The Roaming Dials

Yakutat to Glacier Bay: Lost Coast South

2012-01-25T10:58:00.028-09:00

Last summer a bunch of us got an email from MC saying he had a packraft and wanted to match it with his fat bike. Wasting no time, I pitched the route I'd bought a 907 for: Yakutat to Glacier Bay, the Lost Coast South, a route Dick Griffith did in the 90s and told me was the "best trip in Alaska."

Well, I have heard that about a lot of routes, and claimed that for a handful of my own, too, so while I considered it, I never attempted it. Mostly because I was unsure of what ocean water packrafting would be like. I hated lake paddling in the old stubby boats (pre-2011), I knew, and so thought that the ocean was just like a freekin huge lake. Nope.

What Hig and Erin pioneered was packrafting biggish crossings. Dick had used an airplane to hop over Lituya Bay and had flown in to the start, down by Icy Point. After the peripatetic couple gushed about it on blog, book and lecture, I wanted to do it even more, going so far as to scheme and join Skurka on his trip, but instead settled for the Wrangells with him in May 2010.

As for what part of the Lost Coast appealed most, going south was better than re-creating the Eric/Dylan bike route north, as the north route (now something of a backcountry bikenraft "trade route: with this pair and this Italian soloist repeating it) looked challenging but not that appealing nor wild. Heck, there are logging roads and lodges and lots of non-wilderness between Yakutat and Cordova, dissuading me from that route.

Plus by going south Eric (gear maven) and Dylan would want to go, too, as their trip sounded punishing and I was sure they'd like to "complete" the Lost Coast.

The southern Lost Coast looked burlier, wilder, prettier, more mountainous -- my kind of route. And if risk-averse Andy could do it solo, then certainly we could do it with bikes.

"World Class bear trails" had been noted by all, too.

With beta from Skurka and Hig providing comments like "A bike?" and "La Perouse? Yea, just walked on by!" and even both of them saying their route over to Brady Glacier/Taylor Bay from the outer coast was "bad", I felt prepared.

Looking at the map and Google Earth, it was clear that the route fell into roughly three pieces that reflected the fraction of pedaling that would be available.

The first piece to just south of Dry Bay and north of the creek to the Grand Plateau Glacier looked like a long beach ride, punctuated with some boat crossings.

The second piece looked like about half pedaling, half pushing/carrying past glaciers and rocky points, ending down a bit south of Icy Point.

The third piece looked like pushing and paddling and Eric and I had different ideas about how to get over to Taylor Bay and MC and I different ideas about how to get to Icy Straight.

Earlier, I posted some stats about the route and Eric posted pics and MC a nearly viral video.

In general, the first half is dry.

For some dumb reason, neither of our first camps had drinking water.

The riding nears boring, but has some super cool driftwood and dune sections, and you'll want more than one gear. I had two and liked them both. The views of St Elias to the north and Fairweather to the south are great as long as the weather is nice. If the weather were bad, I am thinking you'd have headwinds and rain.

Dry Bay would be a great destination, if you wanted a short, less committing trip. Even as an out and back.

We got off the plane, packed our bikes, ate dinner and road to the beach, then pedaled to the Situk and camped. We boated across Situk River in the morning and made it to a couple hours shy of the Alsek. We crossed the Alsek as the tide came in and it was easy. We had coffee on the south bank. My point is the down an back could be, like, a three day trip.

The good beach continues down to the big boulders just before the northern outlet of the Grand Plateau Lake. Bear trails take you to the put-in at the lake where we found a note from Gordy and Thai. A funny note, about how silly we were to be riding bikes. It was on a Lindt chocolate wrapper. It was a delight.

We paddled the entire length of the lake -- first half in the twilight looking for a beach to camp on and finding one that was scary when a mini-tsunami followed a five minute calving event. Doom slept on his boat that night.

The next day we paddled through amazing icebergs to the far end of the lake and then stumbled through bad Class IV brush with devils club, raspberry, nettles, and a giant curious bear that about got Doom pooping his pants when he bumped into it in the thick forest and it huffed at him.

Great beach riding starting on sand, increasing to gravel, then on to cobbles, and finally boulders leads to the spectacular Cape Fairweather. Here we alternated between shoving bikes down bear tubes on the wooded bluffs or stumbling and lifting loaded bikes over big boulders on the "beach".

Beyond we had great riding with remarkably constant beach backed by uniform forest. See Eric's clip here. We pedaled onward at the amazing 6-7 mph (we had a tailwind -- generally we get 4-5 mph and sometimes only 3 mph in soft sand) and camped at pretty Eagle Creek, a few miles north of Lituya Bay.

Thankfully the notorious Lituya was easy and calm but I was nervous in my wee Scout and steep but short swells as we poked out into the bay. Near the far shore a wicked fast current whipped us out toward the mouth and I ferried like I was in a river to get out before going too far. More pushing on stubby bear trails past a fantastic sea lion haul out led to more riding. But again, the pushing was very bad before the good riding, very BAD (not like the photo below).

Unlike the mountain hellbike trips of the nineties, this beach riding offers a less frequent split of riding vs pushing/carrying. Here on the Coast it's like, OK, two hours riding followed by two hours stumble-f*cking. Hellbiking was more like 5 minutes riding, 2 minutes pushing, 3 minutes riding, 7 minutes pushing. I exaggerate, but both seem to be about 50% non-riding to 50% riding but in different scales of time. On the coast it can be an entire day of riding, followed by an entire day of boating, followed by an entire day of pushing. This was new for me.

As we headed south the coast became rockier, not with boulders so much as with bedrock, rideable, challenging bedrock. There were some tough creek crossings, pinned between whitewater and surf, through rounded, polished boulders slick with green algae. Check the video below for some of that nasty action. Watching me with my bike over my head terrified the others. But watching them man-handle their frame-bag loaded bikes -- at one point Parsons just dropped his bike and watched it float nearly out to sea -- convinced me that over the head was far more stable.

We camped in view of La Perouse, an enormous surging glacier that had poked its brown head out into the Pacific, not fully, but enough to block the easy walk that Hig and Skurka had encountered. In fact, just a week earlier Thai and Gordy snuck by scrambling on boulders of ice, but we found the ice calving into surf, even at low tide.

Still, I pushed us into a dangerous situation, below calving ice and calf deep in surf that surged past ice blocks and boulders. When we turned a corner after an open area of easy walking, only to see massive cliffs shoved into surf, it was clearly time to retreat and sort out other options.

At one point on the way back a massive chunk of ice collapsed with in thirty feet of Doom, a terrifying moment that got us all running.

Dylan and I liked the idea of going over the glacier as opposed to Eric's idea of a surf launch. My boat was just too tiny to hop in easily with its fat bike cargo and narrow little slit through a mylar spray deck.

"I won't go first," was my cowardly response, "but I will go third." That way I'd see how likely I was to swim getting out past the breakers.

Following Eric's bold lead, we surf-launched our bikes. It was cool and felt clever, sneaky almost, like we were getting away with something risky as -- a mile or more from shore -- we paddled a few miles of the Pacific Ocean past a huge glacier.

Thankfully it was sunny and calm and warm and Doom took my front wheel and the only carnage was MC surf crashing and swimming at the landing. A six foot wave toppled him. The rest of us surfed in sweetly.

South we rode, sometimes pushed, crossing Little Bastard (my name) and Big Bastard Creeks (by raft -- also my name), two slimy, steep, cold streams draining Finger Glacier.

My favorite riding and where I found my two gears, one brake, and rack allowed me to ride more than the others, despite their massively higher skill level, was the bedrock spires and cobble beaches north of Icy Point. With no weight on my bars and a front brake and lower gear -- gosh it was sweet!

Written on my map these words capture some of the exuberance:

Best riding of the trip! Always challenging, always unexpected. Doom and I out front, swapping leads, grassy trails past rocky spires, weaving and dropping into chutes, all unexpected, unpredictable, unlikely, improbable and rideable! Awesome.

By the time we made our solstice camp past Icy Point our routine of twelve hour days followed by twelve hour camps set next to running fresh water was set. We got wood and set up 'mids and I heated water up in a big one gallon pot, but these are modern days and everyone ate food out of their own private plastic bag filled with water from their own private cook pot. At least we shared the fire and sometimes the tent, although I usually slept outside by the fire where the bugs were not bad. In the morning our group showed some unity when we all had coffee from the gallon pot. Yum.

Always the ballsy boater, Eric had us put in directly to Kaiknau Creek and float its splashy current into Palma Bay where he and Mike promptly paddled as far out to sea as they seemed to dare. Must have been an optical illusion for while I paddled straight for a point, Mike and Eric seemed to paddle further out to sea, presumably paddling for the same point.

Always the adventuring thrill seeker, Doom called up a whale that blew its spout on him in the deep bay. Startling as the bear!

We'd hoped to get out at Astrolabe Point for a break after La Palma, but the little lagoon was slimy with kelp and stinky with a dead harbor seal. Only Eric and Dylan climbed out. I peed and bobbed in my boat and we moved on, finding a cove on Sugarloaf's east side with driftwood, hot coffee, and a beach.

Paddling the calm inlets and bays was a treat and we were often visited by hummingbirds as we made our way toward Graves Bay. Near Libby island, Eric found a leak in his raft's valve (c. 2003 model, I think) and he patched it before shoving off again.

Our camp at Graves Harbor was even more idyllic than the last, made more interesting by a bear visit in the morning.

Eric had planned out a route that linked lakes and ponds, but these were mostly dry, muddy, rocky and brushy and it took us six hours to go three miles. See the map for a better way that requires a quick climb then a long paddle.

The brush was so bad that we blew up for a pond less than 100 yards long and THAT saved us time. On the far side of that pond we picked up a meadow, leading to a bear trail and another short lake paddle that took us to the newly grown brush beside the Brady Glacier.

Amazingly, isostatic rebound has changed the face of the water bodies marked on the USGS maps made in the 1950s. The islands shown on the eastern side of Taylor Bay are now peninsulas.

We made another dry camp and nobody but stubborn ole' MC wanted to bushwhack even a mile to Dundas Bay. So we democratically dragged our boats across mudflats and paddled Fern Harbor, then paddled out into North Indian Pass and Icy Straight.

These were idyllic waters for our boats, despite all the terrible stories and dire warnings Eric and Mike had heard from non-packrafters. Once again I recalled risk-averse Andy and Hig pointing out that Icy Straight is fast and safe and easy.

Like those saltwater explorers, we, too, made good time, pulling out for water to drink at the west side of Dundas and then paddling whitecaps over to the east side. We waited for the incoming tide (so much quicker!) at another creek opposite Lemesurier Island, hunkered in a short camp till morning, again waiting to ride the incoming tide, then cruising as fast as 5 mph without paddling as we took the tide into Glacier Bay and Gustavus, with whales all around.

An altercation with an uptight, quizzical park cop killed our buzz. Dylan got a $200 ticket for peeing into the water (we split it five ways) and threatened us with our un-permited trip.

Afterwords we pedaled into town feeling triumphant but let down by the Park Service again. What's wrong with them?

Gustavus seemed neat. We had pizza and beer then got on the 5:45 PM flight back to Anchorage, our buzz back and glowing.

"Best Trip In Alaska"?

For us it was during those ten days in June when it never rained and we saw the wildest coastline America has to offer.

All by fatbike and packraft, my favorite tools for exploration.

Packrafting is real boating

2012-01-17T18:03:00.007-09:00

Ok. if you have a packraft, then please send this video to your friends

It's Luc Mehl's take on our SE trip and while it cuts out the bloops (for those see Timmy J's take on the same trip:
)

What it shows is the beauty of packrafts on steep creeks. That the two (packrafts+steep creeks) can be one. That a hardshell is not the only way, that packrafting big gradient is not just a stunt -- like Paul Schauer points out -- but a possibility, a probability in the remote waters left un-run.

For me, I need to learn what the packrafts can do locally before taking them remotely. Like a climber or a skier at the local crags or slopes before they hit an expedition. For Luc and Tim they are adventure, discovering the unknown and pushing the improbable.

I'd be lying if I said that Tim always knows how the packraft will perform. In fact, if Tim knew, he'd not be paddling one.

So anyway, let's get Luc's video to 2500 hits by the end of the week. Tim looks so good boofing and bracing. It's art in slo-mo and quilted Alpackas.

If you have an account on Mountain Buzz or Boater Talk, then post it.

If you subscribe to Playak then send it to Playak. If you have friends who boat, send it to them.

It doesn't matter if you'll only run Class II with a bike, a dog, or a lunch bag on your bow. This legitimizes packrafting as a whitewater-worthy craft.

The vids are too beautiful, too informative not to go big.

What is packrafting anyway? The Horsepasture River

2012-01-15T07:36:00.008-09:00

Sven, of Packrafting in Europe, a former German hardsheller turned packrafter + Alpacka dealer, has been asking if the new boats on whitewater are really packrafting at all?

Good question. A 2011/2012 Llama is long, like a mini-IK, and a 2012 boat has an aluminum rim on the deck for attaching a spray-skirt kayak-style. Add in a way to brace your legs for Eskimo rolling, a teflon skid plate for shallow water and seal launches, move your seat forward, put in a beefy backrest, then add a foam pad for boofing and -- WOW -- is that still a packraft? That's my question.

But Sven's asking if it's still packrafting if you're parking and hucking, like Luc, Timmy and I did in the Southeast.

Packrafting is, in essence, -- all the way back to the Halkett boat, or even before, to a time when people carried skins to be stretched over sticks -- simply carrying a portable boat. Classical packrafting in the modern sense is walking across Alaska or biking through Utah -- or taking a train in Europe -- with a raft wrapped tightly and stowed until it's needed.

Packrafting could be considered mixing travel with a small inflatable, perhaps the smallest inflatable for the job. In that sense, even carrying an IK on a horse for Teton Wilderness runs might then be considered packrafting. But why make it an inflatable? Not all rafts are inflatables. So then any boat transportation plus boating equals packrafting, right? But this last argument is a bit of reducto ad absurdum.

The nub is this: if you're going to go run the Green Narrows, why not, as Obadiah Jenkins and his ilk persistently pester, "Get a kayak?"and by that they mean a hardshell kayak.

I asked Tim Johnson about his answer, and he says, "You really can't answer that."

This from a guy who has been paddling a kayak for 15 years or more and is now pushing the limits in a packraft. The limits of whitewater, that is.

There are the others, the Hig&Erins, the Skurkas, the guy who "walked the Amazon", Ed Stafford. They're also pushing the limits. Are they packrafting? Extreme packrafting, 'cause they carry their boats such extreme distances?

Forrest McCrthy says that packrafting should be, "Half boating, half walking." Well, is that half in distance or time? And back to "bike'n'rafting" -- is that packrafting? Or the day trip with a roadside put-in and car shuttle -- is that packrafting?

My personal journey has taken me from packraft as a simple boat made to be portable (no seat, no skirt) as a tool for river crossings, to instrument as landscape art, to flow machine (no pun intended, with flow in the sense of high skill/high challenge reward per Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). The boats I use have simply evolved to better suit my needs, to perform better in the 80% zone, the 80% of the time activity. Bring what you need for 80% of your activity.

For instance, 80% the time of our Anaikchak crossing last summer from Pt Heiden to the Chigniks was walking. My Super Scout was fine, although no dry suit was a bummer. Perhaps a super scout + dry suit weight would be about the same as a skirted Llama in rain gear. What I need is a light drysuit I can also walk brush in for a classical packrafting trip.

Even in the early days, when first discovering that floating a river in crossing is fun; to floating rivers in between long walks and discovering that the splashy white stuff is fun; to now, seeking out steep stuff; there is a natural progression for some personality types to gravitate (again no pun intended) to steeper gradient.

So now I am very much attracted to whitewater. And because we just don't know yet what's possible, I like whitewater in a packraft: another form of extreme packrafting that doesn't require I leave home for a year.

My purist goal is to walk in and run technical whitewater. But to get good at whitewater, I need to run roadside, maybe even pools to work on my rolls. That activity of blowing-up and putting-in to sport-boat roadside may not be so much pure packrafting, as Sven asks, as it is preparing myself to packraft remotely. But look. I used an adverb to describe packrafting. It doesn't have to be remote to be packrafting.

Yes, roadside runs at kayak water levels in a packraft satisfy. Sven may be too young to remember, but when telemark skiing first appeared on the scene (like portable boats, it'd been around a long time, but was just reaching a rapid point in evolution -- as packrafting is now) people actually went lift skiing to improve their abilities. Was lift skiing in telemark gear, telemarking? Today that question is silly, but then it was real, and, in fact, telemarking gear evolved into essentially downhill gear, much as the packraft of 2012 has morphed into a mini IK.

But sure, it's still a packraft and we are still packrafting and while a kayak would certainly make me a better whitewater paddler in a packraft (look at Timmy J and Paul Schauer), I am after all a late middle-aged guy who is happy in his boat and would rather not be pried out and levered into another. That's why it's the 20 something kayakers and not the 40 something kayakers who call packrafts, "Badass". They still have enough life in them to switch to another craft.

So if me or someone else does the 150 mile Wilderness Classic by blending a half dozen Class IV+ runs in a 10 pound boat (with foam, thigh straps and spray skirt) with 75 miles of walking are we packrafting?

Yes, you betcha, in a very modern sense.

And the seven hour car-to-car trip down the Horspasture River in western North Carolina was good training for it. We walked 30 minutes down, put in and scouted and blopped, dropped, blubbered, and slurped our way over a dozen or so ledges. Then climbed off the river at dusk and bushwacked upward 700 feet to catch a trail and a road back to the car.

This was a low water run, quite safe, although we did portage a handful of sieves. It required scouting and boofing and skills. It was a solid Class IV run, I'd say. It could be done without thigh straps or spray decks, but would be even sloppier than our sloppy boats.

It may be the best application for packrafts in the SE, although having only run 10 rivers and creeks down there, I am really not experienced enough to say. The fact that Luc and I carried our boats in packs for a walk-in and walk-out that were each over a mile long (Tim used his thigh straps to pack his boat), and that we wore our empty packs under our drysuits makes it packrafting, even by Sven's strict definition I'd hope, although we were paddling stuff as difficult as most of the road side runs we did, too.

So what is packrafting? I'd say it's anything you do with a packraft, including rolling it up, packing it away, and flying in a jet to a whitewater destination to make roadside runs.

Have fun!

SE USA Packrafting: Green Narrows

2012-01-13T08:53:00.012-09:00

It's now clear why so many great boaters come from the SE: The Green River Narrows.

"The Green" is a steep, dam-release creek that apparently runs 300 days a year. It's about 30 minutes from the hip outdoor progressive town of NC, Asheville -- think Hood River but with a southern drawl and a banjo.

It was a bit of a drive from Elijay GA, Tim's adolescent home, to Bryson City where we met J.E.B. Hall, friend of Trip Kinney and an aweome boater in his own right. Jeb is like a fourth or fifth generation western NC native, who works as a fishing guide in AK during the summer and a rep for Pyranna Kayaks most of the rest of the year. A wonderful physical complement to Trip, his Southern accent would come out on the river.

We started on the Upper Green at 100%, the local measure of relative flow on the Green.

Apparently the Upper Green has two "Class III" rapids, the first a 15 foot slide that somehow I flipped midway down, barking my knuckles and pulling a short rib in a determined effort to roll at its base and regain some measure of dignity.

I could see the disappointment, nah, concern on Jeb's face. I felt like putting the clown nose I carried in my pfd pocket as a badge of shame. We were like a quarter of the way down the beginner run and I had already blown it in the name of packrafts, performing as all too many 'round the world expect.

But in this case it was the boater (me) and not the boat (sweet 2011 Alpacka Llama).

Fortunately, Luc and Timmy would show this downstream where it counted.

About the same time we put on, a solo, short-boat canoeist put in, but seemed to take out just below the same rapids we found another pair of canoeists scouting.

"This is typical of the Green's ledges. Just run down the middle and stay in the flow," called Jeb as he dropped down the second "III", something that felt very IV-ish to me.

Soon enough I was looking over the first drop of the Narrows, "Bride of Frankenstein" and while it looked straightforward enough, performance anxiety choked me up. Still, it was no problem and actually did feel class III, if rated Class IV.

Below it was Frankenstein and Tim took one look at the pile of f*cksticks jamming the sieve between two boulders and decided to walk. Luc ran the drop just above the sieves and made it past easily, but the fact that it was a dirty little set of drops that looked unappealing in the way that it didn't look challenging (looked like Class III) or rewarding, just dangerous, underscored the typical whitewater rating scale where somehow difficulty and danger are merged. Frankenstein is rated a V.

Downstream the river choked up with rocks jumbled in gradient and Jeb gave some instructions that basically sounded like "follow me".

By now we'd been passed by a couple of sets of kayakers. They were friendly and exuded little attitude/arrogance seen elsewhere. This could have been because we were with a local hardman/guide. Or it could be that the SE boaters in particular, and Eastern boaters in general, are more tolerant of a variety of craft. On this run we'd see short canoes and hand paddlers, and knew that inflatables had been down before, even hand-paddled through Gorilla, the biggest rapid on the run.

