore five times, fix lunch while we gather driftwood, wrap the twisted jumbles of wood in tarps and load them onto the rafts in sofa-sized bundles. Rowing in a swaying dance, one tells us that she dreamed last night we clients got up in the night, took the bread from the rafts, and invited another river party over to eat it all. In camp, the guides set up the groover, unfold fifteen three-legged stools, build the kitchen and fire, fill hand- and dish-washing buckets, go shopping for dinner in the rafts, cook pesto ravioli and salmon, make salad, talk with us into the night, and then, in the short twilighty dark, sleep.

Day 3, the Year’s Longest Day, Goat Ridge Hike at Sediments Creek, River Mile 54 
(Tatshenshini-Alsek Wilderness, British Columbia)

Steve Carrying Nancy inside the V Alisa, Bryce, and John Make

Connie on the Bank; Alisa, John, and Dale Crossing

 
To reach the trail up Goat Ridge, we need to cross the glacier-melt-cold, knee-deep braids of Sediments Creek, so the guides teach us the flying V, one person in front holding a paddle, making eddies and giving solid shoulders to hold onto for the people behind, each person careful to side-step, not to cross one leg in front of the other.  We throw river shoes back and forth at crossings to share.  Two guides in turn carry Nancy through the braids; the other guide, Alisa, walks barefoot to loan me her crocs. Everyone crosses, dries out, warms up, stays a little more connected than we were yesterday.

Glen and Marsha on Goat Ridge

Descending Goat Ridge 

We do see tiny-white-fleck goats from Goat Ridge and debate whether the haze is smoke or something else--smoke, we learn later.   In the photos, camp is on the far side of Sediments Creek, on the dark, treed point just beyond where the braids and gravel meet the Tatshenshini.

In the after-dinner circle, Ray passes around a bottle he has saved for ten years on his dresser for a special occasion.  It's Maker’s Mark, a gift from his last year working for Kiklukh Lodge’s owner, a man who made his money selling fancy cars in Kentucky.  In turn we bless Ray’s long wait, blow whistle-note salutes across the bottle mouth, and drink from the bottle to the solstice on the Tatshenshini.  Sarah says, “The guides have been teaching us camp hygiene, but hygiene is hygiene, and bourbon is bourbon.”

 

Day 4, River Mile 54, Sediments Creek, to Mile 83, Towagh Creek

(Tatshenshini-Alsek Wilderness, BC) 

The valley opens out big.  Two rivers, the O’Connor and Tkope, and five creeks, Alki, Henshi, Tats, Tomahnous, and Towagh join us from both sides--so much water.  Four of these resonant names derive from Chinook Trade Jargon, a pidgin, or trade language, used as lingua franca among native/first nations groups in the Pacific Northwest.

Tkope: white
Alki: by and by, in the future, presently
Tomahnous: guardian, familiar spirit, magic, luck, fortune
Towagh: bright, shining, light   

Splish-Splash Waves

The river widens and separates into channels that leave and rejoin each other.  In these braids, the other two guides follow Steve who finds the main channel and stays out of shallows, a special skill when the braids and gravel bars are just under the surface of the huge volume of water.  Bryce uses his cap as a gorp bowl as he rows.   

It's a day for singing names.  The guides name the kinds of waves and the ways water moves: hydraulics, helicals, haystacks, curtains--laterals off cliffs--, wave trains, reversals, recirculating waves, smiling and flushing holes, eddies, boils, pour-overs, splish-splash, boogie, whitehorse waves.  Someone points out that Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, got its name from its rapids.   

Alisa's Raft

It’s a day for sounds.  On the river, rocks roll and rumble deep below while silt hisses and sands the raft; in camp at Towagh Creek it’s wind we hear above the gym whistle of the varied thrush, and what the Cornell Lab of Ornithology describes as the "Oh, holy holy, ah purity purity, eeh, sweetly sweetly" of the hermit thrush.  All of it, all of it, holy, pure, sweet.

 

Steve, Bryce, and Alisa at Rest at Towagh Camp after a Long Day

Day 5, River Mile 83, Towagh Creek, to Mile 96, Melt Creek
(Tatshenshini-Alsek Wilderness, BC)

Towagh breakfast: pancakes and bacon--5 days out, in this big, wild place.  

 

Dale and Steve Looking Downriver at Towagh Camp

Big.  The word stays on the tongue.  Downriver the valley and surrounding mountains get bigger and bigger, and we raft through big swells. 

On a walk after setting up camp at Melt Creek, Bryce and Steve jump into the only-but-just-melted-off-the-glaciers creek, but, then back at camp, the guides heat buckets of water for the rest of us to carry over the steep river bank to bathe near the creek in warm water.   

Melt Creek’s campsite is up high above the river, and, for many of us, this is our favorite campsite of the trip.  


It’s where the guides retrieve fresh lettuce when they go shopping in the rafts before dinner and then cook Halibut Tatshenshini--with broccoli, sour cream, and bread crumbs--and cous cous.  

 

John, Melt Creek, and Melbern Glacier

Dryas, Melt & Tatshenshini Confluence, the Noisy Range

It’s where we see the only bear of the trip. 

It’s the huge and beautiful place where people stand around, sit around, and just look.  
  
Across the river: the Noisy Range and the valley with the Alsek in it flowing in wide bends toward us.   

On this side: roaring Melt Creek, the huge peaks of the Pentice Ridge, enormous Melbern Glacier, and more glaciers, peaks, and valleys.   

