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.
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| The Map--Clipped in a Tree at Each Camp |
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| 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)
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| Steve Carrying Nancy inside the V Alisa, Bryce, and John Make |
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| 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.
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| Glen and Marsha on Goat Ridge |
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| Descending Goat Ridge |
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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
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| John, Melt Creek, and Melbern Glacier |
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| 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.
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| Connie,the Tatshenshini, the Noisy Range |
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| Steve, Bryce, the Tatshenshini, the Noisy Range |
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| Melt Creek Camp |
Day 6, Mile 96,
Melt Creek, to Mile 114, Walker Glacier
(Tatshenshini-Alsek Wilderness, BC, to Glacier
Bay National Park, AK)
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| Morning at Melt Creek Camp |
What a glacier-and-mountain-filled place to wake up in
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| 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.
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| Four Guys on a Siltbar |
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| 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.”
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| Approaching Walker Glacier |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Walker Glacier Flowing out of the Fairweather Range |
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| 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.
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| 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.”
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| 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.
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| Not the Way |
They take Door Number Three, very shallow in places.
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| 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.
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| 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)
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| 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.
And what a world to live in for a while where a crew member watches over the bow ready
to alert the bridge by bell or radio to hazards in the shallow or narrow straits 