I got some of my groove back in Pincushion's rock garden and the drops below, down to the memorably named "Boof or Consequences." Here again I got out and walked, not because it looked dangerous, but because it looked tricky: a narrow steep slot to a sharp turn next to a rock wall. But Luke styled it. Tim and I began to wonder if Luc wasn't planing to try and run everything.

The next drop was one of the V+ rapids, "Go left or Die", I mistakenly though I heard it called. It's actually Go Left and Die. Needless to say I followed a woman down the sneak slot 'n' slide to the right (the Squeeze), also rated a Class IV but simple fun and more like a novel Class III in my opinion. But heh, what do I know?

"Yea, that is easy," said Tim, "a packraft just blubbers down." Indeed, there are many rapids that would be hard, even dangerous in a kayak that re just plain fun and safe(ish) in a packraft.

Luc paddled into the Go Left rapid without a good look at it, but with the usual expert beta offered up by Jeb, who was now getting cold, due to waiting around for us to look at and video stuff and his thin layer of clothes.

"Yea, I do it in 40, 45 minutes," he'd told me on the phone. Today it'd be 4 hours.

So we were waiting in the pool below the Class V+ rapid, one of the Green's "Big 3" as Luc slid down the entrance log, plunged off the eight (?) foot drop and pretty much got munched immediately in its river right hole and with me thinking the rapid is called "Go Left or Die", fearing the bad thing.

But Luc fought his way out and survived, got back in his boat and after scouting the next Class V rapid -- Zwick's (sounded like Swix, as in wax, when Jeb named it) -- ran Zwick's and the Class IV Reverse 7 footer above it cleanly, eddying out above the next Class V (again, it's an easy drop that just happened to kill someone and pin somebody else) called Chief.

Timmy also ran these clean but I boofed directly into the pocket at the base of the second drop in Zwick;s and got held for an uncomfortably long time and lost my boat, which washed down a couple rapids, to finally park itself in the Garage cave at the top of Gorilla.

It was there, below Zwick's, that I got to paddle the 2011 hull design with the 2012 cockpit (no spray skirt -- that was on Timmy) when I roped Timmy's boat back to cross to the portage trail. That stock cockpit was so easy to get into and out of compared to my heavily velcroed special production boat. And I had been noticing all week that their boats were just as dry if not drier than mine.

We all portaged Chief, Pencil Sharpener, the Notch, Gorilla's main event called the Flume, and then the two rapids below. Pencil Sharpener, the Notch, and the Flume together make up the Class V+ Gorilla, which looked doable to me in a packraft.

Personally I didn't find either Go Left and Die appealing, nor Sunshine, the other V+, safe-looking, but carnage videos, Trip's stories, and the raw beauty of Gorilla drew me, and if I'd had a third day, yes, I would have given it a try. And after ten days of paddling down there, I think with the right boof I could land it, although the Speed Trap wave/hole below would likely stop me and flip me.

Anyway, we put in just above the last two slides between Gorilla and made those (Power Slide and Rapid Transit, two IVs). I took a beefy left hand run following Jeb on the Rapid Transit and felt my mojo return.

"Just run it blind and follow me," he'd said and we did and it was super wild and exhilarating.

Next was the third V+, Sunshine with its lead-in Groove Tube, another rapid with a disconcerting swim below it, so we portaged and put in below Sunshine and its deadly center rock. I got tripped up by a little side hole/wave, and then was dissuaded from going to Linville by Jeb's description of Linville Gorge as hard as the Green but with much less friendly mid-stream boulders. That and my lousy day on the Green so far.

Below Sunshine the river lets up and is just fun Class IV and III slots, plops, and drops all perfect for packrafts until the long III leading into Toilet Bowl's IV hole where I flipped but made a very satisfying combat roll and preventing an uncontrolled entrance into the Class V Hammerfactor.

Luc ran Hammerfactor clean. Tim had to brace and came closer to swimming than at any other time I'd seen him on this trip. And I tried to roll in the pool below Hammerfactor but couldn't get it and swam.

The rest of the run was fun but uneventful, and I felt like I didn't really "do" the Green Narrows. Tim had done better than I, of course, although we both walked the same rapids, and Luc had run a couple we walked and tried Go Left, but he'd lost his momentum after I swam Zwick's. Except for Toliet Bowl/Hammerfactor he never recovered it, really, that day.

So the next day Gordy showed up and lead us to eat breakfast at a hip breakfast joint in Asheville ("Pretty Girl?") and run shuttle.

We put in for just the Narrows and got a bunch of "those boats are badass" from the 20-somethings and snickers and sneers from the older guys who couldn't wait "to see those boats in some holes".

This time everything went so much better. I had no performance anxiety. We paddled at our own pace and got good video and had fun. Until Zwick's.

At Zwick's I tried to boof right and did but got tripped up on landing (too sideways without enough brace). There was a crew of kayakers hovering all around us and I missed one too many rolls and pulled out too late, getting swept into the lethal Chief right before everybody's helpless eyes with their hands full of paddles, throw ropes and in Gordy's case a long stick (he'd hiked down to watch) and me upside down in my boat deaf to their cries to bail.

You see I thought I had time to roll and did if I'd nailed the first, or even the second. But I bailed after the third and shouldn't have been surprised when surfacing to find myself getting washed into the first drop of Chief.

The night before I had spent twenty minutes reading stories and watching video and looking at pictures of low water Chief, and as I headed toward the second drop I turned headfirst to fend off its pin rock and went over the drop and struck my chest on it. That was better than going feet first and getting my legs stuck, I reckoned.

A hot kayaker, rightfully miffed that I hadn't got out sooner, bumped my boat down to me and I swam to shore with boat and paddle. One more drop and I would have slid through the Notch to be swallowed and punched by the Gorilla.

Feeling good to be alive, I filmed Luc as he waited for a gang of hardshellers to sail off of Gorilla's Flume. They eddied out and chatted him up before he pulled out to run the series of slides below. It was neat as they hollered and hooted as he made the boofs and drops.

From there down we had a great run to the take-out and while I got flipped again at Hammerfactor, I managed to combat roll out of it, so it was OK.

Yep, we packrafted the Green and I'd do it again, maybe even give Gorilla a try. Tim almost ran it but preferred Sunshine's straightforward boof (although he didn't try that either). It just looks doable to me.

Yes, we'll have to go back, maybe with boats outfitted with the whitewater package that Timmy J is designing for Alpacka. Not sure when....

That night we spent some time on the town with Gordy and Adam Griffith, a local scientist and kayaker we met on the Chattooga. We soakied up the gaming, music, and food scene in Asheville. The food at a Caribbean style place called Salsa was really tasty. Gordy got a huge lav pot of boiling pork fit for Fred Flintstone. Later that night we heard the band in the video below live. Good times.

The next day didn't rain enough so we headed back to Georgia paddling a bit of the middle Cullasaja River on the way.

Luc posted some photos and words at things to luc at and there are a handful of videos that Tim, Luc, and I have put together.

Chattooga River, Section IV: A Southeastern Classic

2012-01-04T19:28:00.006-09:00

Remember Deliverance, the movie? Not the nasty bits, but the river scenery and the rapids? That's Section IV of the Chattooga River along the GA-SC border.

It thawed a bit and warmed up ten degrees, but there was still ice hanging from the bluffs and Tim forgot his drysuit. We lucked out though as there were boaters at the put in who offered to shuttle us back. And Tim found himself a spray top in town. Plus it was sunny much of the run.

Oh, what a run it is.

For you Alaskans, think Six Mile but all stretched out, and then five drops in a row with nice, calm pools in between. If Tellico was a Southeastern version of Ship Creek, then the "Corkscrew" was a double-sized Staircase; the "Crack in the Rock" an inside-out Suckhole; "Jawbone" a Merry Go Round without the hateful entrance, and "Socker Mom" (Sock 'em Dog) a fantastic double Jaws sized boof.

Luc said it was harder than Six Mile and Tim pointed out that it has worse consequences with sieves and potholes and entrapment. Over its 40 year boating history there have been many deaths.

The river flows through what feels like Piedmont as there are no mountains in view. Soon after leaving the bridge, the river left, northwest facing South Carolina side has icicles and rhododendron and fat pine. The river right southeast facing Georgia side had dry open woods, no rhodos and more oaks. It was striking: Appalachians at water line left and hot sunny south right side. It's a broad river, too except where it necks down to powerful chutes and chundering holes.

We all paddled the 2011 style Llama, Luc and Tim in the new spray decks which seem to be staying dry. None of us swam. I made a combat roll, dropping off a slide and trying to follow Adam with a quick turn in a lateral hole. He was amazed to see that packrafts roll. I swear that for me the foot pad makes all the difference.

The kayakers, Adam from Asheville, smiling Kate and her dad Mike, Kevin the ten year NOC instructor, and Dallas the itinerant boater who saw us on Tellico day before yesterday, were super fun to cross paths with. They caught us on the Five Falls, there at the end then chatted with us during the 2 mile lake paddle (kind of a buzz kill).

Luc shot amazing photos and video, but you're going to have to wait for it.

Until then, make do with my quick take on this super fun southern river.

Soft Shells on the Tellico Ledges

2012-01-03T06:09:00.008-09:00

January 1 Tim took me out to the local creek of his youth: the Cartecay River here in Northern Georgia.

He paddled Sheri Tingey's latest creation, the "Orca" and I paddled my ten pound packraft. The Orca, like the 2012 Alpackas, has a cowling that holds -- wait for it -- a kayak style spray skirt! While the stock Llamas and Yaks have a thin, tent pole like oval aluminum rim to hold fast the spray skirt, the Orca has one-inch tubing and padded aluminum thigh braces that are adjustable. It also has a Teflon skid plate on the bottom for sliding over rocks while reducing wear.

It was New Year's Day and a local tubing/kayak outfitter was running shuttle to a chili feed and back to the put-in. It sure didn't feel like New Year's. It was a balmy 60 degrees and sunny.

With all the foam and my seat fully inflated I sat high and tipped over immediately, but rolled up easily. Tim followed suit,

"Oh man. This thing rolls so easily. It's not even a packraft anymore." With its narrow profile and 10 inch tubes, its long stern, pointy bow and trimmer, no rocker bow, it rolled easily. For my part the addition of the foot pad at the feet for bracing made all the difference.

We paddled easily off the Class II+ ledges, surfing waves and chatting up other paddlers.

"What is that thing?"

"We call it a soft-shell kayak."

Others asked, "Who makes that?"

"Alpacka Rafts," we answered.

"Wow," one guy said, "I haven't seen them for real. Just in videos of guys up in Alaska walking in and running the snow melt."

We got down to the last "falls" and joined a pack of kayakers surfing the last wave. We surfed and rolled to cheers and hoots. Most were beginner boaters, still working on their own rolls and skills. Indeed almost 15 years ago, Tim had been one of them: a novice local.

Because the water is warm and the air was, too, I enjoyed every opportunity to roll and worked on different foam combinations for riding slides.

That night we picked Luc up in Atlanta and drove back to Tim's family home in the mountains, spent the night outfitting our boats to fit as well as possible and drove north to Tennessee and the Appalachian jewel, Ledges of the Tellico.

The warm weather had been pushed away by a cold front. With frozen ground, ice on the boats, and cold hands it felt more like Alaska in October than the South. Still the half dozen ledges were super fun and we lapped the Baby Falls looking to get it right.

The highlight was the catwalk adventure out to the lower Bald River Falls and its steep slide and Jerrod's Knee, a very Alaskan creek style boulder garden that, as Luc said, "Is like the best of all we have back home."

Ten Pound Packraft

2011-12-30T14:15:00.002-09:00

That's been the limit some of us set as a max weight on a packraft. And now I am there.

My 2011 Llama came heavy, with its extra heavy duty spray deck, made from fabric nearly as beefy as the tubes, plus a fat four inches of velcro down its tall waist-wrap. It arrived weighing around 7 pounds.

Then I added a thick poly-pro line to the bow and stern so I don't get separated from my boat like this guy does. In the past, the "chicken line" went right round, but for creeking, just fixing the four front together with poly-pro and the back two seems both necessary and sufficient.

All last season it had beefy metal D-rings for thigh straps fore and aft, anchoring thick, padded Aire Deluxe Thigh Straps. I added sticky-back velcro stabond-glued on the inside tubes to hold an early 2000's style seat as a beefy backrest. This brought it up to over eight pounds

And most recently, in anticipation of creeking on long slides and big drops back East, I added a cut-to fit 1/2 inch closed cell foam lining, a 12" x 12" minicell pad under the stock seat and an 8"x8" foot pad.

The next mod may well be replacing the thigh straps with knee cups, which may take it back down again.

Europe Dreaming

2011-12-29T19:23:00.003-09:00

Silly Season Dreaming like Mountain Biking in Slovenia:

This slow motion techie downhill riding looks appealing to me:

That would be wonderful.

Peggy wants to go to Italy and Greece to trail walk, eat, drink and soak up the sun. And Scandinavia would be great for packrafting. All those train+packrafting trips, too. But my summer is filling up fast, and will try to get to Tibet's SE corner for ice worming in August.

Then there's the Wilderness Classic in July, and while Timmy J. is considering teaming with me and Luc admitting it'd be fun to join the two of us to paddle the Class III and IV for maybe half the route from "Valdez to McCarthy" (not literally, but figuratively -- the most innovative course in a decade), I fear (1) that I'll burn Tim out on "training runs" beforehand and (2) Luc will realize that the paddling route, while adventuresome, may not be winning.

So then there's June, Peggy's birthday month and the best month for wilderness travel in Alaska (did I say that?). And she's got a beautiful new aluminum Fatback (makes my 907 look ugly), so we have some beach ride in mind. Not sure where, but it will likely include beach combing, maybe even a Bob to cart all the treasures.

Brings us to May, a good time for creeking in AK and maybe hiking in the Chugach and Kenai and putting the two together for a season of first descents. It's time. Enough running the same old stuff, trying to prove packrafts are for real boaters. It's time to find and link some wilderness FD's, no planes, no helicopters, but Class IV-V wilderness runs with 10-15 mile walk-ins. Maybe the new Witchcrafts, which Alpacka is sending Timmy for trial and error, will make that happen.

I'm not getting any younger: just slower, weaker, blinder, dumber, more achy and in further awe of Dick Griffith. He was 55 when I met him thirty years ago and in that thirty years since he's done as much as most of us old enough to be his children or grandchildren. By the time I am 55 I will likely be done with this stuff. Instead, I'll be planting bonsai, coding R, and maybe, painting watercolors.

Silly Season's Greetings

2011-12-23T16:48:00.006-09:00

Silly in so many ways.

Running around in fresh snow over black ice.

Spending money on the wrong things for the right people.

Looking back. Feeling guilty, sometimes regretful, mostly thankful.

Looking ahead, excited, maybe. Older. Achier. More forgetful.

Sleepy, here in the darkness north of 61 degrees.

And overfed, maybe over-medicated, if you know what I mean.

My semester kicked me to the curb and then spit on me.

But. It's over, I'm alive. And addicted to "R", for the small handful of you who may know what that is and read posts here.

I have a lot of things to say but no time to say them, maybe no readers to hear them.

Not only have I been unable to blog, or meta-blog, but I have not been able to read anybody else's blogs really.

OK so I look at MC's photos now and then (how is he so good?), maybe peruse B&P's latest musings (liked that Dave C thought our bikenraft was the best trip of the year), see what my old Sherpa packraft is up to at Dirt and Dogs, check out blogpacking in Finland, of course, occasionally (which some how may have led to seeing a lone, crazy, Italian bikenrafted the Parsons/Kentch route making it a bit more of a trade route these days).

Hig sent me a link to his Malaspina pics. Awesome. While luc Mehl got the "Golden Paddle" award this year for documenting the most significant uses of a packraft in 2011, I must say that Hig continues to dream up trips I want to do even after he does them.

He wrote me about Malaspina,

"The route, with some minor refinement, should become a classic AK trek like Aniakchak. It's totally awesome to cross the ice to the ocean, and both the Samovar Hills and the coast end are incredible. And there's a lot to be missed if you stick to the beach. And the geo-geek stuff is intense. We're ruminating on designing a "how-to" kind of thing that includes info on the route, and also includes a series of photo-reoccupation points and other re-occupiable activities (e.g. plumping depth of growing glacial lakes) that would help illustrate the incredible change going on there. Would love to chat with you about this idea."

Hig and Erin's Wild Coast movie, "Journey on the Wild Coast", edited by Greg Chaney, won an award at Banff, which is cool and appropriate. The 30 min Banff version is good, particularly all the couple's talk. It's short on interactions with other people, people who must have been interesting, but it was their trip and the movie is a good complement to the book, as it was edited by Greg and his take on the trip is good. There is an Epic Eric cameo on their so-called "victory lap" around Unimak (maybe it was a hubris-hating bear that bit them in the boat, there, at the end), which adds a lot as well.

Apacka sent Tim Johnson and Luc some hyper-cool new Llamas. Cool in looks and function. They each have spray deck cowlings that function like a hardshell cockpit -- i.e. the spraydeck stays on your waist and comes off of your boat. Luc's is particularly colorful, apparently inspired color-wise by his wonderful Bird-Spelled-Backward video. We three are going to the steep creeks of NC in early January to test them out.

Yes, that silly season. Silly thinking of next year and all the wonderful possibilities.

Life is short and always getting shorter -- gotta try and live it well, which starts by dreaming.

What are you dreaming up?

Best Packrafting Video of the Year: Luc's edit of Paul on Bird

2011-10-23T12:06:00.005-08:00

Luc Mehl's latest and best creation highlights his skills as cameraman/editor, Paul Schauer's as superb boatman, and the Alpacka packraft as a forgiving, fun craft:

Paul's season highlights is also so well crafted that I'd like to take up hardshelling, too:

Packrafting: The last four seasons

2011-10-16T12:49:00.007-08:00

The biggest-hit packrafting video of all time is the "Alpacka Creek Descent" (above) by mediafeliz. The mediafeliz videos show young indestructible kids in indestructible boats (actually they popped seats and blew out spray decks). Artistic, playful, and inspiring, those videos likely encouraged Eric Parsons to make a handful of vids that included local Anchorage whitewater in packrafts. This was before Eric quit his engineering job to become Revelate Designs (a transition good for bike gear).

His videos showed what was to come: whitewater in decked boats.

Jeff Conaway was in many of those early Epic Eric videos and he was the one to show me how to switch modes on my first Pentax Optio camera and shoot video while we were on Ingram Creek with Paul Schauer in 2008. Soon after, Nathan Shoutis of mediafeliz used a mouth cam and together we shot much of "packrafts are real boats" on Ship Creek. Later I picked up more video of Brad Meiklejohn on Little Su and Thai Verzone, one of Alaska's first Class V boaters to embrace the packraft, on Bird and Canyon Creek.

Some claim that "packrafts are real boats" marked a turning point for the packraft image:

While the whitewater cadre swelled, packrafts retained their original implementation as a brush for making bold strokes in landscape performance art. Employing this classic application, Peggy and I went around the world with a packraft, spending some time with Forrest McCarthy and Amy in Wyoming and Utah, and using one packraft for two-person wilderness travel from the arctic, to the deserts, across the equator, to the other side of the world in Patagonia and Down Under, in NZ mountains and Aussie Outback.

Once home in Alaska, I enjoyed the explosion of classic Alaskan whitewater packrafting in 2009, spearheaded by Brad Meiklejohn. Thanks mostly to Brad, "Revolution 09" captured the highlights of that year when JT Lindholm, Luc Mehl, Tony Perelli, Becky King (all of Team Talkeetna), Thai Verzone and Gordy Vernon and others started running Class IV on a regular basis.

During the Fall of 2009 two more Class V hardshell boaters climbed into packrafts: Paul Schauer and Tim Johnson.

At the end of 2009, Cody Roman, who had been running Ship Creek and other Alaskan waters since 2003, but crippled up with a back injury from the Grand Canyon, looked to be out of boating. So I sold Tim Johnson the boat my son used to use, a blue Yak.

Within a week of owning it, Tim had installed thigh straps and Eskimo rolled it on an icy Bird Creek. Soon, all of Team Talkeetna and others like Toby Shwoerer and Matt Johnson had glued in thigh straps and learned to roll their boats in the pool.

In January 2010 I headed to New Zealand to meet with Timmy J for some West Coast whitewater. 2010 marked the real revolution as we all now felt more solidly connected to our boats. With Paul Schauer in a loaner Yak, we ran Disappointment and with Timmy J we ran the local stouts in low water conditions: Magic Mile, Upper Willow, and Upper Upper Bird. We felt like we were becoming real boaters.

Like Alpackas in early-2000s, spray decks in the mid-2000s, thigh straps in 2010 led to a quantum leap in packrafting. The disagreements we had with Alpacka over thigh straps suggested the theme for the best of 2010, "Sympathy for the Devil", but people were routinely Eskimo rolling now, and in combat situations. So while straps may have been a devil, we nearly all had them.

This year, packrafting has been far less intense for me.

Last year I put in like 60 days and made 35 videos, mostly all about whitewater, but some classic packrafting with Andrew Skurka, too. This year has been more cosmopolitan.