Down here, I am a tiny thing.  I bumble over the tent’s side-flying lines, tumble over while changing from bibs and bootered boots to shorts and sneakers, fumble for something I can’t find in a dry bag almost as deep as I am tall.  I’m happy; we're all happy bugs in this bowl. 

Connie,the Tatshenshini, the Noisy Range

Steve, Bryce, the Tatshenshini, the Noisy Range

Melt Creek Camp

Day 6, Mile 96, Melt Creek, to Mile 114, Walker Glacier 

(Tatshenshini-Alsek Wilderness, BC, to Glacier Bay National Park, AK) 

Morning at Melt Creek Camp

What a glacier-and-mountain-filled place to wake up in

Alisa & Steve at Melt Creek Kitchen (Alsek Valley in Background)

and hard place to leave, but we continue down the latté river that flows big, wide, fast.


We stop on sandy siltbars, staring off to glaciers and peaks, down to river-rounded rocks, holding stern lines in turns during stops while others, women especially, fight with vulcanized bibs and jackets. 

Four Guys on a Siltbar

Sharp Left Turn in the River Just Ahead at End Glacier

   














 









Below Melt Creek and the Alsek-Tatshenshini confluence, with the silty outflow from more glaciers all around joining in, braids widen out and deepen.  




Raymond Carver is with us here:

“The places where water comes together 

with other water. Those places stand out

in my mind like holy places.... 

I'll take all the time I please this afternoon

before leaving my place alongside this river.

It pleases me, loving rivers.

Loving them all the way back

to their source.

Loving everything that increases me.”

Approaching Walker Glacier

 





  





 

Sarah, Connie, Glen, Alisa, Ray, Dale, and Marcia

We set up camp below peaks and glaciers and walk over the moraines Walker Glacier left beside the wild river.

Walker Glacier

Day 7, Mile 114, Walker Glacier, to Mile 136, Gateway Knob, Alsek Lake 

(Glacier Bay National Park, AK) 

We look back into the farther reaches of Walker Glacier opening as we travel downriver, and then we pass the Sapphire Glacier.

Walker Glacier Flowing out of the Fairweather Range

Alisa's Raft and Sapphire Glacier

The Brabazon Range (in the video above) and the broad, flat Novatak Glacier fill the scene ahead and river right for a long time between Walker Glacier and Alsek Lake. 

A Peak in the Brabazon Range to the Left of the Wide Novatak

 The range was named for a late-nineteenth-century photographer for the Canadian Boundary Survey who used photos to compile the first topographic map of the area.  The glacier’s name combines nova- (new) with nunatak (stone that stands surrounded by a glacier that flows around it).  The Nunatak Glacier, retreating, revealed a new nunatak; the glacier below that point became the Novatak in 1962.  Just a little more about names: a Wikipedia entry says that Tatshenshini probably comes from a Tlingit compound noun that means “river with stinking salmon at its head,”  and a map and list of Tlingit place names we see later in a library hallway at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau says that Aalséixh--Alsek--means “resting.”  

Marcia & Glen at the Scouting Stop

To scout the way into Alsek Lake, the guides climb river right and see that the first two entrances to Alsek Lake lead to jammed-together icebergs.  
 

Not the Way

They take Door Number Three, very shallow in places.   

Door Number 3

Most of us get out and walk part of the way to lighten the rafts, but we all slip in the door and don’t have to portage our gear as a party Steve was with once had to do.   

We walk through alder thickets up Gateway Knob, where Steve, Bryce, and John trundle a boulder (push it free to roll).   Steve says the rules of trundling are: don’t trundle yourself; don’t trundle your friends; and, if you’re going to trundle, really trundle. 







  

Grand Plateau Glacier and Alsek Lake from Gateway Knob

This is our next-to-last night as a village sharing the river’s and each other’s energy, unloading and loading the rafts with a fire line at each campsite, watching for bears, getting the dishes done.   

As he heads for his tent that night, Ray says, “Sleep tight and don’t let the glaciers bite.” 

Day 8, Mile 136, Gateway Knob and Alsek Lake 

(Glacier Bay National Park, AK) 

It rains in the night; light rain on the tent sounds like riversilt sanding the bottom of the raft.

By the time we’re up, the guides have set up the Big Top, a rain shelter stitched together from rain flies and tarps by a tailor in Haines, using paddles and oars for support.  We hang out under it and its brown annex and eat a lot: cooked eggs to order for breakfast, soup and cornbread for lunch, and chuck for dinner--many ingredients chucked together.  We don't travel downriver but instead spend the day looking out at the lake and Deception Hills and paddle the rafts out into Alsek Lake.

Day 9, Mile 136, Gateway Knob and Alsek Lake to Dry Bay 

(Glacier Bay National Park, AK) 

Last Sight of the Alsek from the Air

We launch into the Alsek’s siltwater for the last time and come to shore for the last time together.  The guides dismantle and de-rig the rafts.  We help stack and organize the gear, rigging, and frames, and we throw ourselves out flat on the rafts’ inflatable tubes to fully deflate them.  We take an ATV ride down a sandy road to Dry Bay, where we meet bush planes that take people to Yakutat and rafts and gear back to Haines.   

In Yakutat, waiting for the Alaska Airlines flight to Juneau, I see the first sink, mirror, and flushing toilet--very strange and funny--since the US-Canada border station on the Haines Highway nine days before.  They’re strange and funny enough to take a picture.   

At the end of the Alaska Airlines flight, at baggage claim in Juneau--how can this all end?--one by one, we hug goodbye.  We’re on our own, alone, no longer possessed by the water and weather of the Tatshenshini, but I find a tiny wishing rock in my pocket, hold it, and wish very hard to see these people again.