I think I'm finally ready to write about our canoe trip on the Chatanika River.  Since moving to Alaska I've wanted to do some sort of boat trip - sea kayaking or a river canoe trip - so I was lucky to get this one in under the wire.  This is a long one, so get a cup of coffee!

We started our trip on Friday June 5th at Mile 60 of the Steese Highway at the BLM-run Cripple Creek Campground.  The plan was to camp overnight, put the canoes in the river first thing in the morning, paddle two days (to about Mile 39 of the highway, approximately 21 road miles), and be back in Fairbanks by Sunday at 8 PM at the very latest.

Ha ha ha!

But we'll get to all of that soon enough.  The canoe crew consisted of four boats and eight people: Helen and her friend from Minnesota, Morgan; Justin and Susanna; Corey and Jones; Kate and myself.  Non-canoe personnel (Josh, Grant, & Bennish) joined us for camping on Night One and returned to Fairbanks the next morning.

Friday June 5th was a wet and soggy one here in Alaska's Interior.  We had a caravan of cars with boats heading to Cripple Creek Campground and by the time we were all assembled (around 5:30 PM) everything was wet, wet, wet, including the wood.

Thank goodness for that tarp, or we would have been an even soggier mess than we were.  While Josh worked on the fire I pitched the tent, using the hatchet as a hammer to stake it into the ground.

Finally, fire!

It was fabulous having Morgan (far right) along - this girl is tons of fun.  Our route home is taking us through her neck of the woods and we plan on meeting up.  That's Susanna on the left - she's from Columbia and she's a geologist and she's completely adorable.

Naturally with a long weekend of boating ahead we decided to party our brains out.  Super smart!  Jones brews his own beer and brought a keg with him, so we decided that it would be completely awesome to do keg stands.  I haven't done a keg stand in about 12 years but groupthink is powerful.

First, Helen:

Then Jones:

Now Justin:

Ohhh, me!  Me!

Ohhh.  Why?  Why?

Corey:

Kate:

Even Susanna!  Sometimes I feel bad that we're corrupting Susanna too much...

Josh was having none of the keg-standing beyond his occasional role as leg-holder.

There was also some leg wrestling going on, but I opted out of that competition.  I think it's because I refused to drink the bourbon that was going around.

Yes, that is Josh about to leg wrestle with Helen.  And again, I fear we are a bad influence on Susanna...

At some point someone decided that going to bed was a good idea, but I think that point may have come later than it should have, as we got a slow start in the morning.  There was a lot of losing things and then finding them right in front of us on the picnic table.

Once we were fed, brushed, packed, and ready, Justin and I drove down to the boat launch to scope it out and found this:

A suspicious lack of water, no?  We didn't take it as an omen at the time.

We ended up carrying the boats and gear down to the river from our campgrounds (Portage before we even get to the water!  Omen #2) and launching from there.  I won't lie - I was nervous!  I'd paddled a canoe on a lake but not on a moving river.  I was paired with Kate, who is an excellent teacher, and it only took one trip for me to get hooked.  I want a canoe!

T-Minus 15 minutes:

The immediate view from the launch:

Omen #3 - this is about as much visibility of the river as we had at almost any given time for our two days on the Chatanika.  Rarely did we have a wide, open stretch of river down which we could see more than a mile; this river meanders people.  But we got in the water and started paddling because on a canoe trip, that's what you do.  Here are Justin and Susanna, the last of our group to launch:

Omen #4 - after perhaps an hour of paddling, something is amiss.

Justin (back, right, with the yellow paddle) took off his life jacket during a scouting break and didn't put it back on.  He and Jones walked back to the campground to retrieve a spare while the rest of us waited with the boats.  The boys returned, triumphant with floatation device in hand, and we pushed on.  The view from my seat at the front of our canoe:

If I had to estimate the amount of time we spent paddling versus the amount of time we spent either lining (walking the canoe around shallow waters or obstacles by holding onto a rope) or portaging the canoes, I'd have to put at at 40-60 (maybe even 35-65).  This river is a pain in the ass: it's simply a series of blind curves which require you to stop and scout constantly.  It's also full of sweepers (fallen trees in the water), enormous boulders in the middle of the stream, and huge swaths of gravel bars too shallow to paddle through.  It was hard work and I was never so tired in my life, but I was pretty proud of myself, too!