Cody Roman's back's been feeling better, and ever since we went hunting in the Brooks Range, he feels that it actually loosens it up (maybe it's just the adrenaline killing the pain), but we spent a few weeks in Tasmania and ran the Anne and Franklin Rivers with my old friend Bill Hatcher. Then I did a neat Lost Coast bike rafting adventure with Eric Parsons, Mike Curiak, Steve Fassbinder and Dylan Kentch in late June and in late July traverse of the Alaska Peninsula over Aniakchak with a cast of 15 (well documented at Luc's website). There was a smatter of creeking, but not much new (except E Fork of Iron Creek), and I missed video documentation of the two Whitewater Festivals (but Paul shot and edited them: Willow and Six Mile), each well attended by packrafters. Paul also made a vid of the super social early run down Six Mile (his take).

2011 has been a great year to be part of a neat group of adventurers discovering the possibilities of packrafting all around the state and the world.

The 2011 boats are yet another quantum step forward and with Go Pros and digital SLRs the packrafting explosion is both inspirational and sharable.

Anyway, I feel extremely fortunate to be in this place at this time with these people and these tools, toys, and techniques.

What will next year be like? I am eager to find out.

One thing I'd really like to see is everyone fix their Word software to spell "packraft" like "sailboat", not "pack raft" like "sail boat".

Upper Willow Video

2011-09-25T18:42:00.004-08:00

Like a junky needing a fix and desperate for a source, I left a message on Timmy J's voicemail Friday afternoon:

"Timmy, do you know any kayakers who'd be up for Upper Willow tomorrow?"

Luc and Toby were interested if I could get more merriment in the form of more boaters. On the phone I told Thai that it was the best boating I'd done all summer, like the way Ship Creek used to feel back in the days before everyone knew that packrafts are real boats, and that he'd love the low flows and pool drops.

"OK, I'm in. Text me when and where."

Then I called Brad M, JT L and Joe McLaughlin, striking out with all three.

But Timmy came through, surprisingly passing up on the weekend's massive flows on Six Mile that the hard shell boaters were hitting again. Paul Schauer loaned him his 2011 red Llama.

So with Luc, Thai, and Timmy, two cameras, warm fall weather, around 225 cfs in Upper Willow and a little video from last Tuesday's romp on that creek with Tim, Trip, Johhny C, Matt P, and Bo I put this together -- it's worth watching twice to see Luc's combat roll and Thai's boof without thigh straps, as well as a real boater putting a red-colored, thigh-strapped 2011 Llama to the test.

After the run we did (only as far as just above Triple Drop), Timmy said, "You know, these new boats are awesome. So stable and fast. Harder to get airborne on a boof, but so nice on the landings. I'd leave my kayak behind and just take one of these to New Zealand. And putting a slab of minicell foam under the seat worked really well, you should try it."

So there you have it: packraft advice from a real boater.

"Bunny-hop, Boof, and Bushwhack"

2011-09-22T21:07:00.015-08:00

If I were 25 -- instead of 50 -- and feeling the urge to start another blog, that's what I'd call it, "Bunny-hop, Boof, and Bushwhack"as I guess those three words represent three of my three favorite outdoor activities.

Jon Underwood took me out on his latest creations, the mtnbike trails at Kincaid and I had to tell him that those Hillside trails now get a B grade compared to the new Kincaid ones. They are sweetly banked and somehow seem longer and more varied as well as more technical. The fall colors spilling across the ground and the sweet smell of autumn in sun were great.

But an even better high than that was running Upper Willow with Tim Johnson, John Combs, and Matt Peters, three Alaskan kayakers who knew the worth of thigh-strapped packrafts and SE boaters Trip Kinney and Bo Wallace, who had yet to see first hand Timmy J boofing off the countless drops in there. All of these guys are super good/fun boaters and paddled with big smiles on their faces as they made their playful way down the boulder drops of Upper Willow.

Paddling with people who are having fun is contagious.

Tim, Luc, Tony and I had run Upper Willow last year, too, finishing super psyched. Last Fall was a real turning point in packrafting as a handful of us ended a full season of thigh straps with Upper Willow, Magic Mile, and Upper-Upper Bird. Hoping to get a repeat of that this year, too, but I'd be happy with two more runs down Willow, really. It's like the boof-master writes in "Alaska Whitewater" on page 198, "This is easily one of the best (and most serious) whitewater rivers in Alaska."

It's amazing to read what Embick wrote twenty years ago about Willow Creek's "Upper-Upper Canyon", giving it ZERO stars out of his five star rating (Happy River and Charley Rivers each get five -- so does Alsek and Kiagna). He wrote in his 1994 guidebook: "Class V+ or VI- with five portages; not really recommended except for kayakers of extreme skill, willing to accept a high degree of commitment and risk......Andrew Embick made a solo run on May 29, 1986, in a Dancer.....No one has been back since. There's a good chance no one will."

My how times -- and boats --have changed. Granted, we ran it at 250 cfs, but it gets run regularly by the boaters in ANC at 800+ cfs. And for a handful of packrafters, there are so far only two portages.

Anyway, it left me feeling so good with its deep canyon multiple drops and clean water that I couldn't sleep the night after and I can not wait to run it again.

"Hi there. My name is Roman and I have an addiction. And that addiction is low water creeking at 400 feet per mile!"

Hopefully this weekend.......A few pictures from Trip's SLR, above ("Pancake") and below ("Gazebo" look for Timmy buried in the second shot and boofing like a rock star in the last):

So far, all of the drops have been packrafted except "Triple Drop" and "Aqualung", and everything is good down to and including "Maxwell House."

I am hoping to learn to boof half as well as Timmy on this run before I am 55. Oh and the 2011 boat still shines on techie little creeks like this, too.

And thanks again to Trip for the photos and all that crew for the good times.

Great Videos in no particular order

2011-09-21T19:26:00.007-08:00

This is my favorite -- Devin Littlefield, an Alaska Pacific University (APU) student made it about the APU class "Swiftwater boating" taught by Paul Twardock with help from Timmy J, Jason Geck and me one day on Granite Creek.

I love the music and the editing.

Next up is Paul Schauer's run down the Tsaina, near Valdez. Paul's been cranking out the videos, but this one's my favorite of the last few he's done. Plus, it features Matt Peters and Jeff Shelton (among others), two super Alaska homegrown boaters who are also super people.

And then there is Luc's latest, and it's so good I am going to have to work extra hard and steal some of his musical ideas for my next one. It's a great trip report that would have been a contender in Dave Chenault's contest over at Bedrock and Paradox.

Hiking and rafting between 6,700 & 15,500 feet in Meili Snow Mountain National Park, Yunnan, China

2011-09-09T21:44:00.009-08:00

Dr. Yonde Cui of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and I picked Thai up at the airport in a 4x4 Mitsubishi with our Tibetan driver; climbed out of Shangri La over a pass; dropped down along the Yangzi and the Sichuan Border; then back up and over another pass (14,000 feet) to Deqen and Feilaisi, about a dozen miles as the raven flies from Tibet

The 200 km took six hours and we passed through country dry and scrubby, wet grasslands, oak, pine, larch, spruce, and fir forests, as well as yak grazed tundra.

About half the road was under construction and all of it was impressively perched along steep slopes.

The next day we drove down to around 6700 feet, crossing the Mekong River in its wildly steep Canyon (when do mountains become canyons and vice versa?), the color and volume of the Colorado at a good medium flow in the Grand Canyon, climbed up along a a desperately precarious one-lane road a thousand feet above, bumped along that to the driver's home town of Xidang, then hiked from 8,700 feet over a 12,000 foot pass into the Yubeng Village country where we started looking for ice worms above the yak meadows and talus slopes.

We looked hard, visiting a couple of Byron Glacier-style, but Himalayan-scale, avalanche cones by day (meltwater caves) and night (surface and crevasses), camping at 12,500 feet and climbing to a glacier at 15,000, nearly getting our heads blown off by a rock the size of a shipping box for the MacBook Pro 17 inch.

Back to Feilaisi and a happy hostel, we then drove north as close to the Tibetan Border as we could (20 km) without permits, then turned south again and scouted our most ambitious ice worm traverse -- up a side valley of the Mingyong Glacier to "Yak Herder" Glacier at about 15,500 feet, then over a col and across a second, dead glacier, and around on yak trails back to where we'd started.

On our last day we packrafted the Mekong River for a short bit -- very apprehensive as there are huge rapids and vertical walls in combination which we wished to -- and did -- avoid.

All of the peaks in the Meili Snow Mountain Range are unclimbed (with at least three over 6,000 meters) or at least they are unreported, as the range is sacred to Tibetan Buddhists. If we'd had time and permission we'd have made the 150 mile pilgrimage route (Kora) around the mountain range using packrafts for at least a section on the Salween.

This was my first time to Tibetan Buddhism country and I was taken by the people and their culture and how it's so interwoven with the landscape and nature in general. The culture was as delightful as the mountains were beautiful. I now know why so many westerners hang prayer flags at home and others become Buddhists.

We had 10 days of sunny weather and met only sunny people, including the possy who chased us down.

"Rescue" from Minyong: One Trip Report from Yunnan, China

2011-09-08T12:07:00.005-08:00

Trails without sign posts, the Red Bull Trail, the first 24 hours, not just interested in you but respecting and admiring you as you do them, the police kid, the wildly waving man, the guy with the scratch on his leg, the park ranger (or superintendent?), the Yak Herder, the tame yaks, the yak herder's hut, the sketchy climb past the lowest waterfall, the sketchy bushwhack past the upper waterfall, avalanche gullies scraped down to bedrock and slick alpine tundra, the spacey head above 14,000, the crushed rhododendron that stung my nose like a soup spice did my tongue, bushwhacking through rhododendron mixed with birch and bamboo, zig-zagging down-trails through meadows ringing in yak bells, the deep bark of a mastiff a thousand feet below, giant hemlock five feet across with bear claws and the police boy tumbling off, jumping a cascade with the steaming maw of an ice cave just below, wondering what was to come of us, the cell phone call in the rhododendron to a female voice on the other side speaking English, the Yak Herder who looked like my Uncle Zinn and scrambled up a leaning birch to get better cell reception, his pack full with a liter and a half bottle of home made liquor, fry bread, herbs and roots and orange phallic mushrooms, and the furry genitals of a black Asian bear, with great pantomime stories of the hunt and the function of its medicinal powers.

The moraine ridge leading to the moraine covered in heather and lichen and dwarf rhododendron, flowers and plants like those back home and those we didn't know. The good solid rock five four maybe leading to where we could step onto the glacier with a view 7000 feet down to the Mingyong Village below. The Ranger's and Yak Herder's route discussions. The Yak Herder's speed and agility in soft green shoes with no apparent tread, his glee in pointing out our up-tracks in the dust of thar and yak trails, his excited voice on the phone announcing us, his discovery. The mixed birch and hemlock forest with an understory of rhododendron. The texture of the glacier, its headwalls and layered rock, its cracks. And the smooth, thinning icefall now ice ramp that fed it, the firn with no ice worms at 15,500 feet. The pass and the pika and thar tracks to the next glacier, it dead, no cracks, just white and black, handsome long tailed pipits like snow buntings picking slow crawling midges off the surface, but no worms. Huge boulders precariously balanced, posed to pin a leg, if not an arm, the glee of stepping onto tundra and following trails past bivy caves, huts, flowers and views in the shade of morning cloud after a week of high altitude sunshine had toasted my lips, the runs at 15000. Sleeping on everything I had, waking at 2 am for a jet boil brew. Scouting the route on the tourist boardwalk and walking with David, a Chinese researcher studying Tibet architecture. 7 hours up from the hut, class V and VI bushwhacking and climbing with class II brush as desperate handholds, horses in town walking the streets, tucktucktuck of a tractor, and horses looking for goodies like a sweet plastic bag on the street, gentle people living with their animals horses pigs and yak-cattle all tame and pettable. Little orange cats and massive black dogs on chains. Fear of rain, crossing yawning meltwater gorge on avalanche debris of old snow, rocks and a forest peeled from the hillside. Boulders marked with the year the glacier had passed there -- a km in five years of retreat. Scouting through binoculars handing them back and forth seeing the same routes Thai describes, splitting up to take trails see where they go, reporting, then debriefing. Squeezing melted fun sized bars into our mouths eating slightly stale chips from split bags and unbroken fresh ones from bloated bags. Coffee and poptarts for breakfast, red rhododendron flowers, fir trees, spruce trees, pine trees two kinds of hemlock, larch trees, cottonwood and aspen, a tinge of yellow up high but summer down low, tashi delay to dark-skinned-almond-eyed people and nee how to white-colored ones on horseback, everyone skinny, everyone happy, the long looks from Han women as we walked past shirtless, pointing to leftovers on tables for dinner (no language other than survival sign), popsicles and Beer at trailhead when all five "rescuers" leave but Police-boy and we not yet congratulating ourselves, going to the police station and again the English speaking female voice on the cell saying that we will not be fined but to "leave town as soon as possible", this spoiling our plans to packraft through town on the Minyong Glacier's runoff stream. Police-boy and the border guard drunk and staggering down the street, terraces from above, yak foothills, river gorge gardens and fields, high mountains for worship and life giving waters from ice and snow above.

The Yak Herder mimes how rocks fall his arms waving akimbo head shaking tongue rolling out eyes closed hands ringing his own neck, the lands above yaks are dangerous. He stops in His downhill run to show poison plants and dig for herbal ones. He tells us with hands milking and holding fingers to head and then pumping an imaginary pole that he is a yak milker and butter maker happy and smiley and fast uphill and down and jumping his fifty year old body (he looks) across waterfalls and gorges, slipping effortlessly down slimy slides and tangled thickets. He makes me feel cautious and slow and THAI falls several times the only time I see THAT. Police-boy his slouching down the trail his hat sideways his jacket hanging loose off one shoulder. The border patrol guy waving furiously to go his way and yelling my way off. Cameras and cell phones in their hands in the bush in far SW China. Sharing cigarettes and chocolate, building a little hut to show that we need to get stuff at the hut where we'd left gear hidden and a small bag of food hanging like an offering that they had accepted, and lots of wood and a clean space, they'd seen our headlamp lights and five had come looking and found us.

We didn't really know where it was, nor how to get to it, but the Red Bull Trail was down there somewhere, and then we found it, soon after the Yak Herder found us, eating raspberry crumble from the bag and drinking water from the creek, in Yunnan China one mile maybe two from Tibet, on mountains, unclimbed and unclimbably sacred off-limits to us, with no worms on their glaciers, alas, we have to come back to the high wet mtns of China again and we will.

Honolulu Creek's "Beach Party"

2011-08-18T08:27:00.002-08:00

Over at Toby's Blog is a bit about his and Brad's recent overnight trip to the whole of Honolulu.

The video is great and the run looks super:

If I wasn't headed to China's Yunnan Province near Kawagebo and the Yarlung Tsangpo region of SE Tibet next week for a month, that would be my next destination!

Two videos

2011-08-17T09:09:00.002-08:00

Both of these are great Alaskan adventure videos and in some ways tell the same kind of story but in different ways.

Each highlights the wild adventures that Alaskans are doing, adventures that Alaska itself encourages: multisport, challenging, abstract, innovative, and as Peggy often notes, uncomfortable at times.

Josh Spice's advice:

And Luc Mehl's 2011 Wilderness Classic:

Oh and this needs some wider play too:

Luc Mehl's Video of AK Pen trip

2011-08-16T09:50:00.003-08:00

Too good not to post here, too:

Unfortunately Luc and I didn't travel much together. And from this it looks like he had a great time with the B Team.

His videos are soooo good. They keep me motivated to keep coming up with new tricks. I want his camera, but will have to wait a couple years before moving upward to Canon from Panasonic.

I wish I had the band width to listen to Pandora, too, and maybe get a jump on his cool music!

Aniakchak Caldera

2011-08-14T21:51:00.004-08:00

Amazingly the 15 of us walked in over three different days and in all of kinds of weather.

Being of the magical belief -- or maybe a trans-rational one -- that the entire universe and we are one, which in practical terms means if your group gets along well then the weather is great -- we had Thai and Monty and Suzie and Joe and so our weather was fantastic on the walk in.

In fact the only time our weather was wet and nasty was the day we eight headed over a pass toward the coast away from the big party group and there were a bit of disjointed discussions about where we should go and about what pass is which and whether on the 1:250,000 scale quadrangle maps for Alaska whether the big squares are five miles or six across.

Aniakchak Party: Pt Heiden to Chignik Lagoon

2011-08-13T09:57:00.005-08:00

Back in the 1980s Aniakchak National Monument was just too far away for my twenty-something dirtbag packrafter budget.

This was before Alaska Airlines offered Pen Air as a travel partner and before Thor Tingey showed that the Gates of Aniakchak's Class IV rating did not apply to packrafts (ah, another example of how packrafts deserve their own rating system! But I have given up on that battle to move onto other more important ones -- like universally dry spray decks).

Thor eventually took his Mom (Alpacka's Sheri Tingey) and Dad (former NPS superstar Ralph Tingey) from Pt Heiden to Aniakchak Lagoon, initiating a rush of early acceptors to follow suit. This wasn't quite a cheap, dirtbagger's trip, just yet, as it it required a $2000 charter flight out from the Lagoon.

I wanted to do a loop coming back on the Meshik and walking the Bering Sea coast back to Pt Heiden (like big rafters do, as the walking from Aniakchak to Meshik Lake area is awesome on crow berry flats of cinder ---- big boaters even bring wheeled carts for their portage!), but Brad Meiklejohn suggested walking to the Chigniks (Chignik Bay, Chignik Lagoon, Chignik Lake), another 65 miles on and flying out from there -- on Alaska miles.

Somehow the small initial group of JT and Brad plus Luc, Sarah, and Anthony swelled to Brad, JT, Luc, Sarah, Anthony, Este, Brooke, Toby, Ole, Joe, Gordy, Thai, Suzie, Monty, and me. Somehow all 15 of us managed to get flights into Pt Heiden and out of Chignik Lagoon within days of each other. And somehow we all managed to meet at Surprise Lake in the caldera for a party that lasted two nights, included day hikes all over the Caldera with several summits like Vent Mountain, plus a day of flipping the Gates Class III rock gardens, which failed to cut any boats, despite well over 20 descents with and without loads. And somehow we all managed to gather round one big bonfire after the 20 mile whitewater stretch and dry out and eat popcorn.

Luc has posted some pics and so has Toby. Others will soon, no doubt.

I was most impressed with the coastal walking and with traveling as a group of eight (Toby, Ole, Joe, Gordy, Thai, Suzie, Monty, and me) to Chignik Lagoon. It was refreshing to share food again after a string of trips with people who only feed themselves with their individual cook pots and food-in-a bag. We had 14 hour camps and lots of long breaks.

When we moved, we moved fast, often trying to keep up with the athletes of our group, Toby (who held the Crow Pass record for a while) and Suzie who seemed to be all leg.

When the tide was low we walked the beach and when it was high we walked world class bear trails. And I mean world class! I can now see why Hig has taken Erin down the Alaska Peninsula twice.

Willow fires in the rain were a real highlight of the rafting and driftwood fires on the beach for the walking. We only cooked breakfasts on stoves in the rain in the Caldera and eventually went to all campfire cookery -- a real packrafters' trip it was. We used the boats on each of the eight days except the first two leaving Pt Heiden and the first day of beach walking. One day we used them twice: first on Kujulik Bay and then on Dry Creek.

We had great weather, some rain, and friendly locals in Chignik who gave us dry wood, half a case of beer, and cooked us king salmon steaks smothered in cream cheese.

Overall the trip felt to many of us like a Wilderness Classic, minus the race part and with lots of sleep, rest, and fun -- very social yet wild. Many bears, most big, all shy, but occasionally scary as you'll see in the video.

Pt Heiden to Chignik Lagoon is now on my list as a fat bike ride, taking my 2011 Super Scout (extra six inches longer and with mylar/spectra spray deck) for crossings and brushy low land creek bottoms where the walking is bad and the creeks give beach access. I ran the Gates twice in my Super Scout wearing rain gear and all the rapids downstream too. It's an excellent wilderness travel boat, also very Retro with its 10 inch tubes, a foam pad for a seat (Z-Rest), and lots of bag paddling and ferying to take the driest line.

Here's a video of the beach trip. It's long and includes voice, sort of new territory for me. I hope it's enjoyable for those who didn't go -- I made it for those who did.

East Fork of Iron Creek: 24 Hours to Talkeetna

2011-07-12T09:03:00.010-08:00

The bike buzz didn't last as long as I'd hoped.

The siren call of whitewater quickly washed away the rubber residue and almost immediately after getting home, I was paddling that Super Scout (a 2011 Alpacka Scout w/six extra inches and a super cool, center opening, spectra-reinforced mylar spray deck) places it wasn't designed to go.

Doom wanted whitewater after the Magical Mystery Tour and our local goodness delivered. Then Ganey came to town and had to hit the highlights including a near 10 foot gage run on Six Mile's lower two canyons with Timmy J, Luc Mehl, Todd Tumalo.

Wow! What a wild ride Six Mile at 1400 cfs in a packraft is. But the 2011 Llama is almost like cheating. The stern is like a spring that propels you out of holes and the bow punches waves. The bottom is a new and lighter fabric so I have beefed it up with more fabric, especially in the foot and seat areas.

