The Book we've all been waiting for....The Packraft Handbook by Luc Mehl and Sarah Glaser

It’s difficult to imagine a better pair of people to put together a packrafting handbook than author Luc Mehl and illustrator Sarah Glaser. Both were raised in Alaska—prime packraft habitat—with wilderness literally out their backdoors. Each epitomizes the multisport, super-safe, modern adventurer who is self-propelled and self-reliant, good-natured, with broad smiles and welcoming, all-inclusive dispositions that come across clearly in this delightful and informative book.

While I have only a passing personal acquaintance with Sarah, I truly admire her work. My serious packrafting bias aside, this handbook looks like it presents her best, most extensive, and most important work so far, because much of it concerns safety and technique on moving water. MIT-educated Mehl writes brilliantly and thoroughly about the science of modern wilderness adventure. Of course, he’s also a terrific photographer, and so in the vein of a classic William Nealy cartoon text like Kayak, the book you wil certainly soon be reading brings life to packrafting “how-to” through its collaboration of word and image.

A mutual friend introduced Luc and me during the summer of 2009 when the three of us rode our mountain bikes loaded with skis, ropes, and ice-axes on an overnight science trip to a local glacier. Of course, Luc’s strength, speed, and endurance impressed me as did his revelation that he’d just that year won the obscure ski race I’d founded 20 years before. Charmed by his enthusiasm, and knowing that winning an Alaska Mountain Wilderness Ski Classic put him in a certain class of adventurer, I liked him instantly.

That summer, Luc and I collided again, this time as competitors in the summer Wilderness Classic across a 180-mile route through the Alaska Range. For those unfamiliar with the event, it’s a carry-all-your-gear-and-food-needed-to-cross-a-wild-landscape full of mountains, rivers, bogs, brush, boulders, and bears, with no roads, no motors, no pack animals, nor outside assistance allowed, while going as fast as you want or can. The only required gear is a satellite phone. But, truth is, without a packraft it’s pretty tough to finish.

While Luc and I only traveled a short distance together, he again demonstrated his positive attitude and persistence. It was clear that Luc’s endurance and skills would make him a valuable partner worth inviting along sometime. But skiing glaciers and racing the Classic, while important interests in my 20s, were no longer the priority that testing the limits of whitewater packrafting had become to me in my 40s.

Fall 2009 we bumped into one another as members of a big group on splashy Bird Creek, a local whitewater creek with lots of fun little falls. Ever since 2003 when Alpacka Raft first began putting effort into making boats whitewater-worthy, my paddling partners Thai Verzone, Brad Meiklejohn, Tim Johnson (author of our local whitewater guidebook), Paul Schauer (all of whom appear in the book's pages) and I had pushed packrafting into regular runs of low-water Class IV creeks in small stubby boats that most kayakers derided as “sh**ty little Iks that only pussies paddle.”

While Luc has become the familiar face of Alaskan packrafting, Brad Meiklejohn has been the true silent force behind the modern packrafting movement. He'd suggested that we run the epic Talkeetna River, a real river (not a low water creek) and a wilderness fly-in one at that. All of us on Bird Creek who’d be going to the Talkeetna the following weekend were impressed by Luc’s gung-ho attitude and perma-grin, especially after overheating in his brand-new red drysuit, when he cliff-jumped into a deep pool and swam to the other side to cool off. I asked Brad what he thought about Luc coming along. Given the go-ahead, I invited Luc to join us. In some ways, that trip brought Luc into the Alaskan whitewater packrafting fold.

It was a superlative weekend, with great weather (if frosty), great rapids, and great friends, like JT Lindholm Tony Perelli, and Becky King. At one point in the Talkeetna's Canyon, Brad commented, “We really need to roll these things like a kayak. That’ll take us to another level.”

Not a week later, I sold Tim Johnson my son’s old Alpacka. Tim promptly glued thigh-straps into the blue boat and as soon as the glue had dried, he took it out into an ice-encrusted stream and rolled it!

