“The only time I ever cried on a river was on the Copper,” said DJ, “I was just stuck in this massive eddy going around and around for hours, I just couldn't get out.”
We were standing in the entrance to a quonset hut outside her house near downtown Anchorage, watching as she dug around in a deep freezer looking for some frozen water jugs. Outside, two malamutes raced in circles, their frantic barking making the conversation a little hard to follow.
“You girls need sarongs? Gotta have sarongs for the river. Anyway, the wind is wild out there, but you know that. And bear spray. Here, I can loan you a can, but you won't need it because they are all busy with the salmon out there. And here, have some cookies.” A ziplock bag with several pounds of homemade cookies landed on top of the overloaded cooler.
We eyed the cookies, “do you think?’ whispered Christine. I laughed. It was typical of the kind of generosity we experienced on this trip that someone would just give us cookies, whatever kind of cookies they were. But we had a insane amount of work to do before the van picked us up tommorrow. We were about to leave for a three week wilderness river trip connecting the Kennicot, Nizina, Chitina and Copper rivers, some 180 miles from McCarthy to Cordova. It felt a little surreal ferrying around river gear in a strange town in a rental car. I'd stepped off a flight at 2 am yesterday and since then our group of eight had been on a marathon mission: pick up our rented boats, buy a massive amount of food at Costco, get fishing licenses and gear, and for some strange reason purchase the world's largest dutch oven. Barely 48 hours later we were loading everything into a box trailer for the 10 hour drive to McCarthy. It had seemed audacious when we planned this trip to think it would actually work, now it seemed unreal we were actually going.
Our first glimpse of the river came at the footbridge to McCarthy. Below the steep cobble bank, several thousand cfs of water raced by like an icy sluice, straight down from the towering Root Glacier. I'd never paddled a river from its source; this one emerged fully formed, fast, cold and intimidating. This was the smallest river we would be on and it already had the volume of most rivers in the lower 48. As information on these rivers barely existed in guidebooks or the internet, our plan was to get some additional beta on rapids, hazards, and campsites from an outfitter in town. Everyone we met was friendly and encouraging about our trip, but no, they'd never been down there. Compared to setting off on a typical multi day trip with Rivermaps in tow, this felt like the unknown.
We spent a day stuffing ourselves with ice cream and exploring the amazing old mining town of Kennicott. Our plan to follow the blue highway of river from the Kennicott to the sea was hardly original. In 1911, the Alaska syndicate completed the Copper River and Northwestern Railway, 196 miles of track through the Chitina and Copper River Canyons to transport copper ore from the Kennicott mines to the coast. At a cost of $25 million dollars and with 129 bridges, including the 1500 foot million dollar bridge, the rail line was an engineering feet. JP Morgan and the Gugenheim family made a fortune on the profits from Kennicott. Although much of the railway has been destroyed by washouts and obscured by vegetation, the road grade that we had driven to McCarthy followed the line, and the recently repaired Million Dollar Bridge provided the only way across the Copper in the hundred miles between Chitina and Cordova.
The next morning we pushed our boats into the current below the McCarthy bridge while a few German tourists waved and took photos. After a couple fast and technical rapids, the river quickly became a dream. We cruised along in a constant 7 mile per hour current past towering mountains and hillsides turned pink with fireweed. There was not another human in sight. We camped on empty gravel bars covered in wolf and bear tracks. Our lives quickly fell into the routine of the river: wake, pack up camp, float, stop at clear side streams to fish and relax. Our easy river lives were complemented by the nearly endless daylight of Alaskan summer. Time became slippery. Around 10 pm we might bake lasagna in that massive dutch oven then play midnight frisbee on a massive sandbar. When the sun finally set, it took hours to dip below the horizon, a slow motion sunset that was truly mesmerizing to watch.
The Kennicott River quickly fed into the Ninzina River with its narrow canyon and boiling eddies. We then emerged into the wide Chitina River and were dwarfed by towering gravel banks and miles of fast braided channels. Everything existed on another scale. One afternoon, while setting up camp, a young grizzly wandered out of the woods to fish. Clearly startled by the sight of us, he sat on his haunches and regarded us with puzzlement before disappearing back into the bush. We were probably the first humans he’s ever seen.
At the confluence with the Copper River, we passed the small town of Chitina, where a group of fishermen were gathered along the river to dip net for salmon. This subsistence fishing technique involves holding a 10 foot pole with a large net at the end in the icy current and somehow scooping up the 10 lb fish as they swim upstream. We stopped and chatted with some fishermen. They were having a lot more luck than we were with rod and reel, so far we had only managed to break a pole and lose some tackle.