The deck on mine was a special order with a heavier fabric and a very short center opening and mondo velcro. It's not for everyone, and requires a bit of worming to get into and out of on shore/in eddies. When flipped and under water I sometimes use the rip cord to get out, since I am fairly securely installed in that boat.

But the new design, which took the best of the proto-type Wichcraft and incorporated those features (pointy bow, long stern) into the basic line-up, feels almost like cheating. Good bye to the "bandersnatch", hello to catching eddies easily and ferrying fast. Good bye to most side to side bow sway. Hello to straighter, cleaner lines. And boofing is a blast!

Because I am a Yak-sized guy paddling a Llama with seat forward, lots of air behind me, thigh straps, and a super deck, my boat stays dry and buoyant in bigger and squirrelier water. It's not a beginner's boat, especially with a load inside.

But when Joe McLaughlin called about the East Fork of Iron Creek in the Talkeetnas I jumped at the chance, especially with the all-star team of Joe, Thai Verzone, and Tim Johnson.

For video reasons I wanted Tim and Thai in packrafts, but Timmy came equipped with his hardshell, ostensibly fot the flat water paddle out the Talkeetna. Joe's a hardsheller, and so is Thai, but Thai and I have been making annual stabs at establishing the boundaries of packrafting since 2008 when we did Bird, then 2009 when we did Montana and the Happy with side trips.

Thai and I would find that the East Fork of Iron would again raise the bar.

As for mixing hardshells and packrafts I have followed Tim in his hardshell down New Zealand's Upper Hokitika and Six Mile when it's an iced-up, gnarly little creek. I'd welcome his skills, strength, safety, and good sense if he came along in nothing more than a dry suit and kick board.

Joe, too, is a solid boater, who took me down Six Mile many years ago in a mixed group of kayaks, both hardshell and inflatable, as well as canoes paddled by experts who could roll them, and me in my old red Yak.

Eyeing my long, svelte 2011 Llama, he said, "It looks like packrafts have evolved to the point where they don't need to be dumped every ten minutes and can run side by side with kayaks."

The steep Blueberry Canyon on Iron Creek's East Fork would prove that statement true.

Many apologies for the apparent narcissism of the video below. Because we boat scouted nearly everything and were racing darkness, there was no opportunity to use the "big camera". Moreover, the ole' dental cam was missing its face mask extension and I had to go with a bow mount for the Go-Pro. The bow mount doesn't work so well filming forward, but does work well facing back....hence the video.

Timmy J, Thai and I drove up to Talkeetna after feasting on Peggy's moose and razor clam tacos with another stop in Wasilla at Sr. Taco: the idea was to feast, fly, and paddle till midnight.

The flight in from Talkeetna to the miner's airstrip took 25 minutes and $600 for the four of us in Talkeetna Air Taxi's Beaver with two hardshells shoved in the tail.

At first the stream was so scrapy and braided I wondered whether there'd be enough water to cover the rocks we'd seen from the air in the crux Blueberry Canyon. When the creek entered a mini-canyon but felt pretty much just like the South Fork of Eagle River, I wondered why I had shelled out $150 for a fly-in version of Hiland valley.

Then, an hour and a half after putting in, the canyon deepened, the creek steepened and the wild ride began.

I'd been expecting a bedrock canyon, like Bird or lower Ship, but instead got an hour and 15 minutes of twisty turny boulder drops -- not smooth and rounded like Little Su or Magic Mile, but sharp-edged and sievy like the last three drops on Honolulu or Montana below the Big Sky drop.

Almost immediately into the main event of the run, Thai was wondering about the "spray deck leaking" on the stubby Llama I had loaned him.

In classic Thai style he was paddling this modern Alaskan steep creek in a dry suit loaned to him from someone in Gustavus (when he and Gordy had headed back over the Fairweather Range to Yakutat after walking and packrafting the beach to Gustavus), with a paddle loaned him by Tim, and in a loaner Llama of mine.

He had only had time to outfit the unfamiliar boat at the miners' airstrip using the camping gear he'd brought. We'd forgot to bring a backrest for a boat with the seat moved forward.

So when the water got stiff and steep and he found himself swamped, the creeking was not exactly enjoyable for him.

None of us could afford to tip over in the shallow, maybe 175 cfs flow.

I was glad for elbow pads, face mask, and a stable boat. And for Timmy's boat scouting skills. Several times he'd eddy hop right to the edge of a blind drop while we clung to the canyon walls waiting. He'd crane his neck, then pivot and drop in, with one hand over his head signaling us to follow.

At one point in the crux rapid slalom, among giant boulders that strain water and wood out of the flow, Joe got hung up in a corner.

Thai came by him from behind, saw the predicament then screamed and hooted like a banshee.

Downstream there was no mistaking that wild alarm sound as an exhilarating hoot and Tim was paddling hard upstream into an eddy with his spray deck pealed back, exiting the kayak in one smooth motion to pull Joe and his boat to better waters.

Another sieve drop from hell where a landslide filled the creek had one thin line that Joe made smooth and sweet to redeem himself but the rest of us walked.

Besides that and a log below the canyon and a couple fresh wood falls on the Main Fork of Iron Creek we ran everything.

Pulling into our confluence camp at midnight, we were giddy and glad, even after discovering that it wasn't the spray deck on Thai's boat that leaked, but rather a six-inch butt split. In fact whatever cut the boat had also sliced his dry bag inside the boat, too!

Despite the damage and the scare, the East Fork had delivered with a tight, technical, twisty-turny and very steep canyon that kept me right on the edge of my abilities, but never freaked me out, never had me feeling out of control.

"A little more water, like maybe another hundred cfs, would actually make it easier. Pad everything out and make the lines cleaner," Timmy said.

"Yea, I'd love to come back and run this again with more water," responded Joe.

As for me, the low water was perfect for a packraft. And I'd like to get back to Disappointment and drop a few ledges that we portaged last year, before I return to Iron Creek.

The two Talkeetna tribs are certainly related, like big brother and little sister.

Neither is granite: both are sharp. Neither is easy: both are modern, fly-in, AK creeking.

E Fork Iron is like a sassy, slappy little sister to Disappointment as big, brooding brother, mellow in the boogey water but bossy in the drops.

Disappointment is very committing, set deep in a steep-walled, alder-encrusted canyon. E Fork Iron is a shallow canyon with tundra and people at a cabin and airstrip above. Portaging and retreat seem an option.

Disappointment has a handfull of Class IV/IV+ punctuating hours of boogy water; E Fork Iron has an hour and a quarter of non-stop III+/IV/IV+ and a V- slalom sieve. The filler is almost all III+ in Blueberry Canyon.

The confluence camp is nice and the 14 mile 2.5 hour paddle to the Talkeetna's tan waters down the milky blue Iron Creek is quick, fun and smooth. Great wave trains in fast flow make for cushy paddling.

In Timmy J's guidebook he quotes those from the first descent as calling the run "an absolute classic".

If Embick had run it and put it in his book, Fast and Cold, he'd have to give it five stars.

E Fork/Iron/Takeetna has the wilderness qualities of the Happy and scenery as good as the Charley, with craggy granite upstream and forested valleys down.

Awesome whitewater.

And certainly at least three type of river in contrasting segments: the clear water unique steepness of E Fork; the milky blue wave trains of Iron Creek; and the tan big water of the Talkeetna.

Hopefully this video can tell some of our story.

Genesis of the Tour

2011-07-05T10:15:00.004-08:00

For the record the Magical Mystery Tour began with an email and a link to Mike Curiak's blog back on May Day.

From: Mike Curiak
Subject: Psssst, hey buddy...
Date: May 1, 2011 12:27:09 PM AKDT
To: Roman Dial, Eric Parsons, Steve Fassbinder, Dylan Kentch

Apologies for the verbosity, but there is a point to it all:

http://lacemine29.blogspot.com/2011/05/game-change.html

See ya 'round. Hopefully real soon!

This looked like an opening to spring what I knew we'd all want to do, so I hit "reply all" almost instantly:

From: Roman Dial
Subject: Re: Psssst, hey buddy...
Date: May 1, 2011 1:00:38 PM AKDT
To: Mike Curiak , Roman Dial
Cc: Eric Parsons , Steve Fassbinder, Dylan Kentch

Mike et al.

This is timely indeed.

I finally bought a fat bike thanks to Mike's advice and Eric's inspirations. It's meant for a couple more rides before I can't do this stuff anymore.

While we did call it hellbiking (i.e. wilderness bike & boat mostly off-trail) and many derided us at the time as "hike-a-bikers" (back then it was hard to ride and shoot photos at the same time -- plus that wasn't as photogenic as crossing rivers and thrashing through bushes), there were good reasons we did hellbike trips year after year for a decade: 1988 (Wrangells), 89 (Eastern AK Range), 90 (Brooks Range), 91 (Canyonlands), 93 (Into the Wild Bus w/Krakauer), 94 (Western AK Range), 95 (Kenai Peninsula), 96 (NG trip), 97 (Talkeetna Mtns), and 05 (Talkeetna Mtns).

I am looking for the right (experienced but patient and w/a sense of humor) partners to help an old man (me) get from Yakutat to Glacier Bay on fat bikes (or other) and this is the key group, I believe. I think it's a ten day trip and we need packrafts and some, umm, balls, I guess, for dealing with glaciers, bears, and bays. Two weeks from where you live and back most likely.

This is the stretch of Lost Coast that would make a good video using a SLR HD camera and Go Pro as a sub-five minute submission to Banff Mtn Film Festival, for example.

A group of three is ideal for sharing gear, and maybe five is better than four, but four would work, too. Even two, but images and stories come more easily when more than two.

Any of you with the means ($ to get to Yakutat and out of Glacier Bay), time (June), and interest?

You all have what it takes otherwise: skill, boat, and imagination.

Roman

The responses trickled in, beginning with Doom, whom I knew only from the Blogosphere:

From: Steve Fassbinder
Subject: Re: Psssst, hey buddy...
Date: May 1, 2011 4:46:38 PM AKDT
To: Roman Dial

Is this really a trip I could possibly say no to? hmmmm
There is also the reality of taking another extended trip this summer( cost, time off work, ect).
I'm going to head into the garage and replace that 4 year old chain on my pugs and think about it.
Let's just say I'm very interested, but perhaps august would work better for me?
Damn....sounds amazing....

A day later Dylan's response arrived with the enthusiasm of youth:

From: Dylan Kentch
Subject: Re: Psssst, hey buddy...
Date: May 2, 2011 12:31:36 AM AKDT
To: Roman Dial

Roman:

Game on. Any time after the first weekend in June should be good for
me. Let me talk to the bosses by the end of the week and get back to
you then. Flying into Yakutat is cheap, it's getting home from
Glacier Bay that should be more expensive (I think).

Dylan

And then Mike was responding, somewhat lukewarmly for tossing out the ball in the first place it seemed to me:

From: Mike Curiak
Subject: RE: Psssst, hey buddy...
Date: May 2, 2011 9:41:40 AM AKDT
To: Roman Dial
Cc: Eric Parsons , Steve Fassbinder, Dylan Kentch

Guys-

To say that I’m interested is a level of understatement that I’m ill equipped to explain. God yes I wanna.

I love that Roman has started this out by attempting to sandbag us. Old? It’s all relative. What was that quote by Dick Griffith about old age and treachery?!!!?

Roman, with your experience us ‘young’ns’ will still be struggling to keep up. As long as you, too, are bringing a sense of humor and some patience, we’ll probably do fine.

I’m pretty well set with gear (as far as I know) and certainly set with cameras. I’ve got two HD SLR’s (one zoom, one ultra wide) and I’ve already been scheming how to sew a dry bag to my spraydeck to keep them protected but easy access.

I’ve also got a HD camcorder that I’ll gladly loan to whomever else goes, and wants to be responsible for it.

Is June really the best time for this one? I ask because it’s a really, really hard time for me to get away. Not impossible though. I’m still reeling a bit from the financial wreckage of my Feb AK trip, and a bit more time to recover wouldn’t hurt. Early July?

Thoughts?

It was looking like time to snag Eric, who has a dog, a woman, a baby, and a business. He seemed the hardest, but most important, to catch, as he is the coastal bike-rafting explorer. I tried to set the hook with logistics talk:

From: Roman Dial
Subject: Re: RE: Psssst, hey buddy...
Date: May 2, 2011 4:29:18 PM AKDT
To: Mike Curiak, Roman Dial
Cc: Eric Parsons, Steve Fassbinder, Dylan Kentch

All,

Dylan says yes, game on. Mike says, yes

August I'm in Tibet and Mid July I have a week-long short job. Need to see my wife somewhere in there.

The last week June/First week of July window is doable for me with some play on either side of that. Maybe a hair bit rainier/stormier than June (http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMAIN.pl?akyaku), but early July still has long days, maybe fewer bugs, better fed bears.

This is a route I have not yet done, so yes, may be sandbagging y'all but should be interesting. I can get beta, if we want it (Giffith, Hig, Skurka and Dylan's good boss, Dirk know the coast).

Lituya Bay and La Perouse Gl seem like notable obstacles.

We can get out of Gustavus to Juneau on the twice weekly (M & W) ferry (http://gustavus.com/gethere/index.html#ferry and http://www.gustavusak.com/).

One thing you should know, in full disclosure, is that I had ankle surgery ("arthroscopic debridement of an impingement") about three weeks ago. Doesn't hurt any more than before the surgery and feels best when I am in a boat or on a bike.

Roman

Maybe it was my admission of weakness with recent ankle surgery, but eight minutes later came the Captain's commitment:

From: Eric Parsons
Subject: Re: Psssst, hey buddy...
Date: May 2, 2011 4:37:07 PM AKDT
To: Roman Dial, Mike Curiak
Cc: Steve Fassbinder, Dylan Kentch

"circular inspiration" is a good thing but I don't know Roman. Sounds scary, lots of bears, calving tidewater glaciers (I'm still traumatized mind you..) and big balls. shit. what did Skurka say? "engaging?" :)

screw that man, I'm going to stick to feeding Finn pureed sweet potatoes.

kidding of course, would be sweet to have done the whole coast and is a route I've pondered about a lot. Getting the time will be the hard part, that will take some work on my part.

But now that Eric was in, it pulled the rest of the crew more firmly into commitment. One hour later:

From: Steve Fassbinder
Subject: Re: Psssst, hey buddy...
Date: May 2, 2011 5:44:07 PM AKDT
To: Roman Dial
Cc: Mike Curiak, Roman Dial, Eric Parsons, Dylan Kentch

Ok this idea has my full attention.

In fact I'm thinking about selling my #25 Don Mclung bike to finance my way, shit i'd sell my left nut if it was worth anything!

Late June early July would work for me. I have a wedding that I must attend in SF on july15th. I guess the farther away from that date would be best, as to give me some time to work in-between.

Things that I could possibly help with are my unwavering good attitude, camera skills, and possible film ideas.

I'm very close friends with all the mountain film telluride people, in fact they are all starting to get fat bikes. If we made a film that we all felt good about putting our names on, it would be a shoe in at MF.

I also have a friend from telluride, that just took a summer bush pilot job, based out of homer.Not sure if he could help us? He flew his personal plane up to AK with the intention of exploring (flying) to some amazing places, and told me I should come up this summer and he'd fly me anywhere.

I would love to be a part of a tour like this, as much for the company, as for the experience of riding and boating in such an unknown( to me) place.

Let's keep the ball rolling with some ideas and dates.

I leave one week from tomorrow for a 13 day trek across Utah that will involve the usual bike boating bushwhacking, but this time there will be a legit climbing section, and bachelor party thrown in the mix.

Should I return from this mess with my sanity and liver still intact, you can count me in.

All the best

Doom

By 10 PM of May 2, less than a day and a half after Mike C's first email we were all in and planning:

From: Mike Curiak
Subject: RE: RE: Psssst, hey buddy...
Date: May 2, 2011 9:51:00 PM AKDT
To: Roman Dial
Cc: Eric Parsons, Steve Fassbinder, Dylan Kentch

Sorry about the email binge. I’m procrastinating real work, which is the only time I get emails answered…

Last of June/First of July is probably the best compromise for all, yeah? Eric? Dylan? I can agree to it.

I’m not worried about being sandbagged, Roman. You’ll be waiting on me plenty regardless of locomotion. If, somehow, I can keep up on the bike and in the boat, I still won’t because I’ll be fixated on filling as many memory cards as I can. I expect y’all knew that already.

Looking at the maps I see *lots* of notable obstacles. I’m so green to this that I should probably keep my mouth shut and just follow closely. I’m of the opinion that we’re gonna have our work cut out for us regardless, and more beta is mo betta.

But that’s just me. Happy to go in ~blind if that’s what the group decides. It always works itself out.

AK guys—any guesses at what we’ll be spending to get to Yakutat, and back from Gustavus/Juneau all-in? Just looking for a round number to budget.

Roman—after the debridement has the impingement lessened?

Sleeping fitfully already…

MC

And the rest is video and blog entries....more of which I'll try and trickle in, too.

Magical Mystery Tour: Video

2011-07-01T14:40:00.000-08:00

Magical Mystery Tour: Yakutat to Glacier Bay on fat bikes and packrafts

2011-06-30T23:49:00.016-08:00

Over at the the captain's blog is a bit on a trip so rich and so good that I can not write adequately.

I shot essentially no photos, only these "accidents": Be sure to click on them and see them in their big glory. MC has posted some beauties.

But lots of video: 70 gigs of video -- and that's just mine. All with the new HD GH1 and Go-Pro.

I can offer up some stats:

225 miles total.
135 miles riding every sort of beach sediment you can imagine.
65 miles paddling lakes, rivers, streams, ponds, sloughs, oceans, bays, fiords -- we used our boats 25 times.
and 25 miles of mostly stumblef*cking.

The powerhouse Lost Coast Pugsly team of Eric Parsons and Dylan Kentch, with Mike Curiak of fatbike Idita-routes and "Doom" Steve Fassbinder got me through with humor, at least two fires a day, and cowboy coffee every morning.

We saw more eagles than sea gulls. Enough bears to make it interesting, but not so many as to be stimulating. We saw sea lions and whales, suspensefully close.

We saw no one else for days, but got a note from Gordy and Thai deep in the wilderness. They walked the coast to Gustavus and then skied the Fairweather Range back, we heard. No word yet on their trip completion.

For me this was among the top ten trips, ever, and would make for a long challenging Wilderness Classic.

Our camps read like a geography of this wild coast: Situk River, Dry Bay, Grand Plateau Glacier, Cape Fairweather, Lituya Bay, La Perouse Glacier, Icy Point, Graves Harbor, Taylor Bay, Icy Straight.

The bike and boat combo was the only way for us to go. We looked forward to the miles and miles of sand and gravel, even cobble beaches, as they were all rideable. Only when the boulders got to be the size of American sports balls (hardballs, softballs, footballs, basketballs) and cliffs of ice or rock met the surf did we set on pushing and portaging our bikes or paddling our boats.

There are highlights:

Watching Dylan eat his 3 lbs of cookie dough straight out of the gallon ziplock while bobbing in 4 foot swells in his packraft.
Hearing Mike share stories about a mutual friend whose initials are RR and who lives a bit north of Anchorage.
Following Eric's lead into the Pacific breakers off La Perouse Glacier, his Surly Pugsly bravely crashing surf on the bow of his old leaky Alpacka.
Riding with Doom on bedrock and cobbles and sea grass bear trails as far as we could go without dabbing.

We were treated to wonderful weather, spectacular scenery, ever-changing terrain on what is quite likely the wildest coast in the USA.

The riding on either side of Icy Point was pretty much among the best wild riding I can recall, improbable and delightful with the aluminum 907 with its one brake and two gears, a rear rack and a backpack, ideal. Thankfully our food loads were light at that point.

Another watershed moment came with tidewater paddling. I now know how Hig and Erin stuck with it from Seattle north: it's so much better than the alternative. Heading into Glacier Bay we moved at 5 mph. Matching travel to tidal flows was super satisfying.

We averaged 3.3 mph on bike (including rest breaks), 0.6 mph stumblef*cking on the boulders or f*cksticked bear trails, and 2.3 mph on the paddling stretches. That's with the fat bikes on board.

Alpacka made a four pound "Super Scout", six inches longer than the normal Scout. It included a spray deck.

Such a great and perfect boat for me on this trip, although a bit spooky with the 60-70 pound load at the start.

Maybe I'll get some video together to give a taste.

Every Poet is a Thief

2011-06-09T12:45:00.002-08:00

Yesterday was sweet.

I joined JT, Luc, Brad, and Ben on Little Susitna at about 450 cfs.

I had my new 2011 Alpacka Llama with custom skirt and thigh straps, a new Werner Powerhouse one-piece carbon paddle (197 cm -- a bit longer than my 194 and mo betta).

And my two new cameras.

One's a Go-Pro and after seeing a CarpeyBiggs and a Ben Brown kayak video, each with Go Pro on the bow, I had to try it.

Feels a bit narcissistic, but if I put it on Timmy J's or P. Schauer's boat it'lll look super cool.

Old School

2011-06-04T16:49:00.021-08:00

A sure sign of age is when your favorite techniques are revealed to be "old school".

I have discovered that I am old school.

I like rain pants and hard shells, sharing a tent, meals, and a big cook pot with others.