And that was it. We all glued thigh straps into our boats and went to the pool to learn our rolls. Thus began the Bronze Age of packrafting with Luc there from the beginning, taking what we’d been doing and following Tim Johnson to the next level of packrafting, just as Brad had predicted.

Over the following three years Tim and Paul Schauer, natural-born boaters, led Luc and the rest of us down southcentral Alaska’s classic runs pioneered by Andrew Embick as “Class V”, as well as the modern test-pieces of their generationand the one right before Tim and Paul (e.g., Montana Creek, Tin Can, Upper Willow, Upper Bird, Disappointment, East Fork Iron Creek, Ingram).

While the excitement of whitewater seemed necessary for Luc, it was certainly not sufficient. In a string of unprecedented adventures over three consecutive years (2011, 2012, and 2013), he assembled teams of eager participants to combine skis, boats, and even bikes for grand traverses across North America’s three tallest mountains using modified Wilderness Classic rules. Leaving the road, Luc lead his groups into, up, over, and down Alaska's Denali, Canada's Logan, and Mexico's Orizaba, in each case exiting back to near sea level via packraft.

This book, with its emphasis on a culture of safety and vigilance informed by a decade of experience during the steepest growth of whitewater packrafting development, marks the sport's entry into its true Golden Age. We are lucky that Luc pushed pause on hsi data science career to guide the packrafters of the world to yet another level.

So, read this great book, stare at the fantastic illustrations, and enjoy the writing, the art, the stories, the advice, and feel secure in the knowledge that Luc and Sarah have engaged over a dozen of the best packrafters and kayakers in Alaska to contribute and vette content that captures a wealth of knowledge and experience in simple prose, awesome call-outs, beautiful photography, and clear illustrations.

It’s the book we’ve all been waiting for.

Golden Age Nostalgia

After reading Luc Mehl's guest blog at the Alpacka web site I indulged in some nostalgia from 2009-2010.

If you're reading this, then you really should go read Luc's post. I found it flattering and a bit of a vignette of what I, self-centeredly, consider the Golden Age of packrafting.

Golden in that it was a big leap forward. Golden in that Brad Meiklejohn urged us into Embick's  Class IV and V creeks. Golden in that real boaters Tim Johnson, Paul Schauer, and Thai Verzone led us down and plucked us out. Golden in that I started hitting whitewater centers beyond Alaska with the boat born in Alaska and now ready for the world: NZ, Grand Canyon, Australia's Franklin, Appalachians.

But the world was not ready. Haters were everywhere and even Alpacka wanted nothing to do with thigh straps.

"Why would a packrafter being going down a class 3/4 river like this, ever? Not only that, these guys are wearing drysuits because the water is cold - and I can't imagine a lightweight hiker wanting to bring one along on his trip. 

Seriously, I think you've missed the point of this video completely. It's about paddling in big groups that have sufficient resources to perform a rescue and using the skills that are taught in whitewater rescue classes properly. It's not about boat design.

I've kayaked big water for years and backpack/hike and the combination of packrafts and big water is a bozo no-no in my opinion. It seems like the packraft community is rediscovering everything the ww kayak community has known for years about the dangers of ww kayaking. Please stick to class 1 rivers and ponds for your own safety, and don't paddle in cold water without the proper thermal protection."

And a kayaker's response to thigh straps and packrafts in 2009. 

 ‘In a packraft, at least IMO, they seem like more than is necessary even at the upper end of whitewater. IMHO if you feel you need thigh straps you should probably think about improving your technique or further developing your skills. Weather it be reading the water better and seeing the clean lines and hitting them or simply spending more time in the raft, one needs to have skills. Given their design, there are just certain things that will be difficult no matter what you do. eg big holes on big water. These things are already about as idiot proof as it gets. Don't get me wrong, there are probably a hand full of people that could really push what is possible in a packraft with thigh straps, but for most it will simply be a substitute for skill and ultimately not help them in the long run. In fact I'd be willing to bet that most packrafters would not be able to roll a raft even if they were glued into the thing. It is certainly more difficult than a kayak by a long shot. Not to mention much harder on one's shoulders as well.’

