by Scott

In the summer of 2021 I had a unique opportunity to spend a month on a remote river in Alaska above the arctic circle. Usually I am unable to do anything like this in summer because as a wedding photographer, I am busy just about every weekend from May through October. However, the wedding business was hit big by COVID and most of my weddings this summer were forced to cancel or postpone, especially early in the summer. By the end of August and September things were moving again, but I found myself out of work for a month right at the time my longtime friend Jason needed a crew for his Alaska expedition. Jason is a geology student at Stanford and as part of his doctoral thesis he is studying the origins of the Brooks Range in Alaska. Our trip would consist of rafting the John and Alatna rivers (I couldn’t do the second month on the Alatna, so this post only covers the John River) stopping to set basecamp at the mouth of various creeks, which we would then hike up as far as we could to get above the heavy forest, then gain the nearest ridge line and from there hike to the tops of various peaks where Jason would study the geology and collect samples for analysis and dating back at Stanford. Alaska is an amazing state! It is probably one of the last true frontiers left on this planet. We flew in to a native community called Anaktuvuk which is right on the continental divide. If you spill a glass of water at one end of town, it would flow to the arctic sea, spill it at the other end and it flows to the pacific. We had studied satellite maps and Jason had been in communication with the ranger based in Anaktuvuk to discuss rafting it from the airstrip. As far as we know, this hadn’t been done before in expedition rafts. We could only find one trip report online from pack rafters (basically inflatable kayaks) and they struggled. Jason and I both have a ton of whitewater experience having competed together in kayaking competitions and Jason was a world champion freestyle kayaker and has numerous difficult descents under his belt. He is also in his late 20’s and I’m over 50. But I still boat regularly and figured we could suffer through 3 days of anything so I signed on.

Because of the grizzly bears in Alaska, we couldn’t ever leave our basecamp unattended, so we needed to find some adventurous souls who wouldn’t mind chilling at camp and fishing while we struggled up steep creeks on our way to the mountain peaks. Fortunately, my brother in law had a little extra time and was looking for something that could be a bonding experience with his teenage son. Next, we needed to find at least one more solid hiker who could accompany Jason if I was too tired or injured (I’m a longtime ski racer and I knew my knees might have problems.)  Through a friend of the family, Jason was connected with two very outdoorsy  young women who were still in college. I had my doubts at first, but both of those ladies were tough as nails and out-hiked me.

The first 3-4 days were from Anaktuvuk pass to the junction of Hunt fork. This was the big unknown as there was no beta. According to rangers, the river at Anaktuvuk was high, but what that meant, we didn’t know. As we flew over, we could see from the air that the first few miles were braided flows through ice. We took numerous pictures trying to analyze our route, but we were committed at this point regardless. We decided we wanted to be dropped off at the south end of the dirt airstrip, because from there it was a short walk to the water and we had about 1200 lbs of gear to haul. Our pilot, Scott, did an amazing short landing, stopped and turned his plane around and dropped us off on the southern most tip of the runway. What we didn’t realize at the time was that the runway came over a small hill. So from the village, they saw a plane come in to land, lots of dust, then nothing. So as we were unloading most of the village including the tribal police and fire decided to pay us a visit. Once they realized we hadn’t crashed, and that we weren’t going into the village but straight to the river, the wished us good luck and left. Except shortly after many people started driving their Argo’s down the muddy trails along the river. Argos are these 8 wheeled arctic all-terrain vehicles that are sort of ubiquitous up there. I supposed we should have known something was up at that point, but we continued to inflate our rafts and secure gear and after Jason and I walked a mile or so up the river trying to memorize our route through the many shallow channels, we set out.

I’m happy to say we didn’t give the locals the show they were probably expecting, but we had to be 100% focused as the river here was shallow, fast and had large ice flows along each bank that were undercut by the water and would probably be death if we got pushed under. It was a stressful several hours and we only made about 3 miles or so, but we found a spot to make camp and were treated to an amazing midnight rainbow.  The next day it started raining pretty hard. Jason’s info from his family, who were sending us weather updates via our Garmins, indicated heavy rain for the next few days and the potential for flooding. Not wanting to deal with rapidly rising fast water on the small, narrow creek section we were on, we busted out a 15 hour day the following day. We camped in the rain and got an early start again the next day. The river was higher but not so high that it covered the many boulders in the streams. We had a couple of pins, one that was close to being a trip ender as a wrap was narrowly avoided. Much of that day was spent walking in the fast moving water lining our rafts through the worst of the rapids, but at the end of the day we made camp just above Hunt fork. Hunt fork is a large river that joins the John and from there on down there are no rapids, just gently flowing wide river.

After the adventurous first few days we settled into our routine of making camp at the mouth of the river while part of the group did a multi-day hike to analyze the geology and collect samples. We went 16 days before seeing another human. Even then, they were floating down the river on small inflatable pack rafts and we never saw them again. It continued like this for about  25 days until we reached Bettles. We made campfires each night on the rocky beaches when it wasn’t pouring down rain, which it sometimes did for 2-4 days at a time. We battled mosquitoes morning and night. We tried our best to adjust to the fact that the sun never set. During rainstorms, you would only see a rainbow near or after midnight because that was when the sun finally got low enough to project the rainbow on the horizon across from it. We saw moose, glimpsed a wolf, but never got to see a bear despite giant grizzly tracks at nearly every campsite. Many more pictures from this trip as well as others can be found via keyword search at TahoeLight.com