I wear sleep clothes.

Call me old school, but when skiing on the Harding Icefield, it's hard for me to give up my sled for just a pack, and planning a "bikepacking" trip I find it hard to give up my rear rack.

As visible above my rear rack holds my Sawyer paddle shaft and inside that compression stuff sack (vintage 1996) is 10 days' dinner and breakfast and a gallon cook pot.

That little bit of blue foam will serve as insulation and a packraft seat when paddling. Right there it's keeping the rack from wearing a hole in the bags and makes it easier to get a good tight load, which I need for riding.

On top of the food bag is a Go lite shelter for three.

Notice all the straps. They'll be handy for getting the bike on the boat when bikerafting and for setting up tent (I carry no stakes).

While I may be an old dog, I am still learning some new tricks.

There's that Epic Designed Revelate thingy up front holding an 8 pound Alpacka 2011 model Llama with thigh straps.

I went and rode some bumpy local root wad trails with this and found that the packraft holder thingy bounces around a bit.

I must have put it on wrong, but with another single lash strap, I reefed on that bundle and tamed it so my handling was far more nimble than you'd think of fat ole me on my fat bike with a 30 pound load (that's for ten days) split between pack (10 pounds), rack (15 pounds), and bars (5 pounds -- this raft is not the one I'd use for bikerafting -- it's just a test load).

The pack is my last Cascade Designs Seal Pack (vintage 1997) with a 25 L P.O.E. dry bag holding a Go Lite Quilt, sleep clothes [Patagonia wool base top + bottom, socks], rain gear [pants + anorak], wound kit, lunches, Skurka cat food can, and other stuff I'd need a spread sheet to post properly, I guess.

I like to portage with my head through the main triangle and the rear rack resting on my pack, so I haven't gone to a frame bag just yet. And I do like my rack cause it holds twice the volume of a seat bag.

Not sure I can put 15 pounds in a seat bag, can I?

Anyway, here's an old story I wrote and maybe had published in the UK back in the mid 90s. It's pretty obvious who our sponsors were and it does seem pretty dated.

But with the new stoke on about bikerafting and "bikepacking", some readers might find it pertinent today.

Plus it's a good review for an upcoming bike trip!

Lea River in Tas

2011-05-30T18:01:00.001-08:00

This link shows that someone's paddling good stuff in Tassie:

Ice-worms, Boofs and Bunny-hops: The Beauty of May in AK

2011-05-27T18:51:00.028-08:00

A handfull of us glued in thigh straps last week, huffing glue and MEK while drinking Moose Drool, I think it was, and eating Great Harvest peanut butter chocolate chip mega-cookies at Alaska Raft and Kayak.

Yes, quite a party with Jeff C., Toby S., and Tony P. We had to wait for the glue to dry and so didn't consummate the party the way we should have: with a run down Six Mile's Third Canyon boofing everything in sight with those new, cone-headed, long-tailed, 2011 Alpacka Rafts.

By the time the glue was dry I headed for the Harding Icefield with Amy (my snow algae grad student) and Melissa (my ice-worm student) and Tyler (undergrad assistant). It was an Alaska Pacific University research trip investigating glacier ecology.

The weather was sunny and interesting with some low blowing snow one morning and cooking sun the other. Our main objectives were to drill holes through the snow and into the underlying ice to anchor "ablation cables" for measuring snow melt over the summer using the steam drill:

We had the guys' and gals' tents. The gals' tent looked far more spacious than the guys', and the gals even managed to build a multi-walled wind block from the snow.

Another objective was to install a worm cam to shoot the emergence of ice worms as the season progresses and measure the light and temperatures simultaneously.

Basically we got up at 7 AM, melted snow, ate breakfast and headed out for our drilling project with the steam drill, a pressure cooker-like contraption that forces steam down a hose and so melts a hole in the ice and snow.

The skiing was great.

And the work crew stellar. They called the steam drill, "Hookie".

Tyler Katzmar, Hookie-meister.

We drilled about three dozen holes -- actually they drilled. I was just the supervisor/surveyer.

After we put in the holes, Amy fertilized her experimental plots to see if she can get more snow algae growth by adding nutrients to the snow.

We just worked on a small corner of the enormous icefield. Look closely in lower left to see the skiers.

After two nights on the Icefield we headed out, the gals a few hours ahead of the guys. The icefield was great traveling.

The gals had passed the Harding Icefield emergency shelter a couple hours ahead and would get down so far ahead of the guys that they went into town and got pizza and beer.

Spring had sprung and, boy, was the snow rotten on the trail.

And the bridge slick.

In the three nights we were away, spring had come.

I've written here about the Harding before and even after like my dozenth trip up there I am reminded of how much I like its Pleistocene austerity.

Skiing across its flats lets my mind wander through hypotheses big and small about why and where things live and grow up there, and this was one of the more productive 96 hours I've had there.

It's just that hike up and down with big loads that keeps me from returning every year instead of every other!

But the real reason for this post is to provoke readers with my fatbike's gearing arangement: a trials size dingle:

Look at the drive train! 16 T chainring and 16/18 T freewheel.

These are my two most-often used gears (1:1 and about 0.8:1) when riding wild. Since I only needed to shift two gears (and would need a chain tensioner anyway) I decided to do rear dingle rather than front dingle.

The derailleur is from my old teen-age Campy bike -- very retro.

I tested it today by riding the Brown Bear Trail on Hillside coming and going with ease.

Is it slow? You bet!

If I want fast I'll take my Pivot 429 out and rip, snort and roll. But for stability and crank and slo-mo fun this low geared dingle and 7 psi is just my ticket to ride.

"Triple A": All Across the Gates

2011-05-17T10:32:00.007-08:00

"Triple A"-- a route that visits many of the scenic highlights of the central Brooks Range as it crosses the seven million acre Gates of the Arctic National Park. It's a route I suggested to Andrew Skurka, who modified it a bit. I posted some of the middle section of Triple A, the part from Anaktuvuk Pass to the Arrigetch, on my previous blog post and as a guest on Hiking in Finland. Each of those links have more photos and text.

The route is best done during August (3-6 weeks), when bugs are sparse, days are long, and colors intensifying, with food drops at Anaktuvuk Pass (Post Office), Circle/Kutuk Lakes (bear barrels) and Pingo Lake (bear barrels). Bring a sat phone.

Anaktuvuk, Arrigetch, Ambler are three touchstones of the central Brooks Range from east to west, and as a packrafting trip in the Brooks Range it's hard to beat these 400 miles. The route passes through the best mountain sections, including the Doonerak region, Arrigetch Peaks and front range of Igikpak. It floats North Fork of Koyukuk to Ernie Creek, John River to Wolverine Creek, Pingaluk to Alatna, the Noatak to Lake Matcherak, and all of the Ambler River. It follows game trails and excellent creek and river bars and avoids more tussocks and brush than you'd believe.

Drive up the Dalton Highway to a little turn-off to the west, just before the pipeline road leaves the Dietrich valley bottom and just downstream of Nutirwik Creek. It's about sixty miles north of Coldfoot (you could fly to Coldfoot from Fairbanks on Arctic Air for $250). Hike up Koyuktuvuk, Trembley, Blarney Creeks and over Kinnorutin Pass to descend Amawk Creek and paddle N. Fork Koyukuk (PR 3 -- PR 4 at high water). Climb Doonerak via a scramble up its south ridge, if you like heights and broad views.

From the junction of North Fork Koyukuk and Ernie Creek there is a bit of tussocks to the Valley of the Precipices. Unbelievably, this should be one of only two tussock stretches, if you read your landscapes well en route to Ambler. Bar-hop on mature willow bars or follow well-drained tundra ridges and noses to Graylime and Anaktuvuk Creek. If you are travelling light (i.e. have a food cache in Anaktuvuk mailed to the PO there) these creeks are mostly paddleable, except for some braids on the lower Anaktuvuk, where you can pick up an ATV trail and follow to Anaktuvuk Pass, a friendly village IMO. Peggy and I took a week to Anaktuvuk in one boat in 1986; I walked from Anatuvuk to the road in a day and a half in 2006. Plan for four-five days, three days if you have Wilderness Classic experience.

From Anaktuvuk to Takahula/Circle/Kutuk Lakes is another 4-7 days. Pick up food in Anaktuvuk that you have mailed ahead; although it may be possible to buy what you need at the Nunamiut Store. There are about five flights a day to Fairbanks, and sometimes to Coldfoot, so you can bail out if you need to, or hike up a pass beyond "Giant Creek" and float the Tinayguk (PR 3) back out toward Wiseman.

Eventually you will see the river start to drop around Kollutuk Creek into rock gardens of PR3. This is fun and splashy and easy with rain gear, no PFD, a Sawyer Paddle, and neoprene socks, even in the rain, if you wear a puffy jacket under your rain gear. Just pull up the sleeves to keep from soaking the arm insulation and rest your elbows on your knees. When the steep bit ends, three creeks (Ekokpuk, Masu, and Kolluturak) unite and come in from river right, doubling the flow of the John, making it feel like a small river instead of a creek. There are cottonwoods here. The river cruises nicely to Till Creek where raids begin again up to PR3, ending a couple miles above Publituk Creek, where the first spruce appear (ya!).

When the Hunt Fork comes into the John,

the river gets big but the gradient has lessened. Three hours below Hunt Fork, take out at Wolverine Creek (pic) and barhop and game trail follow west to its headwater pass. The travel is among the fastest and best westward walking on the Triple A route. White boulders make the upper stretch scenic and fun.

Cross into the upper Iniakuk drainage (see pic left) below Nahtuk Mountain and drop down and climb again over a second pass leading into the upper Nahtuk drainage. The upper Nahtuk also has an awesome network of game trails (mostly BMWs = bear/moose/wolf trails) but be sure to cut over to the Pingaluk at the lowest, most obvious pass, as the lower Nahtuk is the worst walking I have encountered in the Brooks Range.

The three hours along the upper Pingaluk's eastern tributary isn't much better thank the lower Nahtuk (shown right and typical -- brush on the right side, tussocks, humocks, sponga on the left and a nasty sharp rock canyon near the bottom), but when the main Pingaluk River is reached, awesome BMWs lead downstream to where a couple of canyons offer up spicy PR 3 (first canyon) and PR4+ (second canyon). These are easily portaged on moose trails that go high on river right. If you lose the trails, no problem: the woods are open and the ground relatively firm and dry. The lower Pingaluk is easy PR2 (for its sweepers and wood) and leads to the Alatna.

Nasty walking upstream to Circle Lake or Kutuk lakes along the base of the river right hillsides includes bad brush and tussocks. Longer but better travel wanders out onto the old bars and sloughs and open forest of the Alatna and heads upstream that way. I have done both and am not sure which I prefer. But there is NO good trail along the base of the hills to Arrigetch Creek from Circle Lake or Pingaluk River mouth.

Pick up a food drop if you can at Circle lake or Kutuk Lake, or even Takahula, then head up Arrigetch Creek's "use trail", which is on river right on the first canyon's rim. The use trail ends below the "Elephant's Tooth" at the forks of Aquarius and Arrigetch Creeks, where it's best to cross to the river left bank of the main Arrigetch Creek and follow caribou trails relatively high up-valley to below Ariel Peak.

Arrigetch Peaks from the use trail. The use trail has some remarkable campsites, but is a boggy, soggy, brushy route that is worse than most of the game trails in other valleys. It's still the best way into the main Arrigetch Valley.

Camp at the Forks in Arrigetch Valley. There is wood here and some signs of use, but it's clean and you'll feel compelled to keep it that way. The Aquarius Valley (up the left fork) makes for a good day trip and the big north walls of the Maidens and Badille are spectacular.

I used these Salomon shoes and like their aggressive grip. Mike didn't get enough support, but I find these my favorite shoes (Speed Cross, I think). They need some beefing up with glue-goo on the toe seems before leaving or you'll find yourself sewing.

The unclimbed Grayling Wall on Xanadu. If you look closely you can see the big dorsal fin of a grayling outlined on this wall. It's about 2000-2500 feet tall, I think.

The disappearing glacier on Melting Tower. Older photos show the glacier extending all along the ledge to the right. I saw it that way last time I was here in this valley in 1994. I wish I had all my slides scanned so I could post that image.

Looking down Arrigetch Creek with the Elephant's Tooth on the right and Nahtuk Mountain far off on the horizon. "Triple A" goes along the base of both mountains. The views from here are worth the hike, even from Kutuk Lake. Ariel is a surprisingly easy climb, no harder than Flattop in the Anchorage area.

Caliban, the highest peak in the Arrigetch. Ryan Hokanson climbed Caliban a couple years back with Sam Johnson. They called their route the "Pillar Arete", 5.10, Grade V, 16 pitches via a long and complex ridge route.

At the base of Ariel, looking back at the main Arrigetch Peaks. This meadow is a good palce to get a drink and eat before pushing up talus to the ridge and on to the summit.

Make your way to the backside of Ariel and follow its north ridge (chossy but doable with fifty pounds on your back) to where the long chossy shards change to a firm rotten granite that looks like sandstone. Drop your packs here and continue on the third class scramble to tag the summit and grab a fantastic view. Back to the packs follow the loose scree between slabs to talus below and take a break at the small lake shown on the 1:250,000 maps (but not shown on the 1:63,360).

Ariel is airy! But remarkably stable. Stay close to the ridge on the long shards of chossy rock.

Granite spine on Ariel -- leave your packs at the base and tag the summit. The chossy shards end at the base of this rib. Follow it to the summit but climb back down to make your way off the backside of Ariel.

Good, safe footing -- just don't stumble! In the background is the initial spine. This is the final summit ridge. You need your hands in a few places.

Summit Ridge of Ariel.

Looking off the overhanging summit of Ariel. The summit is small and very much overhung.

Wichman's Tower (left) and Xanadu's Grayling Wall (right). These are easy views to get and worth the 4500 feet of climbing from the Forks of Arrigetch and Aquarius to the point of Ariel.

Disneyland (l), Badille (c) and Shot Tower (r), peaks I climbed as a teenager in 1979. The expedition was rainy and thick with conflict. We still managed some neat climbs and I learned a lot -- mostly that I needed to work on my expedition behavior and wanted some new climbing partners.

Arthur Emmons (l), Pyramid (c) and Wichman's Tower -- the last a peak I tried solo. Nearly made it up Wichmans Tower in 1986 but verglas turned me back. That was pretty much the last climb I did.

Summit photographers.

Working between slabs on way down. If we'd left our packs at the granite rib we wouldn't have them here.

Working the scree descent off Ariel's backside.

Looking up the backside of Ariel. The summit is that pointy finger.

Looking at Xanadu on edge from far base of Ariel. This talus is big and loose.

From here descend to the Awlinyak (see Arctic Circle route for how), bailing out by floating down that bouldery PR3+ stream back to the Alatna if you've had enough mountains, as there are more rocks and passes to come. These are the last spruce until the Ambler or you choose to leave the high country.

Walls above the creek coming down from east fork of Awlinyak and Deception Pass.

Crossing the east fork of Awlinyak Creek. The creek gorges out downstream of here.

Heading to Awlinyak on a wonderful game trail on the crest of this old moraine. This avoids the gorge to its right and gives a good view of the West Fork Awlinyak trib across the valley.

Awlinyak Creek -- float this back to Alatna if you want to shorten your trip. Dave Weimer has an engaging story on his blog about paddling it.

Get high on the river right side of the unnamed Awlinyak trib coming in from the west to follow awesome caribou trails through Class III brush (hands needed). Stay high for the next couple miles until the brush ends, sticking to the trails and resisting the ones that lead down to the horrible cobblestone bar.

The good trails stay high on the left (i.e., river right). Do not get sucked down unless you enjoy cobble-hobbling.

Looking back at the lower West Fork Awlinyak trib and its brush with the Arrigetch behind, notably the big square block summit of Xanadu. Its right hand (W) ridge was climbed by Jon Krakauer in the 1970s.

Steve Hackett named these peaks the Little Arrigetch back in the early 1980s. It's a good name.

There is a sweet caribou trail leading up between the split West Fork Awlinyak trib, as you can see here.

Once in the tundra, follow the nose between the split tribs, veering right to scamble talus to a high meadow, then climb 500 feet over Talus Top Pass.

The descent of Talus Top is done best by dropping straight down the other side. Bears use this pass and that's simply amazing. Follow meadows and rock hop to the left side of Skinny Bou Pass and follow more rocks to the tundra and slabs at the top of Kaluluktok.

The West Fork Finger of Fate rising above a hiker on the caribou trail on the moraine that splits the West Fork Awlinyak tributary.

Lichen and moss on boulders near a spring. The orange lichen is associated with high nitrogen levels where birds often perch.

Looking down the West Fork of the Awlinyak Creek toward the Arrigetch.

Descending Talus Top Pass is slow and laborious -- be careful, too.

Between Talus Top and Skinny Bou are dry meadows with good camping but no willows.

Rocks with green crustose lichen tend to be more stable than the rocks with the black leafy lichen.

The approach from the east is pretty easy and gentle.

Looking back up at the pass from the west side.

At the pass.

Talus.

Looking back at Skinny Bou Pass you can see the talus is extensive. If you are good at rock hopping and have the right shoes and a light pack, this goes pretty quickly.

Igikpak is the highest peak in the western Brooks Range and forms a glacial and snow source for the Noatak. Its twin peaked top has been climbed only a handful of times and is quite a dramatic summit.

The alpine country in the Arrigetch and Little Arrigetch have these nice tarns that invite swimming on hot days.

There are solid boulders among the talus and even bedrock that makes for great walking.

The bad thing about these high routes is the big talus, standing at a steeper angle of repose than more southern stuff. Remarkably large rocks shift and tip and are quite startling. Thoughts of Aron Ralston frequently float into your head and psyche you out. The black lichen is slick as greased rubber in the rain and fog, so try to go light and pack the trekking poles away -- or if you have a grippy handle flip the pole upside down and use the grip for balance.

Between big piles of talus are strips and fields of tundra, sometimes grassy, other times filled with heather and lichen like this. The lichen gets slick in the rain as it has no roots and comes free. It's quite crunchy in the dry and makes for good fire starter.

This is Akabluak Pass, probably the best way to get to the Kobuk or Noatak drainages from the Alatna, via an unnamed valley just NW of Awlinyak. The caribou trails leading up to it are amazing, like rutted double track. That route would be the fastest but would be less interesting than the Arrigetch/Little Arrigetch route.

Looking down at Kaluluktok Creek, an upper trib of the Kobuk. About a thousand feet below here there is spruce, but just below here a few hundred feet is willow.

The biggest wall I have seen in the Little Arrigetch is this thousand foot monolith. In 1986 I walked over a pass just to its west, but getting to that pass required another pass that is not very good.

A nice tundra climb leads up to Mystery Pass over to the Noatak. The pass itself is full of big rocks and small, but these will be the last of the traverse, thankfully for sore feet.

The mystery spot, so named because it seems as if the water is flowing the wrong direction. Several travelers through here have commented on this optical illusion. The views are good, but the rocks to come are bad, if short -- the last ones, really.

Looking up at the pass to the Noatak. The pass is the saddle below the peak in the background. The best route drops into the gut here and scrambles over the rock glaciers debris. These are big, loose boulders.

Big, loose rocks. They required a lot of effort to maneuver around. Any bigger and we'd have been doing lead climbs.

Tupik Tower near Igikpak.

Looking back at Mystery Spot Pass from the Noatak side.

Descend to the Noatak and bar hop through mature willow bars as far as the big unnamed glacial creek coming in from Igigpak's east face on river left. The walking is great. If the water is high enjoy PR 3+ boulder gardens that are NZ-stle down to Lucky Six Creek. If the water is low, enjoy bar hopping and awesome game trails down to Lucky Six. Even at low water from Lucky Six down is easy boating.

This is good PR3+ when water is high -- at low water, it doesn't go.

Hiking to runnable flow on a low water Noatak.

Igikpak in the clouds -- on the Noatak above Portage Creek.

"Siwash" -- a sourdough-style bivouac.

Fly out from any of a number of lakes near Portage Creek ("Pingo" or "Nelson Walker" or "12-mile Slough") or pick up additional food for the final, easy 100 miles to Ambler.

Paddling the "Sloatak" -- Noatak low.

At low water several parties find the "Sloatak" painful and instead walk on the dry mature bars as far as Nushralutak River opposite Lake Matcherak. Curiously there grizzly bears fish for chums on Kugruk River Katmai-style. Good bar-hopping and tundra with caribou trails leads to Nakmaktuak Pass. Stay on the rim on the left side until you can make your way through a break in the limestone and descend to the upper Ambler. The views of the upper Ambler are beautiful and forested. Say good-bye to the tundra Arctic and hello to the Kobuk watershed.

Good walking leads to the first big gravel beds of the Ambler. Put in here for splashy PR 3 down to Ulaneak Creek or walk, your choice. Below the Ulaneak the river slows and then braids and really slows on its way to Ambler.

Fly out to Kotzebue or buy food and continue down the Kobuk River, restocked at Ambler and visit Onion Portage, Great Kobuk Sand Dunes, and maybe a side trip into Kobuk National Park's Salmon River, made famous in McPhee's book, Coming Into the Country.