But maybe like bad brush and cold water, some of us just felt that these nasty-grams were challenges to overcome and now that they are overcome, I find myself sitting back, older, and trying to just get out of the way.

1. My Packrafting! book is out of print.
2. Falcon Guidebooks sells a new book about packrafting.
3. Thor and Sarah Tingey have transformed Alpacka with a boat for every kind of water and even a mountain bike boat.
4. There are maybe even a dozen other packraft manufacturers.
5. My testosterone has drained away leaving me somewhat flacid when it comes to whitewater.
6. But it doesn't matter because there are plenty of bad-asses out there, 
• including former kayakers and
• hard-core packrafters-first who now use kayaks to improve their packrafting.

It's been great to watch and even greater to be part of it.

My own history with whitewater in packrafts can be covered in six videos. The first couple of videos are sort of accidental. But starting at the end of  2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 I posted on You Tube the greatest hits I'd been involved with each year. 

2008 was the year of whitewater discovery. 
2009 was the year of whitewater exploration.
2010 was the year of thigh straps that made us feel like real boaters.
2011 was the year of extended sterns that felt like cheating.

(January 2000) Taking a Sherpa Packraft down a stream in Pumalin Park, Chile before I'd actually got my butt in an Alpacka.

(January 2008)  Hermit to Havasu with Gordy and Cody Roman in the Grand Canyon. Up to say 2008, Cody Roman and I going down Ship Creek's canyon repeatedly and sniffing out some other runs elsewhere, was about it for whitewater. Then I started paddling with Brad.

(2008)  was the year I finally found someone other than Cody Roman who wanted to do Ship Creek more than once. The music was Radiohead's National Anthem, a song and band Roman introduced to me and the song captured the hectic feel of the early days of whitewater in packrafts. But YouTube stripped the song....so now it's the canned version of what they offer.

(2009) By the Fall of  2009 the packrafting revolution was getting started with Brad, Thai, Luc, Gordy, Tony, Becky, JT and others hitting it hard in Southcentral AK. It was when Tim Johnson and Paul Schauer and Thai Verzone, Class V kayakers all, joined us.

These guys, as Mike Curiak recently wrote, made me feel as though they were "participating in an entirely different sport -- one filled with grace and control and poise, where by comparison I feel like I just bludgeon and hack my way through while trying to survive."

This one doesn't play on phones, I guess because nobody's made enough money yet off the half-century old Beatles classic, Revolution (although it plays on computers in the US). It's worth watching on a 'puter, by the way, with the sound track.

(2010) Ah yes, the struggle with Alpacka over thigh straps. We were the Devil:  dangerous, reckless, a real pain in the butt-boats of Alpacka, but in the end we were right. Maybe, just maybe, our devilish ways got the "Witchcraft" started, a black boat you might catch a glimpse of in this next video somewhere, and that is the ancestral boat of Alpacka's Lips and Gnarwall boats. Or maybe it was really the handful of "Media Feliz" paddlers down in CO that motivated the development. Still, I like to think it was us, the 20 or 30 people in Alaska packraft-paddling Six Mile and Little Su and Ship Creek and Bird that pushed whitewater boat development at Alpacka. But again, probably just my narcissism playing tricks on my ego!

(2011) With the new long stern boats of 2011 it was almost a new sport. It was like in the 1980s when sticky rubber (particularly the Fires) hit rock or when foot fangs and plastic boots hit ice, or when leashless tools hit both rock and ice, whenever that happened. We had the new longer stern boats that erased bandersnatching as a concept and instead launched us out of sticky holes, leaning forward into the modern boats we've known for years. It also ended my year-end video making recaps, as then Luc Mehl and Mike Curiak were there to pick up my stringy end of the tapestry and weave it with finer artistry.

And there we have it. Six footnotes to "Show up and Blow up: Alaska"!

Arctic Alaska Packrafting Gear Suggestions: an Annotated Photo-list

Packrafting’s roots reach deep into wild, landscape crossings of northern Alaska.