Our usual campsites were open gravel bars where a side stream met the river. This afforded not only silt free water, but a spot away from the bugs and a wide line of sight so hopefully bears would see and avoid us. That night our camp below Wood Canyon had an unusually turbulent eddy where the small creek met the Copper. It took us a second to realize, but the chaos in the eddy was the fins of salmon packed into the small eddy. They must be resting here for the final push through the strong currents in the canyon. There were so many fish here that a few couldn’t resist even our amateur fishing equipment and technique. A feast of the legendary Copper River Salmon ensued. The following morning, over bagels and fresh salmon, we celebrated the fact that we were spending the Forth of July on the river camping in the midst of Wrangell St Elias National Park.
By that afternoon, something had changed. We’d been noticing the afternoon pick up steadily each day, and it seemed to carry with it a haze of dust. It made for a beautiful sunset on the Chitina River, but here on the massive expanse of the Copper, it morphed into something else.
John was rowing when the wind picked up. He struggled at the oars as the boat bumped to a stop on a gravel bar. “Maybe someone should take over,” he grumbled. We’d been picking our way through a maze of shallow braided channels in the middle of the half mile wide river channel when the wind roared into a 30 mph gale. We scrambled to change places as the wind spun the cat out of the shallows and upstream into an invisible eddy. I looked across the river, the silty glacial water had transformed into a mess of waves and spray. There were no recognizable channels, only breaking waves marching upriver. Our other two boats were rapidly disappearing downriver. As more cold spray hit the cat, it felt like the ocean. I pulled against the wind for 15 minutes without much luck before handing the oars to Justin. He threw all his 6’3” of leverage into the aluminum carslile oars, they bent and wavered in the water as the cat stood still, caught between the wind and current.
Just when we thought an oar would break, Justin fought his way into a sliver of current and we began to slowly claw our way downstream. The big cataraft had been borrowed from a friend in Anchorage who planned to take it down the Grand Canyon. With monster 28” tubes, it looked like it was ready to smash through lava falls while carrying a month’s worth of beer, but out here, lightly loaded, in a 30 mile per hour upstream wind, those huge tubes just acted like a sail. One of our biggest fears on this trip was simply becoming separated in the huge expanses of water, having a swimmer or lost oar far from the other boats. Fortunately the two rafts had managed to pull over on a mid-river gravel bar and wait for us. With no nearby place to camp, and the cat unable to move in the wind, I suddenly felt fully humbled by the magnitude of the river.
After a quick discussion, we decided to tie the rafts together. As luck would have it, the end of a 14’ aire fits perfectly between the tubes of a 17’ NRS cat. Georgie White could not have made a stranger craft; joined end to end, the 3 boats formed a 30’ viking long ship. Three people took the oars and we set off against the wind. Even if the wind had us at it’s mercy, at least we would all end up there together.
A few hours later, we finally made camp on a group of wooded islands in the middle of the river. Hunkered down from the wind in the tent, we collectively reflected on the day and decided our Alaskan idyll might just need to change. The Copper was legendary for it's powerful upstream winds and blinding dust storms. These would only get worse as we approached the coast. The evening dust we’d been seeing was probably coming from the Bremner Pennisula, a massive expanse of sand dunes formed from glacial silt deposits. We'd seen satellite photos of huge Copper River dust storms blowing hundreds of miles out to sea and knew we didn't want to get in one. We would have to abandon midnight frisbee, dig out the watches, and get earlier starts.
Outside of a few hours of calm in the morning when we boated separately, the viking ship became our go-to rafting configuration. As we approached the Bremmer Peninsula, the river became so wide, it no longer felt like a river, but a massive fiord. It felt almost silly to take something as small and slow as an inflatable raft on this massive expanse of water, and yet we were still pulled along by a steady current. We had passed into the tidewater glacier zone, and huge tongues of ice tumbled off the peaks down to river level. Although we were still 100 miles from the ocean, seals popped curiously out of the water to regard us. They had followed the spawning salmon upriver, and some of the fish we caught bore scars from narrow escapes with seals.
On a dead calm morning we rowed past the miles of sand dunes on the Bremner Peninsula. On what seemed like an uninhabited and otherworldly landscape, we saw huge grizzly tracks marching across the dunes. As we looked back at the dunes, the wind began, and we watched as huge plumes of dust spun off the dunes into the sky. Glad to have that behind us, we found a sheltered crescent of sand to make camp and watch the show.