You have just completed a trip twice as long as the John Muir Trail, longer than VT Long Trail, and just a bit shorter than the Colorado Trail. Perhaps the Brooks Range classic.

Guest Blog at Hiking in Finland

2011-05-17T07:38:00.035-08:00

Hendrik posted my trip report about five days with Andrew Skurka in the Gates of the Arctic National Park. Here are some more pictures of the traveling.

Put-in on the upper John.

Avoiding the meat to stay happy, if not warm and dry.

Packraft camp.

Anticipation.

High water on the John.

20 minutes from wake-up to lace-up to go.

Following everybody else up Wolverine Creek.

Good gravel: smooth, dry, and firm. Low on Wolverine Creek.

Typical woodland walking.

Crossing lower Wolverine.

Boulder hopping along mid-Wolverine Creek.

Cris-Cross-Recross-Cross.

Big load but light.

Bar hopping on Wolverine Creek.

Notes on the map.

Grizzlies mark there territories by biting bark as high as they can reach. It shows everybody how big they are. The bear that marked this tree is over seven feet tall.

Andrew working on his gear book, upper Wolverine.

Upper Wolverine.

These are hummocks, not tussocks, although they likely have tussocks at their core.

Two nervous animals, circling, bluffing, hoping.

The bluffing game winner.

I'd rather be packrafting, but the walking was great, too.

At least most of the time.

Trophy sized tussock head in the Pingaluk drainage.

Willows (yellow), resin birch (red), sponga, on this side and f*%#-sticks on the other.

Staying high dry and smart above the S Fork Pingaluk canyon.

Animal communication.

Finally! Lower Pingaluk, Alatna Valley in the background.

Cowboy coffee on a cat food can.

Waiting for the resupply and Michael.

A pair of readers of this blog flying in to give "Arctic Circle" a go.

A bunch of these (and other) photos are geo-referenced here.

Iceland

2011-05-16T10:00:00.006-08:00

Most of us have seen the fantastic video by Alastair Humphreys about crossing Iceland.

Several friends of mine have been to Iceland, Alaskan friends who have packrafts and know their potential, but they always came back without anything fantastic to say about it.

Alastair's 215 mile traverse of the island over ice field and down rivers puts Iceland firmly on my hit-list. The video by Alastair's trip partner, photographer Chris Herwig, is informative and beautiful.

Iceland Crossing (10 mins) from Christopher Herwig on Vimeo.

My hunch is the trip could be done a bit quicker (read lighter) if you weren't packing for what look like award winning videos. Maybe a Black Diamond Firstlight for the breezly ash-storms, and fewer 'lectrons for recording your epic.

If I read right, there're two days or so worth of boating, leaving about about 165 miles of walking. Late season, you could skip the crampons and walk on the ashy ice.

It looks like it could be done as a 10 day trip, probably it (or a variation) being the best packrafting journey in Europe, so far, (there's still some development needed in Scandinavia and elsewhere, of course). Another river or two on an trans-Iceland traverse to push the pack:raft ratio closer to 1:1 rather than 3:1 would make things easier on the ole' feet and back, but certainly don't want to miss out on that water-fall landscape on their first river, the "Pjorsa".

Anyway, it'd be neat if those two submitted one of their packrafting videos to Banff Mtn Film Festival. The Hig and Erin story will be there, no doubt, as well as other packrafting videos like a CarpeyBiggs Grand Canyon one. Luc Mehl as soon as he unclips his ski bindings and climbs back in his packraft will make something quirky and fun with his new Canon.

Maybe this could be the year of the packraft at Banff.

HD

2011-05-15T07:29:00.007-08:00

Besides the new boat there're the new cameras: Go Pro and Panasonic GH1. Wanted the GH2, but couldn't wait, so spent about half as much for the GH1.

Tim Johnson had to get started on his thesis work about the "iso-scape" of oxygen and hydrogen isotopes in SC AK waters. He's collecting samples from Talkeetna to Homer and his northernmost creek is Montana. As his advisor I rode along.

The gauge was reading 450 cfs, and everything else has been locked up ('cept 6 Mile), so Montana seemed like a good choice. Just the bottom canyon, one you could easily flip multiple times if it weren't for the Devils Club on the approach. Next time I'll be taking a ridge down rather than canyon flanks. Should be drier with less Club. Still picking it out of my flesh today.

Montana's lower canyon sits squarely with lower Ship and lower Bird Canyons as great packraft creeking. How nice it would be to have those three jewels linked like beads on a watery string. Doing all three in a day would be sweet, but Ship is still outlaw, so far as I know.

Montana Creek is a long drive but a great run. It was Paul Schauer's first packraft run two seasons ago, and he styled it. Wish I had the better cameras for that trip with Paul and Thai:

Yesterday, Tim ran in in his old blue stubby and I ran it in the 2011 Alpacka Llama. My new boat has no thigh straps, but does have a sturdy deck for bracing my knees. The video shows how pointy bow does a great job punching little waves. The boat holds a line well, but can still turn and pivot quickly, seen while threading some ice shelves.

The word "bandersnatch" no longer applies.

Inspiring Videos

2011-05-04T16:56:00.005-08:00

These two videos have inspired me to buy a Panasonic GH1 with a 14-140 mm lens.

Luc in Glacier Bay

and

This one of Grand Canyon by CarpeyBiggs

Last of the Great Unknown - Preview from carpeybiggs on Vimeo.

Yep, I am dumping my Optios, and Go Pro-ing and SLR HD with a tripod.

Reminiscing

2011-05-03T18:10:00.006-08:00

"Where are we?" At the Wolverine and Iniakuk divide.

Hendrik has honored me with a guest post on his wildly popular and wonderful blog. Because I am recovering from some minor surgery and National Geographic Magazine didn't run enough photos of Andrew Skurka's Alaska-Yukon Loop, I thought we'd all appreciate looking at some more.

Cat food can cowboy coffee.

Here're a few photos from the Anaktuvuk to Circle Lake leg, a mere 2% of Andrew's overall mileage, but a classic packrafting route I'd first done when Peggy was pregnant with Roman 25 years ago.

Brooks Range packrafting on the Pingaluk.

A moment I have been waiting for

2011-05-01T13:02:00.004-08:00

Mike Curiak has a packraft.

Curiak is someone whose biking is inextricably linked to water.

I know of him best as a snowbike expeditioneer, having likely made more trips (maybe a dozen?) from Anchorage to Nome on the Iditarod trail than anyone else without a snowmachine or dog team. He's also into riding chunk in the desert SW (water and deserts are linked by definition).

So now he has a packraft, the 2011 model, which is the dream boat come true. The big boat that can do it all: flatwater and whitewater, big loads and no loads.

I smell an epic adventure in the works.

That is, maybe Mike will come up for the other soft substrate fatbiking: big beaches and icy bays.

First Run of the Season Video

2011-04-26T14:30:00.005-08:00

Paul Schauer's video of early season 6 Mile run. There are a couple clips of my New Boat in action amongst all the hardshells.

2011 Alpacka Llama -- Getting it wet and icy

2011-04-24T10:54:00.013-08:00

My new Llama showed up on Thursday, just in time, as the AK Boating season is open – at least partially.

A bunch of us went down 6 Mile’s 2nd and 3rd Canyons yesterday (Paul Schauer, Timmy J, John Combs, Travis Spalding, Jeff Shelton). Running at 250 cfs or so, it felt like an exploratory creeking first descent a week earlier than we went last year.

As usual, the high competence, calm demeanor, yet humor and positive enthusiasm of Timmy J and Paul Schauer made the trip outstanding. Young Travis Spaulding and Jeff Shelton, second generation Alaskan adventurers, added to the spirit of exploration, especially with Jeff playboating in the icy stream, doing flips and tricks while wearing no shoes and only fleece socks. And of course, helicopter pilot Johnny "Carnage" added to the pile of smiles. It was one of the best days I have had paddling with a band of hardshells, mostly because of who filled those plastic boats. Paul posted photos, words and video on his blog.

Every corner was spooky as the creek flowed through a sub-canyon of sheer ice walls 3-10 feet high. We eddy-hopped much of the way down, often climbing 5-7 foot ice ledges to scout, then seal launching off those same ledges if clear ahead, or portaging and crossing ice bridges to seal launch below the ice dam. This doubled the time of the run -- a big group, many scouts and portages -- and worried the rest of our crew. They'd opted out of the Third Canyon due to winter play injuries and, fretting at our late arrival time, drove up and down the Hope Road looking for our bodies below.

Yea, the Third Canyon was pretty choked-up with potentially lethal ice bridges at every major rapid (top of Staircase, Suck Hole, Merry Go Round, Jaws, Junkyard Dog, and several more). In another couple weeks it should be clear, says Tim, who notes this was one of the earliest runs he's made. At one point, Johnny was scouting on river left when a dam partially collapsed, leaving a tunnel under the ice bridge on river right that we all then ducked under. It was magic.

But the big news is that the new boat is simply amazing. Best of last year's Witchcraft (i.e. long stern, pointy bow) w/best of old style boats (i.e. big tubes, bright colors, high volume, room for gear with attachment points). The Llama is super long, like 7 feet almost, but nearly as nimble as the old stubbies, and so much faster, straighter and more stable.

Old habits die slowly, and I had to take a blow to the ribs from an overhanging ice ledge to learn that I can’t do last second pirouettes to avoid things. But the speed, tracking, and especially wave ferrying and surfing are worth every micro-second loss of quick handling.

I’d like an even pointier bow, and have moved myself more central in the boat with old seats (old being pre-sewn-in, when they were just loose in the boat maybe vintage 2002-2004). I like the bow and stern to be level, and I like the high volume Llama (but am 5’ 11” and 170, so official Yak-size), so I attached my seat as far forward as I could. That means I took the back tabs on the seat and lashed them to the front tabs on the boat. I am eager to hear what the posse of new-style boat owners do with their seats.

Running Class III in the new design almost feels like cheating, it’s so stable. Luc once emailed me that a kayak was easier than a packraft, and I think the new bow and stern make it more kayak-like – it punches waves far better than a stubby and has more for-aft stability. Like a classic packraft (mine's a Llama) it retains its awesome lateral stability, something the Witchcraft of 2010 lacked.

I had Sheri put on a custom skirt which is super dry. It's a heavier fabric, almost like a tube fabric. I also had her make me a very short center opening, which is not something many would feel comfortable in, but I had no problem doing a wet exit followed by a self rescue and wet re-entry after a surfing flip. My boat's custom opening is about as big as a kayak cockpit. It’s a very short center opening with 4 inches of Velcro. But with the heavy fabric, short opening, and mando Velcro, even without thigh straps I could brace my knees on the deck. It worked so well I am considering glueing knee cups in as well as thigh straps.

The opening is so narrow that I can no longer swing my legs out to the side to get out. I also have to step right between the two lobes of the seat to get in. Like a kayak, I can not just hop in this boat. But the new cone-head butt is so stable that I just slide backwards and out onto it, then pull my legs out. To get in, I need a calm eddy, or a good platform to seal launch.

We did like ten seal entries yesterday, at least one that was about as tall as my paddle is long, and poised just 10 yards above an undercut ice wall. The new design pierced the water well, especially compared to an old stubby’s blunt entry, and its length and pointy stern gives it superb ferry ability. The long stern makes backwards boating much more consistent.

Like thigh straps and spray decks before it, the new design eases me in to another whitewater class (calling + and - classes) by technology alone. I think this year I'll be a solid Class IV boater, moving out of my solid Class III+ standing currently.

What’s even more exciting is the number of people here in ANC (maybe the center of the world for whitewater packrafting) who will have new boats and solid skills. Many of these new owners are kayakers looking at an upcoming low water season. They now have a new tool to match the conditions, a way to turn butt-scraping runs into something fun, and a way to ferret out some FD steep runs, as well.

Post Script: My second bike purchased in a year (and the second since my Mountain Klein purchase in 1986) is a 2x10, aluminum 9-Zero-7, and 80 mm Fat bike. This new bike and new boat are meant to match one another for some new "wild rides", the kind pioneered by Eric Parsons and Dylan Kentch. The fat bike is awesome and helping my rehab from ankle surgery. Wish that I'd bought one years ago although it would likely have interfered with my whitewater development.

How I wasted my Spring Break

2011-03-13T12:01:00.003-08:00

In the mid 1980s XC ski legend Audun Endestadt claimed that it would be possible to ski the 30 miles and 14,000 vertical feet to the summit of 16,000 foot Mt Sanford in under 24 hours.

This was about the same time that Chuck Comstock schemed to win the Wilderness Classic using his kite to fly off the Stairway Icefall, Jon Underwood suggested we mtn bike a wilderness route in the White Mountains, and Carl Tobin said the Iditabike ought to be extended to McGrath.

Those were heady days and we dreamed up many possibilities that only now are realized by a new generation of adventurers.

For example, Luc Mehl and John Sykes have shown that summiting Mt Sanford in a day is possible, although I think they were simply training for the upcoming Winter Wilderness Classic. Their round trip to 15,000 feet was three days, and they weren't really racing as they had time to make a video and sleep on the way up.

While Luc and John were setting out to ski Mt. Sanford rt from the road in under 72 hours, I was reliving my past (about all I can do, anymore it seems) and contributing to the cloud's collective knowledge base by posting photos for Google Earth where there are none.

My Problem with Vinyl

2011-03-11T10:14:00.002-09:00

John Harpole skiing/walking/rafting out from Kitchatna Spires, 1985.

Class II in Cheap, Vinyl Packrafts

2011-03-09T10:47:00.005-09:00

There's a discussion over on the Backpackinglight.com website about what's available as a cheap boat for Class II packrafting.

The old, apparently discontinued Sevylor Trailboat was always too small and fragile. The other vinyl boats that could be bought for under $50 worked better, but were very fragile and needed tender care. But the fist hiking traverse of the Alaska Range (Tok to Lake Clark) in 1996 by Kevin Armstrong, Doug Woody and others was made with vinyl rafts. They floated the Nenana and the Stony Rivers among others with expedition-ish loads, too.

Many people completed Wilderness Classics in vinyl rafts including Dick Grifith in 1982, and others throughout the 80's and 90's.

Back in the 90's when only vinyl rafts and the wee Curtis Design boats and used Sherpa Rafts were all that was available, Barney Griffith (he made the first kayak descent of Devils Canyon of the Susitna, Talkeetna Canyon, and Canyon Creek in the 70's) often packrafted with his dad Dick in the Wilderness Classic. Barney told me that a good paddle was more important than the boat. When pressed for what he meant by "good", he said stiff so that you had control and could keep the vinyl boat or fragile little Curtis Design off sticks and rocks and out of holes.

Below is a video from Australia of people running Class II and III in inexpensive vinyl rafts. By the way, "lilo" is Aussie for air mattress.

Yarlung Tsangpo Link

2011-03-06T15:11:00.002-09:00

My spare time, between lectures, paper-grading, and admin has been researching the region at the corner of Tibet, China, India, and Burma. This place looks quite amazing on Google Earth, particularly as the Tibet/China side has really good resolution and there are 1:200,000 scale maps available from the Russians. Plus, the Chinese tourists who travel through the Tibetan side seem much more savvy and willing and eager to post their photos on Google Earth, so you can get an idea of what it looks like. Spruce, hemlock, juniper, and birch in the lowlands and of course, my interest, are the supposed ice worms of the glaciers. Unfortunately the tourists have not yet posted a photo of a Tibetan ice worm.

Recently I stumbled on a video of an Outside Magazine movie here that's an incredible modern kayak expedition, even if 10 years old now. An international crew on 10,000 cfs Grand Canyon flows with a NZ West Coast gradient -- there's even a 70-100 foot waterfall that splits the river into an upper and lower gorge. These gnar gnar runners voices document their real respect for the Himlayan scale big water.

Worth watching all 45 minutes or so on-line. It's the movie of the trip that Peter Heller wrote about in Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet's Tsangpo River.

Watch more free documentaries

Recent Packrafting Links

2011-02-27T08:26:00.006-09:00

Alastair Humphreys has a neat, short introductory piece on packrafts at a blog called Rohantime. It's probably the best brief introduction to what a packraft is and how to get into it that I have seen.

Meanwhile, there's Andy Skurka's big Alaska Trip in all its Ted Koeppel and Michael Brown glory in the March Issue of National Geographic Magazine and on-line here and a bit more here at NG Adventure on-line where Andy has a brief but interesting interview.

It's still winter here in AK, the time of map dreaming and scheming for the coming season of joy. So I'll leave you with these 1:200,000 Russian maps (free source) of an amazing corner of Tibet west of China, north of India and slightly NW of Myanmar, where I'd like to do a packraft loop and name it "Dharma Cycle".

This is not the Tibet of high, wind-blown plateaus and grasslands, but rather rivers and maritime glaciers with forests of spruce, pine, and what looks like cottonwood. It's a green and forested place, east of Namcha Barwa and the Tsangpo Gorge (headwaters of the Brahmaputra). It seems to be the most lush place in the Himalaya, perhaps because this elbow in the headwaters of the Brahmaputra are the nearest high peaks to the Indian Ocean and its summertime wet monsoon.

Skurka Grizzly Bear Encounter in Brooks Range

2011-02-13T12:17:00.019-09:00

While crossing Gates of the Arctic National Park w/Andy Skurka on his big Alaskan adventure this past summer, we ran into a curious bear on the upper Nahtuk drainage. This was the same general area where Peggy and I had another bear encounter over 20 years ago.

At first the bear looked more predatory than curious. Andy was startled that it didn't just run away immediately, like all his other bear encounters over the last 4000 miles had ended. This bear really evaluated us.

As Skurka's usual method was to stand his ground and yell, "Go Away Bear", Andy did that, but the bear just reluctantly moved off the gravel bar and into the bushes. The wind was weak and blowing upstream, if I recall. And the bear was walking upstream toward us.

We sort of walked in a small radius half circle, Andy with his bear spray pulled to the ready, me with camera shooting over his shoulder to try and capture the tension of the moment -- and the bear walking in a larger radius half circle.

The bear just took its time, far more interested in our possibility as prey than as threat, it seemed to me. It felt much closer than the wide angle shot suggests.

The bear felt far closer than the telephoto shot shows, too!

One long, last look before slowly, almost disappointedly, the bear continued ambling upstream.

Andy Skurka with a good post-bear encounter adrenaline buzz going.
He's an adrenaline junky, too, I guess, just more of the low-dose, slow drip kind.

Spring Break?

2011-02-12T17:26:00.002-09:00

Wish I could justify this trip over the coming Spring Break (instead of the 2012 one):

It's Ganey's Part I Instant Grand Canyon Classic. The Canyoneering start, the big inner gorge rapids, and the meal at Phantom Ranch just sort of high-grades the place.

That's enough for me. Wonder if it could be done on a Backcountry Permit?

And this by Tyler Johnson. He went down on a full raft trip and used packrafts as sattelite boats which is pretty common nowadays, I guess.

And our "old" one, which was also self supported. I think a week in the GC with a packraft is satisfying the way a Wilderness Classic in 4 days is. It's a satiating, full-body adventure:

Packraft Portaging

2011-02-05T21:50:00.003-09:00

One of the great matches between the Franklin River and packrafting are the portages.

The Franklin is Class III, maybe Class III+ (which can be, yes, portaged easily), except for a handful of Class V to Class V+/VI drops.

Some of these un-runnable drops are a bit involved in their portages, with ropes, ledges, cliffs and scrambling through brush. These are the infamous Churn, Thunderush, Cauldron, and Pig's Trough. Even the less involved portages like Log Jam, Nasty Notch, upper Coruscades, Ole' Three Tiers, and Big Falls look like a pain for anybody with Class III skills and a hard-shell kayak or big, 12 foot+ raft.

Anyway there's really very little Class IV (and what there is seems highly dependent on water level), the kind of stuff that makes you feel like a wussy for not running it, but when you do, you swim and lose a paddle, or a boa,t or skin off your knuckles. I don't like to run Class IV with a week's worth of camping gear and food, so I'd portage that, too, if there was a bunch on the Franklin, but there isn't. Just miles and miles of great Class II and III and moving water though pretty gorges.

What tickles you, the packrafter, there on the Franklin -- the way walking miles on sore feet and then getting into your boat to paddle tickles you, like you're getting away with something in a clever way -- is that the terrifying cascades and waterfalls of the Franklin can be portaged.

In a weird way -- like the way it's summer down there when it's winter up here, and their swans are black and ours are white, and the sun goes across the sky from right to left there instead of left to right here -- on this river, what tickles you, the packrafter, is not getting in your boat, but getting out of it.

Here's how we rig for that:

A Grand Australian Canyon, The Franklin

2011-01-27T15:06:00.018-09:00

Ten years ago I scared the bejeezus out of myself on the Franklin River.

Last week Bill Hatcher, Cody Roman and I ran it with flows varying from low water to high water and found it fantastic, truly one of the world's great packrafting adventures. It is longer and more pristine than anything else in the southern hemisphere south of the 40th parallel, including rivers in New Zealand and Patagonia. It runs through a 3.5 million acre World Heritage Area that stretches 2/3 of the way across western Tasmania. There is great variety and enough challenge to keep it interesting, but not so much as to guarantee an epic.