Landscape crossings are what I started over thirty-five years ago as a young punk in his twenties and it’s where I have returned as a 50-something old curmudgeon.

Northern Alaska is where Peggy and I packrafted across the Gates of the Arctic National Park in 1986 from the Haul Road and down the upper Noatak, perhaps the first month-long trip to use one.

It’s where Thor Tingey decided he needed a boat with “bigger tubes” and by asking his mom Sheri to make one, that Alpacka was launched after he and a group of college friends made a 600 mile Brooks Range traverse using Sevylors and Curtis Design boats.

Since then, I’ve run some whitewater, roadside and wilderness, and pioneered the bike-n-boat approach of packrafts con bicycles back in the 1980s. 

I’ve played at the beach, gone hunting, included my kids, climbed mountains and rafted out. 

Some of those early trips I described in my book Packrafting! which is down to the last 100 copies now.

But it’s the long trips linking watersheds with mountain passes and long, ridge-paralleling walks that satisfy me most.

This spring I planned a nearly 300-mile long, four watershed trip across Yukon, Canada’s Ivvavik National Park and Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

I invited  Brad Meiklejohn to take a vacation from his dam-removal project that’s rehabilitating an Alaskan salmon stream and a new paddling partner, Tom Diegel.  Mike Curiak, introduced the three of us during a packrafting trip to Idaho in April when we ran the Jarbidge and Bruneau at 1900 cfs on April 20 when we ran the latter's Five Mile Rapid, the longest section of Class III I've ever run. It was great -- one of the best sections of river anywhere, not really difficult, but loooong. It'd be worth to hike the trail on the west side and run twice, since it's sort of near the take-out. Following Mike down the Wild Burro without a scout was exciting too!

Anyway I have enjoyed my university sabbatical doing five-day to three-week trips each month for the last year, sort of my last gasp at adventuring, I think. 

I am no Dick Griffith and so doubt I'll have a post-retirement boom in adventuring like Dick did: an outlaw run of the Grand Canyon at sixty in his open Sharpa packraft. Completing a four or five thousand mile traverse of the Northwest Passage in his sixties and seventies with annual month-long solo ski trips. Finishing maybe 15 or more Wilderness Classics after his 56th birthday. I am 56 now and seeing an end to this stuff for me.

Luckily there are ever more amazing trips done with and without packrafts by others all around the world.

Over the last year I have been fortunate to have Brad around to make about half of my monthly trips, everything from season openers on little-known whitewater wilderness runs in the Lower 48 like the Chetco and Jarbidge-Bruneau, to Nordic ice-skating road-trips across southcentral Alaska from Weiner Lake to Teslin Lake and north to Harding Lake, even from Sutton to Palmer on the Matanuska River ("D+ quality ice but A+ adventure!"). 

He’s about the only guy I know who’s my age and likes to do the same sort of things but better and faster than me.

Especially walking wilderness landscapes and running wilderness rivers.

The route I came up with  for our June 2017 trip--“Go Firther, Kongo!"—started with a flight in.

I’m not too keen on flying-in. It robs a little of wilderness’ adventure for me, but because Brad and Tom had other obligations and only about two weeks to make the trip we flew in with Yukon Air to near the Alaska-Yukon border on Joe Creek.

From Joe Creek we’d run the Firth, a legendary Yukon Arctic whitewater river to the edge of the mountains, then walk four days back to Alaska, crossing the crest of the British Mountains section of the Brooks Range. Then we’d float the Whale Mountain tributary of the Kongakut River (and a few miles of the Kongakut) and pick up a food drop.

We’d follow caribou trails of the enormous Porcupine Caribou Herd through a series of valleys linked by low passes to the Egakserak River, which we floated over two days to a long ridgeline that borders the foothills and overlooks the coastal plain, leading to our final float, the Jago River. The Jago offers up ten or fifteen miles of non-stop boogey water up to Class III as it cuts through the foothills to spill onto the coastal plane.