I had a lot to learn, and fast, since we were doing so much more than just paddling down the lazy river I had envisioned.  When we stopped for lunch I was very relieved and very wet.  My hiking boots were soaked through.  Note-to-self: do not canoe in hiking boots.  Ever. Again.

The boys even got to fish a bit, though nothing was biting.

It's a good thing we stopped to eat because what was ahead required serious energy.

In the below photo I am standing behind a huge sweeper (also called a strainer) which posed an enormous problem for all of us, but most notably for Helen and Morgan, up front in the scouting boat.

I'm going to tell you a story with this same photo:

Sometime after lunch we approached a left turn in the river.  Kate and I were behind Helen and Morgan by about a half-mile, and as we got far enough into the turn to see downriver we saw them holding onto the river bank (where I've placed a red X in the above photo).  We knew immediately something was wrong: the river was moving very fast, they were facing another sharp turn, and they weren't so much holding onto the side of the riverbank as they were using roots and branches to drag themselves backward against the current.  Had they continued forward they would have followed the path I drew in yellow and smashed into the six or seven giant trees that were lying across the water.  That meant only one thing: Portage Time!  A portage is simply when you need to carry your boat (and all gear) across or around an obstacle.  It's also a time during your canoe trip when you might wish you were not on a canoe trip. 

The portage for Helen and Morgan was different, since they were on the opposite side of the river - I marked that passage in pink: up an eroded river bank, through a few hundred yards of woods, to the other side of the trees that made up the sweeper.  The rest of us lined our boats to just in front of the sweeper, emptied them of their contents, carried the contents to the shore, up the eroded river bank and around the exposed roots of the sweeper, and back down the eroded river bank, across the fallen tree (seriously, like, walk 20 feet over a rushing river on a fallen tree with gear in-hand), and to the other side of the sweeper.

But wait!  There's more!  We haven't moved the other three boats yet!  To move our boats we did as follows: tied throw-ropes to one end; the person on the side we needed to get to (Corey) held the throw-rope while another person on the side we were starting from held the lining rope; the person with the line rope let the current take the end of the boat and swing it around and then out, until there was no slack; Corey used the throw-rope to pull the canoe up onto shore and then two other people pulled the boat over the sweepers to water that was, you know, not as deadly.

Oh, and then we took the gear we walked over the fallen trees and strapped it all back down into the canoes and went on our very merry way.

We only went another hour or so before we started getting anxious to make camp.  While losing daylight isn't a problem this time of year, cold, hunger, and exhaustion had set in.  Jones found us a sweet spot to put in for the night.  It was like having a little island to ourselves, really, with a big, sandy beach for camping, cooking, and (why stop now?) partying down!

Beyond the fallen trees was a huge stretch of beach, lots of driftwood, and brush high enough to hold the wind off of our tents at night.

Those yellow canisters on the right are bear barrels, necessary for any backcountry trip in Alaska.

After a fire was built the next order of business was drying out and restocking our fresh water supply.  Justin and Jones spent the first hour filtering river water into our water bottles.  Tedious but so necessary!

We decided we needed to lighten our loads and figured the alcohol was expendable.  Morgan figured out that a bottle of Glenlivet also doubles as a massage accessory:

Kate took over cooking the sausage, as well as a variety of foods Helen and Kate had dehydrated themselves.  They are very clever girls.

We were also treated to fresh fish - Corey and Justin caught Arctic Grayling which we cooked simply over hot coals from the fire.

Delicious!

Helen had Justin and Corey recreate a fishing photograph from their youth, one of her favorites of them as little boys. 

Then:

Now:

You would think we would have learned our lesson from the night before (Susanna did at least, and went to bed pretty much as soon as the tent was up...actually before I even had the rain fly on...) but no, we partied on into the night, sure that what was ahead could not possibly be harder or more crazy than what we had left behind...

We were, of course, wrong.  Very, very drunk and very, very wrong.