Essentially a pool-drop river with frequent rapids and stunning, sinuous reaches, the Franklin starts in the mountains of sharp, bare ridges and ends in lowlands pockmarked with limestone caves. Throughout grows thick temperate rainforest often cut with canyons and gorges. We took 5 days to go around 100 km and saw nobody else until the end when we caught a yacht to take us six hours to the nearest road.

The 100 km run in west central Tasmania has a long list of epics in its half century history. That history carries on today with its reputation for wildly-varying water levels, big rapids, and gnarly portages often set deep in sheer-walled canyons. Even the names -- “Nasty Notch”, “Irenabyss”, “Great Ravine”, “The Churn”, “Cauldron”, and “Pig’s Trough” -- suggest something sinister.

Like temperate rainforests around the world, there is not much bird or animal life in these thick, somber, and soggy woods. Not much to support the original Aborigines, even less for the escaped convicts of the 19th century who fled the forced work camps of Sarah Island, only to find themselves in an even more inhumane prison of brush, canyons, and starvation.

Named for Sir John Franklin, who traversed its wilderness with his wife Lady Jane while he was governor of Tasmania, five years before his disappearance in the Canadian high Arctic, the Franklin River was also the birthing ground of the powerful Green Party. Spearheaded by Senator Bob Brown, who pioneered the use of over-sized packrafts down the Franklin in the mid 70s and 80s with his partner Paul Smith – who said that their “duckies” made the life and death trips of the early Franklin pioneers into “exhilarating sport” – the battle for the Franklin wilderness showed how motivated Australia’s environmentalists could be. Today, over thirty years later, Bob Brown and the Green Party remain a potent force in Australian politics, although the current environmental battles fight over old growth eucalyptus forests in Tasmania and the 300+ foot giants growing there that are clear-felled for pulp.

In contrast to Brown and Smith's “rubber ducky”, the micro-duckies of today, Alpacka Rafts, are more nimble and easier to portage and seem to be the perfect craft for the river. It is possible to run the 100s of Class II and III rapids of the Franklin in a packraft carrying a week’s worth of food, while portaging the Class V drops and waiting out the swollen river during high water events in the numerous and spotless camps set high above the river. We felt that the easy waters might make a kayak a bit of overkill and the log portages might make big rafts a bit of work. Packrafts offered their usual forgiving fun in whitewater and light weight during portages. Carrying along the slim, informative guidebook by Griffith and Baxter, “The Ever Varying Flood”, offered us well-illustrated maps and descriptions.

We rode a bus from Hobart for about AU $55 each to the short Donaghy’s Lookout Trail. There we hiked down to the confluence of the Franklin and Collingwood, as the water level was too low the first day to start at the usual Collingwood Bridge. From the junction we paddled about 15 km in the afternoon to Descension Gorge. It rained all night and the next day, bringing the water level up and sending dozens of waterfalls into the river. The second day was flatter paddling than I’d remembered from 10 years ago when I scrawled on my map, “best packrafting in the world”, but we made good time to Camp Arcade.

The third day the river had risen over 1.5 meters at the large pool below our camp and when the river was constricted over drops and rapids we could really feel its push and the hydraulics’ suction.

We portaged the big rapids in the Great Ravine in sunshine, although I did try one of the Coruscades, losing my paddle in the aftermath. Sharp-eyed Bill spotted the paddle in an eddy and spared me from trying to paddle the big water with my Sawyer paddle, our spare.

Stymied by the high water at the put-in for Thunderush’s low portage I saw the nearest thing to panic in Bill’s normally cool and collected demeanor. Rome and I were willing to make a go of the four-foot drop piling into a wall and a hole, but Bill thought he saw the high portage on the other side.

A landslide and taken out a part of the high portage route and the Tasmanian Parks had done the rest, spending millions on helicopters and labor to remove the high portage track of bolted walkway out and carting it away. But the old cut through the forest remained and we scrambled up.

We scouted the high portage route's remnant of cut bolts and fixed ropes, using our own throwbags as handlines, then bivied below an overhang at the top of Thunderrush. Thankfully it didn’t rain and the water came down. The next morning we carried our camping gear over the portage and made a short rappel back to the water’s edge. High adventure!

The portages and rapids challenged us. Roman, still recovering from a lower back injury in the Grand Canyon three years ago, was surprised and encouraged to find that he could manage all the paddling and climbing and descending as well as he did. This trip may well be a turning point for him.

“I think packrafting is good for my back,” he said along the Thunderush High Portage, which was music to my ears.

Since middle school he and I have paddled packrafts together. As it breaks a father’s heart to see his son injured and unable to enjoy activities they have long shared, it’s wonderful to know that we will continue mixing water and land in wilderness.

We portaged the Cauldron on its long track and Ole Three Tiers but ran everything else down to the terrifying Pig’s Trough, portaging that, and paddling on to our camp at Newland Cascades, the nicest camp along the river. There, a series of shallow caves beneath a high overhang offers up a dry enclave, free of leeches and wet brush. There is a commanding view of the 400 meter long Newland Cascades and a waterfall across the river.

We dried out our gear and enjoyed young Roman’s amazing Jet Boil cookery: Indomie Mee Goreng instant ramen noodles with whole milk powder and peanut butter – tasty as something from your local Thai restaurant, truthfully.

Bill shot photos and Roman nursed a cold the next day as the rain waters upstream swelled the river by over a meter and a half. At 2 PM we finally shoved off and rode the flood downstream into the lowlands, past limestone walls and caves and waterfalls pouring from holes in the rock.

We ate our usual lunch of sardines and Cadbury chocolate in Rafter's Basin and a dinner of tasty cheese and milk biscuits above Double Falls, while rafted together in mid-river.

Twisted old Huon pine and young new recruits lined the banks where the river flooded past the bushes. It wasn’t raining, so we stayed warm. Double Falls was swollen to a single falls and Roman made a go at it but was flipped by a boil. We had a bit of a scare with an undercut wall at its lower end, where Cody Rome found he had to time his exit with the water’s surge.

Big Falls was a terrifyingly huge tongue disappearing into a maw of a hole. It took us 20 minutes to bushwhack around its left side.

With such high water we discovered that we could quite likely make it the 40 km out to Sir John Falls, where a yacht waited with another raft group of 3 rafts, 2 kayaks, and 11 people to make the 6 hour, AU $170/pax trip out to Strahan and the road.

We made it by 9:45 PM with just enough light to quell our trepidation of paddling the mighty Gordon in falling darkness.

The next day cruising down the lower Gordon and Macquarie Harbour we swapped stories with the rafters and swapped turns climbing to the crows-nest on the 65 foot ship. Thankfully the winds and waters were calm and we could enjoy the food served on board.

In Strahan Bill and Rome caught a ride with the rafters back to Hobart while I tried my luck thumbing a ride from the gas station. For a tankful of gas, I managed a ride with an Aussie and his American girlfriend, meeting Roman, Bill, and legendary climbers John Middendorf (of A5 fame) and Paul Pritchard at the New Sydney Hotel in downtown Hobart in time for a beer and a burger.

What a trip. Just what we'd been looking for: whitewater, and scenery, and an ideal application of the packraft. Better than my first down the Franklin, by far. Still, I look forward to my next Franklin packrafting adventure, as it's truly one of the great river trips of the world.

Franklin River Packrafting from Roman Dial on Vimeo.

More photos from Bill at his website (click "Franklin River Packrafting" under the "New Work" tab) and his blog.

Tasmanian Steep Creek

2011-01-18T03:12:00.006-09:00

Borneo boating was a bust.

It was too expensive and bureaucraticly challenging to get to Sabah's Maliau Basin with boats, so Roman and I hung out in Tawau for a week, nursing our dollars until leaving for Tasmania, Australia.

Tasmania is the closet thing to a New Zealand watered wildland, with native Australian animals, plants and birds. It's wild and thick, with few trails and a pretty little Hobart nestled in hills over tidewater, like Seattle in the sixties or Portland in the seventies. Parrots and lorikeets swoop through well-watered eucalypts, while strange marsupials you've never heard of come out at at twilight: quolls (marsupial "cats") and pademelons (foot high kangaroos) chief among them.

Cody Roman and I had come to meet Bill Hatcher to run the Franklin (which I ran in 2002 and feature in my book, Packrafting!). But first we had to warm up. So we ran the Picton in an afternoon and then a couple days later set shuttle for the remote and steep Anne River (400 feet/mile for about a kilometer or so).

The Anne is situated in the remote Southwest National Park and starts high in Australian Alpine country, near Mt. Anne and the Arthur Mountains, a stunning, once-glacial landscape of weird plants and craggy peaks. There in a campground we saw a raccoon-sized Spotted Quoll and its potential prey the wee Tasmanian Pademelon.

We hiked in a scenic trail for about 30 minutes to the put-in on a metal bridge and proceeded to boat-bushwhack a kilometer in 2 hours to where the creek steepens up and clears out into wild drops spilling through boulder gardens of sharp rock. Good thing the weather was good or we would have been in trouble. It's hard to exaggerate the Tasmanian brush -- worst in the world I reckon: makes Appalachian laurels, California manzanita, Alaskan and BC alder, Chilean quila, and whatever it is they call their scrub in NZ a look like stuff for pre-school kids who are too young to know what alcohol is, while the stuff down here is Tassie is for hard-core alcoholics on crack.

Anyway, retreat upstream or down except in boats was not an option. It took us ten hours to go ten kilometers down the wicked steep drops. Can't say it was the best boating I ever did -- can't say I'd so it again. Too much more water would be suicide for us. Any less would be a hike through world class stumble f*cking brush.

The lower Anne, its last four kilometers or so was dreadful and the Huon at 0.75 m on the Judbury Gauge was a tedious 25 km paddle through stunning eucalypt forests with 5 great drops in its gorge. We got out with our last scraps of food in the dark after 36 hgours of intensity and non-stop ending I haven't seen since the last Wilderness Classic I'd entered.

So, I think we're ready for the Franklin -- once our arms recover from yesterday's 12 hours of paddling.

Kenai Canyon Cold

2010-12-16T21:28:00.001-09:00

If we weren't headed for Borneo and Tasmania soon, maybe something like this would make it to our agenda:

Borneo soon

2010-12-02T21:05:00.004-09:00

This shelter is a Rob Bell of Mountain Laurel Designs creation, a tropical tarp to cover a Go-Lite Shangri-La nest. The idea is to hang something outside to keep rain off, yet offer up some airflow across a bug net to keep the inch long ants and terrestrial leeches off our sleeping bodies. The tent's intended for tropical rainforest camping, something we have done a bit of over the last couple decades, starting with Hawaii, passing through the Caribbean and Costa Rica, but finding its ultimate expression in Borneo, where the tropical trees are tallest and the canopy-dwelling animals wildest (IMHO).

In a few weeks we Dials will be roaming to Borneo. That's all of us -- Peggy, Jazz, Cody Rome, and me -- heading to Sabah for a couple of weeks watching wildlife, eating tropical fruit (durian!), and sweating in the equatorial heat and humidity.

We first went as a family in Dec-Jan 1995-96, when the kids were six and eight. We went to Kalimantan to visit Gunung Palung National Park (often featured in National Geographic Magazine with photos by Tim Laman). What an influential adventure that was. We flew to Singapore, then Kuching in Sarawak, then Pontianak in Indonesia. There we rode a small boat for five hours across the Kapuas River delta, biggest in Borneo. The boat dropped us in Teluk Melano, a malarial town with a never-ending stream of timber floating past. Old-growth, primary forest cut for plywood to hold concrete forms in China, Japan, and the US then thrown away.

From there we rode motor cycles on single track through cut-over jungle to a village and hired two guys in a small dugout to paddle us upstream for 12 hours to a research station rotting beneath giant dipterocarp trees. The animals and the plants and the purity of the place was remarkable. We drank from a stream flowing off Gunung Palung, the steep, wild mountain behind camp, as it flowed right past the camp. Twice daily we'd bathe in its cool refreshing waters and the kids delightedd in wading, snorkling and catching "toe-nibblers" and "needle-nose" fish that looked like they were right out of a freshwater aquarium. We watched gibbons and orangutans, caught giant millipedes and big green lizards. We saw ants as big as your finger and deer the size of your boot.

We returned the following year when I taught an APU tropical ecology class there but by then the log poachers were encroaching and the wildness was fading fast.

I've been back to Borneo many times since then, including a two month stint at Danum Valley with Roman doing a research project on canopy structure, microclimate and arthropods. Most recently, Peggy and I included Sabah and Sarawak on our round the world trip in 2008-2009. The really neat spires, the jags of limestone rearing out of the jungle, are in Mulu National Park, Sarawak. There are other sights from Tawau Hills Park, Kinabatangan River, and Danum Valley. The big spiky fruit is the stinky but oh-so-tasty durian....always a highlight of any visit.

This trip should be good, too. We are all excited as it's been 15 years and the kids are now adults strongly molded by the memories of their childhood visits to Borneo.

Kimberly Australia: King Edward River, Bungle Bungles

2010-11-21T09:55:00.004-09:00

This is a bit of a tease:

It's a fellow named Kevin Casey, a world-traveling, self-described "remote riverman" who recently replaced his inflatable kayak with a an Alpacka Raft. His first packraft trip was to Australia's far NW Kimberly for a solo jaunt that made my own solo trip look a tad tame. He recently posted on the Alpacka Rafters site that Gabon would make a good packrafting destination for the savvy wilderness traveller.

His Kimberly journey was in May, the early, cool start to the dry season, which contrasts mightily to March when Peggy and I were there and it was deadly humid and hot. Think East Coast August humidity and Phoenix, AZ August temperatures. By May, it's dry and cool, and super nice. Main problem is getting back to civilization once you reach the mangrove and crock-infested coastline. NOLS runs canoe trips down the Drysdale River in the Wet, but I think when I go back, I'm going in May. March almost killed me.

Peggy and I drove out from Darwin (3+ days drive) to see the Bungle Bungles but the park was closed so she camped at the road while I rafted down the Ord River to walk into the park. It was a strange and wonderful experience. The water was as warm as a hot springs and the air like an oven. I paddled past a pack of wild dingos resting on the bank then splashing off through the shallows; flocks of a thousand gallahs, pink colored cockatoos sqawking; and what looked like ten thousand fruit bats fussing and fighting in the tea trees with a dozen freshwater crocodiles waiting below to feed on the hapless weak ones that fell into the water. I paddled though this melee of bats and crocs then camped downstream, spooked.

As night fell, a half hour of bats (see the video below) passed overhead in the beautiful sunset. I slept restlessly for fear of crocks climbing up on the bank to get me, bivied on an air mattress under a cotton sheet. Alive in the morning, I watched the thousands of bats return.

Downstream I paddled through some fun class II rapids with crocs waiting in the pools below. Then I rolled up the boat and headed for the Bungle Bungles, an incredible landscape of domes and canyons.

On my hike there I walked on a jeep road, rutted and eroded, when I came to a nine foot snake, clearly an elapid, and judging by its size and aggression, a king brown snake. I stopped and it headed toward me. I threw a rock at it to get it to retreat but instead it checked out the rock then headed for me more directly, more quickly. This alarmed me so I retreated up the road and watched as it disappeared down a gully.

The next day I hiked into the Bungles, walking up the Piccaninny Gorge. It was hot, oh so hot, and I found another snake, and water monitor lizards, and a few birds and fish. I was all alone here as the park was closed for the wet season.

It was just too hot. The balls of my feet feet on the hard surfaces in the heat in La Sportiva Fireblades were blistering so I decided to walk at night in my crocks which, were really functioning as camp shoes.

To save batteries I walked in the dark, fearful of snakes. To save fluids I rigged my sheet for shade during the day and tried to sleep. It took two pushes to walk the 30 miles out in my crocks. The second night was trippy, as in a bad psychedelic experience. First there was the late afternoon heat. My watch thermometer read 113 degrees under the umbrella carried as a parasol. Then there were the bush fires burning, burned out, or smoldering everywhere as I entered the wooded hills.

I crossed a creek and heard two feral bulls, the ones that are wild and never get rounded up, bellowing -- no roaring at each other, just as the tropical sun dropped, and one bull came toward me and I hurried off into the scrub to get trees between me and the beast, like you would with a pushy moose. That freaked me out, with all the poky bushes and grasses and the snakes lurking, I knew, and me barefoot in my crocks, 'cause the bulls came for me as I was trying to put my socks but no time, had to run. And that was just the beginning.

Then it got black and the hills were burning in bush fires, creepy, and silent and no wind, no night sounds, under a billion stars, all weird, except Orion in a funny place and that weird Southern Cross. Later the sideways moon rose and I could hear digeridoo music: Honest! Way out, like 20 miles from the nearest road and that road an empty thing in the Aussie Outback. I couldn't make it out to Peggy in the dark that night and I was tired from no sleep (too hot in the day fro walking or sleeping for that matter), so I camped in the dirt and woke in the morning with a centipede and a scorpion under my sheet with me.

And the next morning I walked out to the road, happy to be alive.

Another Great Modern Packrafting Adventure

2010-11-15T10:47:00.003-09:00

Alastair Humphreys' video's professional production puts my silly little vids to shame:

An Expedition Across Iceland from Alastair Humphreys on Vimeo.

Thanks for making me look bad Alastair!

Modern Packrafting Adventures

2010-11-13T10:51:00.005-09:00

This trip shows Tazzie as a packrafting destination. More of a classic, Alaska-style landscape adventure than a New Zealand trail hike and sport boat trip spot.

And this is more modern still: "Urbaneering" in Baltimore

How to impress kayakers:

2010-11-10T18:47:00.002-09:00

Luc Mehl's latest creation:

"We've heard a lot of kayakers describe the differences of being in packraft for the first time, but never get the opposite perspective.

"I took a Jackson Villain creekboat down Sixmile II and III (8.8 ft) with Matt and Toby Sunday (followed by a ski run in Turnagain, which was sweet!). My first time in a 'real' boat. It was a lot of fun, fun to be going through the rapids and nervous as hell.

"The take home message is that the little crap that we worry about in packrafts was not a concern, while some of the more subtle features, like eddy lines, require way more technique. I never had very good control of my line, but the boat pushed through everything (except staircase!). I expected everything to be harder in the kayak, but it really wasn't.

"Once I learn how to deal with eddy lines I think I'd be comfortable kayaking the same low-water runs that we packraft now.

"I loved not having to deal with inflating the boat and my 5 seat/back-rests.

"We put in at Boston Bar, so there wasn't much time to get used to the boat, I felt really unstable and kept getting turned backwards. Everyone complains about how poorly the Alpacka's track, but this boat didn't really feel any different in that regard. It is just much more of a two-dimensional problem.

"In the packraft I go in straight line segments and just turn the entire boat to change direction. The kayak carried speed with each stroke, so I had trouble timing my direction changes- travelling in curves rather than straight lines. This likely has a lot to do with my lack of technique.

"Pearly gates was no problem, but when I entered the eddy left, I flipped instantly on some eddy line I didn't even see. The roll was easy and gratifying. The rest of 2nd canyon was spent learning that I didn't need to worry about choppy waves or lateral features, etc., the kayak just punched through everything.

"I was pretty nervous entering 3rd, but I had the sense that if I could just get the boat where I wanted it, I'd get pushed through all the rapids. The problem was getting to where I wanted to be! The boat was so much more responsive to paddle strokes that I kept finding myself facing ~45 degrees off of where I was paddling toward. This put me directly over the staircase rock that Roman hit his head on, which was of course not a good place to be. I flipped, tried to roll three times but was getting pushed up against the right wall so I pulled the skirt.

"It was no problem to hold on the boat, but it was so heavy that even after I got it to shore a few times I couldn't get it out of the water. Matt and Toby were not too helpful because they swam there, too. Classic. The snow and ice on the banks didn't help.

"I had no problem with the rest of 3rd. It was a real treat to keep some of my warmth. I really liked being able to slide over rocks too. The braces put my right leg to sleep instantly, I don't know if that means the boat was too small or if I just need to adjust padding. But it made me appreciate the comfort of our inflatables.

-Luc 'Join the Darkside'"

New Map with Outdoor Data

2010-10-29T13:18:00.004-08:00

Beside being a water hucker (both powder and liquid forms), Luc Mehl is an MIT-trained earth scientist. Recently as part of his work with ecological databases, he put together this map. I don't know enough to make the map look embedded here, where it should be, so all of you Alaskans and those planning on visiting Alaska could more readily use it, but I suggest you bookmark its location as it is super useful.

Luc has compiled real-time sensors all across the State, including web-cams and put them here in one place.

Thanks, Luc, for taking the guess work out of planning my next quick trip and for putting so much good, live data in such an easy to reach place.

End of the season?

2010-10-26T17:33:00.005-08:00

Tim Johnson continues to lead Luc Mehl and me down ever steepening creeks: Magic Mile, Upper Willow, and, this past weekend, Upper-Upper Bird and its handful of stout drops, namely "Walls of Jehrico", a "20 foot" waterfall.

Several interesting things occurred: first Luc wants to turn to the "hard side" -- not to give up on packrafting, but rather to improve his technique, to "paddle like Timmy and Paul and", he adds, "to go down easy rivers with my friends who are just getting started in packrafting."