I awoke to the sound of the river and discovered that our tent was now at the water’s edge. Most of our small beach had disappeared. I rescued a fishing pole bobbing in the eddy. Fortunately the boats had been tied well, and although they now drifted 20 feet from shore, the lines had all held. We stared in amazement. We hadn’t lost anything but a single tent stake. The river, which was at least a half-mile wide in this spot had risen at least 4 feet overnight. How much water could that possibly be?
A few miles below our camp, the river funneled into a 100 yd wide passage at the Abercrombie Rapids. Our limited beta included scouting here as well as stopping to watch the bears. “Better than National Geographic” was DJ’s endorsement. When the salmon are forced to fight their way up along the shoreline eddies against the strong current they become easy pickings for bears fishing from shore. As we scrambled along the rocks of the right bank in a light rain to scout, there was indeed a bear across the river fishing. He studied the churning brown water for a minute before plunging off a rock into the river. A thousand pounds of bear disappeared into the water for a instant before surfacing with a fish in his mouth. He promptly walked off into the bushes to eat and reappeared a few minutes later to study the water again.
I could have watched this all day except that bears didn't just fish from the left bank. Below the rock where we stood, bear tracks the size of dinner plates crisscrossed the sand in every direction. There were massive piles of fresh scat everywhere. In a few places the tracks converged on a tunnel into the thick brush. “Bear tubes” Darryl decided they should be called. From our rock, we were pretty sure there was a bear watching us, ready to tap us on the shoulder and say “excuse me, I’d like to fish now.” The big guy on the left bank caught another large salmon and we decided not to linger.
We emerged from the rapids into the vast expanse of Miles Lake. Here, the Miles Glacier and the Childs Glacier met the Copper, calving vast amounts of ice into the river. Bergs of all shapes and sizes inhabit the lake, some floating in the current, some stuck on bottom like a massive island, some suddenly rolling or breaking with a loud crack. One iceberg floated down the river with an bald eagle perched on its apex. Across this wild landscape, railroad engineers had managed to build the huge span of the Million Dollar Bridge. Somehow, it narrowly survived several advances of the glacier, as well as numerous ice bergs and an earth quake in 2003 which toppled one of the bridge spans. It was lifted back in place a few years later, giving the bridge an odd jog in the middle.
We camped in the shadow of the bridge near another group of boaters, locals from Anchorage; who had started in Chitina and would be the only other rafters we saw on the trip. The river rose a several more feet, flooding the shoreline vegetation and leading to speculation among the group that an ice dam at one of the many glacial lakes upstream had breached, leading to a massive release of water. This happens on a fairly regular basis on this river system, but can be really dangerous if you meet the glacial flood in one of Nizina's narrow canyons. The steady parade of icebergs on the river was also joined by a huge mass of logs that formed a line of floating timber across Miles Lake. When we checked the gage a few days later in Cordova, we learned that the Copper had risen 50,000 cfs over the past 24 hours.
In a large building near the bridge, we also met Luke, who was restoring the building to be a destination lodge. After a tour, he pointed us to a trail which accessed the Child’s Glacier. The Child’s Glacier was once a popular tourist destination, from the opposite bank, tourists would watch the very active glacier spectacularly calve into the river. Then shifting channels in the massive Copper River Delta washed out the road from Cordova making access only possible by boat. The campground was now deserted, rapidly disappearing back into the forest.
The trail led up through the alder and devils club onto the windswept moraine of the Child's Glacier. We stopped to put on crampons when the loose rock of the moraine ended, then stepped onto blue ice striped and speckled with rocks of every color. The glacier rose in a smooth hill above us before breaking into a series of jagged ridges and disappearing in the clouds. There was a low hum in the air, a constant static white noise.. I'd never heard a sound like that before. It was soft and low, yet filled the air with sound. It had to be the sound of the glacier. Something powerful beyond all imagination was happening under our feet. Mountains were being ground to pieces. Ice, snow, rock, water fed the river below us. The Copper carried its cargo into the delta, making new land, and out to sea, where it nourished the ocean, and fed the salmon that would grow to swim back up its mighty current. I’d never seen a landscape so huge and wild and beautiful. I looked across the lake and the crooked bridge below us, and imagined steam trains rattling across the landscape a hundred years ago. Imagined a busload of tourists in the now empty campground. Everything was silent except the wind and the constant hum of the glacier. Icebergs and logs were massing in the lake to begin their downriver journey. In a few days we would be in Cordova too. Darryl picked up a piece of the crystal blue ice. It could be thousands of years old. There were tiny flecks of sand inside, pieces of mountains. He dropped it into a cup, poured some whisky and we toasted to a life of running rivers.