Second, four of us piled on Tim's 4-wheeler to drive the four miles to Upper-Upper Bird. This seemed pretty weird, riding an ATV to go packrafting, instead of walking.

Third we worked on the first rapid, "Cave Man", like rock jocks on a boulder problem. We kept getting flipped (we being Luc and me -- not Timmy) at the cave wall at the bottom of the drop. Tony Perelli watched us closely, then took his turn and made the drop, hit he cave wall bow-on, bounced off and paddled away. Luc and I were able to replicate this technique and so move on to "Walls of Jehrico," the big drop.

After Caribou Creeks' drowned "Skyscraper Falls" this is one of the cleanest drops around. We studied it and decided that we could drop off its right side and the "horn mid way down we won't even feel." I was not so sure and planned to miss it.

First Tim and then Tony hit the horn and both face planted as the horn caught the boat bottoms and slowed them. Luc, going third, was intent on making a good roll in the pool below (he's been hitting his combat rolls consistently in Six Mile), but instead made a fantastic boof that cleared him of the horn, sticking the huck and sending his fist upward in glory.

Next, we came to the another waterfall, "Inside Out", which was too bony for us to run. The plunge pool was great but the entry slot was narrow and overhung. We three packrafters jumped into the pool feet first, then Tim, the kayaker, folded up his butt-boat and anounced he would be late for his date if he didn't leave. So he walked to his 4-wheeler while we finished the run, a run too bony for fun, exhausting, frustrating and slow

It wasn't just scrape-y but bang-y as we hit our paddles on the rocks in six inch of water for the next couple miles and what seemed like hours.

Luc said, "If I've learned one thing, it's always do what Timmy does: if he takes a line on a waterfall, take it. If he walks around a drop, walk around it. If he leaves the river with his boat rolled up, leave the river. He's always right."

November 2009 to October 2010

2010-10-17T13:19:00.003-08:00

Not since Alpacka came out with fat tubes, a big bow, and a sporty cut has there been such a big advance in packrafting as thigh straps. And Tim Johnson should get the credit for leading the way on that modification to a stock Alpacka Raft.

Thigh strap are not one of "40 add-ons" to a packraft that just make the boat heavier. They are a single addition that we in AK have seen on dozens of boats that give people control and confidence in whitewater from Class III to Class V, as well as leverage for paddling the flat and windy.

People are not getting entrapped -- yet. If a single chambered boat with extra velcro (added to keep a boat dry) were to go flat in the wrong place at the wrong time, then it does seem like being trapped in thigh straps will be bad. Indeed, besides practicing your Eskimo roll in a thigh strap equipped boat, think about letting all the air out while you are in the boat in the pool to see how you'll get out! Simply having a single chambered boat go flat under you, even without thigh straps, is a dangerous entrapment situation and one reason I find the Feathercraft Baylee so attractive. Unfortunately the Baylee is not as maneuverable or boofable as an Alpacka.

It would be nice if Alpacka made two chambered boats as durable and long and lean as the Witchcraft, and if Feathercraft made nimble boats with spraydecks that stayed up. Until then, we'll all be modifying our own boats and paddling them like this:

Hig and Erin Highlights Reel

2010-10-14T16:14:00.002-08:00

Bird Carnage and Honey Sweet Upper Willow

2010-10-11T19:46:00.007-08:00

It's Bird season -- low water and warmer down on the arm in the hemlocks and Sitka spruce. Took my son Roman and Todd Tumolo and Matt Johnson down to do the long version of Bird Creek. Be sure to take the second left after the wooden trail marker about 45 minutes in from the parking....not the first left after that wooden trail marker. We had sunshine and carnage at the Center Falls. Matt came up with a great name for the drop after Center Falls -- "Bird Cage" -- as anyone who's got grabbed at the stern in low water can appreciate. His video offers up good low water names for the series of rapids below Mushroom: "Bird Brain", "Chicken Wing", "Whirly Bird", Center Falls and "Bird Cage". I'd stick one more name in there for the ledges above "Whirly Bird" -- "Breast Meat"?

That canyon has become quite the packrafting scene -- there are about six or seven You Tube videos on just Bird (OK, well two are mine) and for good reason.

On Friday I tried out the BayLee 1 by FeatherCraft on Bird. It comes thigh strap ready and with two chambers feels oh-so-safe compared to a single chamber should you cut your boat and go flat midstream with thigh straps tight and four inches of velcro holding your skirt shut....anybody who wants to downsize from an inflatable kayak (IK) to a packraft will absolutely love this 9 lb (w/straps) boat. It paddles more like an IK than an Alpacka and has two chambers and solid fabric. Rafters will appreciate its conventional valves. The seat is well forward and the spray deck surprisingly dry for version 1.0, seem like. Pulls up high on the chest and actually stays there. It's like Feathecraft has been reading the Alpacka Forum and blogs like this and listening....but for me, I still prefer the nimble cut of an Alpacka Raft even if the Alpacka needs some further mods to make it suitable for Class IV.

So when Timmy J, Luc, Tony Pirelli and I went to paddle Upper Willow, I took my trusty Super Llama.

That was the best day of boating this year, with uncountable big drops and filler that felt like Little Su's main events. I emailed Brad, "If Magic Mile is Little Su on steroids, then Upper Willow is Ship Creek on crack." It was an icy day with frost on the walk-in and verglas on the boulders, but my hands stayed warm under the influence of "A", that natural high substance we all crave.

I shot some video but it doesn't do the magnificence of the canyon any justice. Nor did I capture the intensity of the drops. The boogy water is basically like Bird Creek canyon rapids and the big drops, the ones with names, are like nothing I'd ever done in Alaska -- more like a mini version of the Upper Hokitika Canyon, challenging, committing, and often sievy. The longest rapid "Sieve 57" was wild and finished with a big juiced up version of Commando Drop, twice as high and following a bunch of linked Six Mile Staircase like drops. WILD!

The Triple Drop portage on the right was an adventure. We had to get into our boats from a cliffside and I got surfed in a mini-hole, fell out and almost got pulled into a sieve there until I pushed my boat into a channel and held-on head first down a narrow slot to keep from touring Elvis' Graceland North.

Elsewhere and in other news, I feel like I learned to boof-lite (not full on, but getting there).

In 2009 Thai Verzone said of Montana Creek, "Last year, we'd never have dreamed of doing this." This year I never dreamed that I'd finish the legendary Upper Willow two weeks after Magic Mile and grinning ear to ear with Luc, who said, "I didn't think it could get better than Magic Mile -- I can't wait until next week to do this again."

Luc, Tony, and I bought Tim dinner and a tank of gas in thanks for taking us down -- we ran everything but Aqualung and Triple Drop and landed it all with big fat smiles on our faces.

Some links worth checking

2010-10-09T09:16:00.002-08:00

Feathercraft's packraft looks like the old Sherpa Packraft on steroids (to be fair the Alpacka raft is an old Curtis Designs boat on juice, too).

Heading out shortly to paddle a BayLee 1 -- report to come.

Meanwhile there's been a bunch of packrafting going on with people all over the place:

Packrafters checking out a landslide on Caribou Creek, a landslide that dammed up the creek and shortened 30 foot "Skyscraper Falls" to Townhouse size. We didn't run the falls -- this time:

Next there's the Red Boat Brigade on Six Mile's three canyons, a personal favorite video of mine:

The East Fork of Chulitna from the fun-loving Fairbanks tribe of packrafters:

And finally, Forrest McCarthy posted his greatest hits vid for 2010 about the time we were just getting started up here in AK:

AWESOME!

Magic Mile II

2010-09-28T21:27:00.001-08:00

Luc Mehl's video:

Crazy...

Magic Mile

2010-09-27T17:08:00.010-08:00

In the 1980s when I was a climber I hung around Andrew Embick's house in Valdez where hard men told stories about the first descents and epic kayak runs of the day: Canyon Creek, Kings Magic Mile, and Caribou Creek's Falls, among others.

Then, I was a wilderness racer and mountain traveler whose biggest whitewater experiences were limited to the likes of Class II and III on the Chitistone, Nenana, and John Rivers in an open Sherpa Raft. I never thought that I'd have the skills to paddle a kayak, much less a packraft, down the test-pieces of that golden-age era.

My, have the times changed.

This weekend several groups ran Six Mile's three canyons, Echo Bend, and Canyon Creek in packrafts -- albeit at low water -- and had a good time on those classics.

Canyon Creek is the surprise for me. When Six Mile is below 400 cfs on the USGS gauge Canyon Creek is like the new Ship Creek: lots of improbable drops (dozens), lots of fun. There is a waterfall portage, a waterfall that Embick wrote as three-tiered and "80 feet". But don't look for an 80 foot falls to portage - - it's more like 30 feet in three drops. Best to go down Canyon with someone who knows the drops and the portage as Canyon Creek is a bit more serious -- especially with its sharp rocks and mining debris -- than Six Mile. And at higher water -- when Six Mile is over 9 feet, Canyon gets back to its gnarly 1980s reputation for we butt-boaters.

Here's Timmy J running the Third and Fourth "Box Cars", a train of a half-dozen closely spaced ledge drop-rapids below Canyon Creek's only published rapid name, "Saddle Slide" ......

But the really big news is Kings Magic Mile.

Maybe it's another Embick exaggeration -- he called it 400 feet/mile -- but no matter. It is DARN STEEP and sustained! Imagine all the steepest drops in Little Su stacked back to back with Little Su's filler cut out. That's still not as steep as Magic Mile. Or maybe think of a microcosmic version of the West Coast New Zealand runs like Arahura and Hokitika. It's a steep boulder run and -- while no place for novices -- there are likely a dozen people in Anchorage with the skills to run it in packrafts at the 150-200 cfs we ran it yesterday. Make no mistake: it's the most serious, most demanding and difficult creek that we have packrafted in Alaska.

Thankfully we had Tim Johnson along to advise us with his experience and calm, reassuring, safety-minded nature.

Last year Brad Meiklejohn, Luc Mehl, I and others ran lower Kings and talked about the Mile. This past June a crack-team tried it at high water -- no, we looked at it -- at high water with Paul Schauer, Thai Verzone, and Nathan Shoutis.

But this Fall, Thai was gone, Paul was busy and Nathan, well, not sure where that nomad is currently wandering, so Luc and I convinced Tim and Brad that it was time. That the endless Indian Summer was as good a time as any to hit Magic Mile at low water. Except the Indian Summer ended this weekend and we hit the Mile in snow.

Surpassing New Zealand's West Coast, Disappointment Creek, and Maryland's Upper Yough, this was the highlight of my packrafting experiences so far, as it is a legendary run in Alaska. I missed a brace in the last rapid and got chundered, but everything else was a most satisfying challenge that I will be buzzed about all week, maybe all winter.

Luc even pulled off a combat roll in the upper third and re-ran the "Underground Railroad" in the lower third, yielding a run of every rapid. Of course, as you'll see in the video Timmy J is a master of water strokes, no matter the craft, and ran the Mile with a load in his boat and a long paddle duct taped together. And in flip-flops (I jokes about that).

We drove into the first mud-hole, started hiking at 10 AM, reached the put-in three hours later and were on the water by 1:30. It took until after 4 PM to pass the mile. We met Jule Harle at her warming fire below the Mile and she climbed into a loaner Llama (!) to run Lower Kings with us to below "Gotta Giver 'Er". We were out by 6 PM and back to the truck by 7 PM.

The sun finally came out and hundreds of Sandhill Cranes filled the autumn sky above the Matanuska. It had been a wonderful day.

And the version on Vimeo if YouTube has no music:

Magic Mile Packrafting, Kings River, Alaska from Roman Dial on Vimeo.

Toby Schwoerer's Review of Feathercraft's Packraft -- The Baylee

2010-09-23T20:45:00.005-08:00

Yesterday Luc introduced me to Toby Schwoerer when we did a little Echo Bend flip -- two runs on the prettiest river in the Anchorage area -- Eagle River in the mountains. Indeed, hiking up the Eagle River Trail to the Eagle River crossing and then floating back now would make for a great girlfriend/wife/daughter/person-who-doesn't-like-packrafting-as-much-as-you-do (yet) trip. The colors are awesome, the mountains steep and big, the river manageable, and the difference in views between hiking up in the woods and floating back amazing. But best to take out just above Echo Bend with beginners.

But for intermediates Echo Bend offers a super Class III adventure worth multiple runs and with Polar Bear Peak at the end and Yukla as a backdrop at the beginning, it's as much fun to look around as it is to move nimbly between the rocks shooting slots at will.

Anyway, Toby and I got to talking and he told me that Goo Vogt had the Bailee by Feathercraft, a heavy but study packraft that Goo already put thigh straps in -- Goo's an inflatable boater going back decades -- and that Toby has posted a review of it and a comparison with his mid-oughts vintage Yak:

Check this out

But don't call Goo. I already have and he's out hunting caribou, so I have dibs on demoing the boat next week.

Monatuak Gnat Stove -- 1.6 oz

2010-09-22T09:55:00.004-08:00

As part of Hendrik's gear pass-around I got a chance to test the "lightest [canister stove] in the world", the Monatauk Gnat. I went rafting and moose hunting and carried the 1.6 oz Ti and Al cutie around but never used it in the field.

I would have used it to start a fire a la Thai Verzone-style (think gas barbeque grill vs charcoal grill to ignite the fire) while packrafting or as a hot drink fixer while moose hunting, but the moose came down 150 yards from camp and our boating has all been warm and dry (no cold swims), so I had to settle for a test at home.

Now, I have been fortunate enough to share shelter and stove with Skurka and seen his catfood can in action. That's gotta be the lightest stove out there, for sure, but I like the convenience of a canister stove for shorter trips and don't really like messing with liquids.

The beauty of these micro canister stoves like Pocket Rocket, Soto OD-1R MicroRegulator and the like is that they fit in my "Thing" worn inside my rain jacket or drysuit while wilderness boating. The Thing I use as an internal "pack" (but I load the front mostly) to hold fire starter food and extra camera, as well as map. So these micro stoves are for starting wet wood on fire in the rain when we are cold, wet, and miserable in fall weather on a glacial river in Alaska: dumbstruck cold with hands that won't work and teeth chattering.

Liquid fuel stoves are too finicky and bulky for this application.

Currently the stove I have been carrying is the Soto (2.6 oz). I like its igniter which saves the weight of a lighter, but it has pot supports that are attached using little screws which I have had fall out! This made the stove incapable of holding a cook pot. The standard stove I have as a canister stove for family-trips is the JetBoil. Heavy though it is, it's super convenient and stable and better in the wind.

My test was these three stoves mentioned above using the system I'd have: i.e Jet boil w/100g fuel (each test used a 100 g can) and its integral pot; the other micros stoves with the Backpackinglight.com Ti cook pot (about 1L).

I usually have no wind screen and if I cook usually it's inside my pyramid-style, floorless shelter: the tests were in 10 C weather, cool, calm morning on my front porch, no wind screens or other surrounding breaks.

I put 3 cups of cold tap water and a waterproof datalogger in each and then lit the stoves. The micro stoves got brand new cans of fuel. The Jet Boil had some slightly used fuel. I turned the stoves on, lit them and then turned them on full and backed down a little so they were right where the initial big "brrrrrrrrr" sound starts. My thinking was this was maximally hot hot but not wasteful and likely where I'd set it if I was heating water without using the thing as a fire starter. I then let each go until water was spitting out the lid (i.e. roaring boil).

Here are the results:

As you can see the Jet Boil was slowest and the Gnat and the Soto very close in heating rate at about 10 C/minute. The jet Boil has other nice features (stability, integrity, neoprene sleeve and cap for drinking) but the micro stoves are what I am really comparing -- the Jet Boil is just an outgroup. My dataloggers should have been set at a closer interval than 1 minute, but alas that's all I had time for. There are no replicates either and all the usual oh-wells and qualifiers that go along with gear tests like this.

I'm going to buy the little Gnat as it's cute and Ti and has no parts to fall off or fail and it's an ounce lighter. I usually have a lighter too, anyway, and I am a sucker for stoves.

Thanks Hendrick for this opportunity and Beni, sorry the stove's late on its way to you.

Videos that have caught my eye

2010-09-10T07:49:00.003-08:00

Butt-boating, mtn hiking, and 29er biking are probably my favorite outdoor activities and here are some other folks adventures to enjoy:

Ed Plumb of Fairbanks has posted a neat Alaska Range video:

and Forrest posted several from the WInd Rivers, this being my favorite, I think:

and then there's Mike Curiak's gonzo "ne school" trail riding:

Teton Pass from lacemine29 on Vimeo.

Whitewater Junkies

2010-09-09T15:35:00.003-08:00

"Ironically as they paddle more and more whitewater, their reward circuitry (for dopamine) dulls, which makes the easier runs less satisfying and drives them to still harder runs and bigger drops to compensate.They are essentially chasing the high of earlier, heavenly thrills on easier water. This is precisely what we see with chronic alcohol or substance abuse."

Yea? Well, adrenaline is a substance and I'd call this "hormone abuse".

Comstock Stories

2010-09-08T14:17:00.003-08:00

While in the Gates of the Arctic recently, my companions rquested I tell Chuck Comstock stories and Michael Brown shot video during a couple of them. Peggy says I do a better job when I am not being recorded...but in any event here's one about ice climbing in the Wrangells in 1987

and another about Chuck during the Wilderness Classic Nabesna to McCarthy in 1988 and 1989:

Montana Creek @ 450 cfs

2010-09-04T14:23:00.006-08:00

Last year Paul Schauer, Thai Verzone, and I ran Montana Creek near Talkeetna at 350 cfs on the NOAA Guage. It was super fun but a bit bumpy:

Yesterday Gordy Vernon and I drove up to Talkeetna after eating lunch at Senior Taco in Wasilla (super good, authentic Mex) just to do the lower canyon on Montana Cr. The NOAA Guage was reading about 465 cfs at UTC midnight (=4 PM AK time) and the USGS read 451 cfs; both gave about 5.4 feet. This was a juicier, cushier flow but not pushy. I'd say it was pretty close to ideal.

Gordy drops "Big Sky Country":

The crux for me, besides making the far left side of "Big Sky Country" is the mini boulder garden about three drops later, below both "Big Sky" and "Chockstone" and signaled by a big central boulder that you go left around then hard right then left again. There was a wee bit of wood, but nothing to get hung up about.

Montana's lower canyon a bit like a backwards Ship Creek lower canyon in that the hardest drop is the "Big Sky" falls right off the bat. There were a total of five drops in the short run and for me it's worth the drive. If we'd got an earlier start we would've walked up the extra mile or so for the upper canyon that has another five or so good drops. Unlike Ship Creek a swim here might have consequences with all the big boulders (foot entrapment, stuffed under an undercut). The run I like to do is shorter than Ship but longer than the lower canyon on Bird Creek -- harder to flip than Bird but more satisfying in a way and doesn't need the flip, I guess.

"Chockstone" often has wood but this time it was in a safe place:

Anyway, this info might be useful to some....Mark Oathout ran the creek in his IK, too, at a juicy flow last month.

Skurka Video Compilation

2010-09-02T19:38:00.004-08:00

On my way to Fairbanks to meet Skurka and his NGS crew I bumped into Katmai and Erin McKittrick passing through security with me. They were waiting on Hig who was out running last minute errands before their family trip from Point Lisburne to Kotzebue. She was five months pregnant and passed on a video message to Skurka. It's possible though improbable that the two sets of mega-trekkers will meet in Kotz, as the Ground Truth Twitter says the fam is still up by Kivalina and Skurka's chomping at the bit to finish, maybe, tomorrow?

Anyway, here's pretty much the best video I have from the trips I did with Skurka and the National Geographic crew.

Hope it offers an honest flavor of that grand trip of his.

Vimeo version for Euros:

Andrew Skurka's Alaska Yukon Expedition: two legs from Roman Dial on Vimeo.

Michael C. Brown

2010-09-02T14:40:00.002-08:00

Mike Brown is my favorite photographer and he too chased Skurka in the Brooks Range:

Dan Koeppel

2010-09-02T11:05:00.004-08:00

Dan Koeppel is a writer and editor whose path crossed mine walking with Andrew Skurka last week. He's in the mountain bike hall of fame, too! (how do I get in?)

He's a soon-to-be dad, an avid walker of urban routes, a former editor of Mtn Bike Magazine for Rodale Press back in the day when I wrote hellbiking pieces about wild rides with Carl Tobin and Jon Underwood across Alaska's wilderness, and an awesomely quick witted but slow walking guy, born in New York, transplanted to LA.

He's written a wonderful book on bananas and one on his father, a world class birder who was among to see the most of 10,000 species of birds in the world or so. Anyway I don't think I've laughed so long and hard as I did during the four day walk to Anaktuvuk from the Haul Road.

Here's the vid:

Dan Koeppel (writer) and Andrew Skurka (walker) hiking in the Brooks Range from Roman Dial on Vimeo.

Skurka Video

2010-09-01T10:34:00.002-08:00

Recently back from 300 miles and two weeks with Andrew Skurka. Here are some clips:

On top of Ariel Peak in the Arrigetch Peaks. This is a great summit, easy too, as well as spectacular.

An awesome Grizzly Bear trail that went on for at least a mile and a half:

And a gang of kids swarm us in Anaktuvuk Pass.