The lower Jago leads to the Arctic Ocean, where we let the Polar Easterly winds blow us across a series of lagoons to the Innupiaq village of Kaktovik on Barter Island where we flew back to Fairbanks and Anchorage.

In all we’d paddle 175 and walk 120 miles. In a lifetime of Alaskan adventures, it was among the best packrafting routes of all, with a week spent paddling and a week spent walking, but split into nine alternating legs.

I already posted on that trip. Here I’d like to share my gear inventory. Maybe it’ll help some others out there for planning their Arctic Alaska trip.

 Let’s start with the pack. 

It needed to carry ten days of food, clothing and gear for camping in the Arctic, and a complete cold and whitewater packrafting kit.

 HMG 3400 Southwest pack

I could have taken a 4400 Porter, but because mountain hiking would be prominent, it’s lack of external pockets made it less suitable for easy access to clothes and  food. To keep up with Brad’s long legs striding through tussocks I’d need ready access to lots of chocolate and my favored small bags of Dorito and potato chips.

Having been a lightweight walker since the late 1970s, I have found that the bigger pack I take the more I carry. So one way to go light is simply to take the smallest pack I can. 

My choice was the HMG 3400 Southwest. Yes it's small.

It’s black, which is good for wet bushwhacking but a poor color for the legendary mosquitos of Alaska’s North Slope where in July 1990 I killed 94 mosquitos with one hand (no smearing) on my pant-covered leg along the Hula Hula River!

Ladder buckle "lash straps"

My packraft rode on the outside top of my pack, lashed below the top Y-strap compression that I extended using a lash strap. I carried a bunch of lash straps. After fire, rocks, and a packraft I find them the most versatile thing available to me on a trip.

Lash straps from 2-4 feet long. I carried six and used every one.

Packraft

For packrafting I brought a 2017 “high pressure” Alpacka Raft in the Yak (or medium size). It was outfitted like their new Gnarwhal with a removable whitewater deck. To lighten it I stripped everything out and replaced the seat with an old “Diva seat” that was lighter than the usual seat. This Diva seat  wedges into the boat.

The sleeve where the stock seat would go held my water bottle. It was a pint-sized, "bottled-water" style found in the TSA line at the Anchorage airport when full and un-opened bottle. Someone left it so I drank, then carried the empty bottle along for my trip.  My empty platypus (for camp water supplies) also stayed in the sleeve.

I kept the new Alpacka foam backrest in too.

Twelve ounce Diva seat and foam back band.

I replaced the stock knee-straps and the foot pillow with lash straps. These were lighter and more versatile and the Firth River has only a handful of Class IV rapids where I’d want that security. 

I find with a good back-band and foot platform that I can sit with my knees bent and locked in, keeping me, as Mark Oates wrote recently, well-connected to my boat, a must in running whitewater.

Replacement knee strap worked well, although I never tried to roll with it.

The high pressure boat used a great one-way valve. I could get the boat very hard with just this one valve.

While the zipper on the removable whitewater deck is a little heavier and less dry, it made emptying water and drying the boat much easier. Being able to fully dry the boat before the hiking portions was important in keeping my load light to keep up with Brad and Tom. It also made portaging a loaded boat easier by reaching my hand through the zipper from the inside.

I had to carry my own blow-up bag since the other two had old style valves.

Inflation bag for new, high pressure one-way valves.

Brad and I like to joke that while we may be in the Golden Age of packraft evolution, it feels like we are in the packrafting equivalent of the Ramer ski bindings but wishing for the Dynafit binding era.

Ramer aka "Lamer" binding from the 1970s. I had these exact bindings.

Still the packrafts of today are the driest they have ever been in whitewater. The the "knee cup whitewater skirt" and new single-piece coaming stiffener are improvements. The one-piece coaming stiffener is surprisingly easy to pack and the latest coaming drier and tighter than in the past. 

By the way, even if you never run anything more than Class II, the whitewater decks are so much warmer and drier than Cruiser Decks that they the only way to go, IMO.

2017 Alpacka coaming stiffener held together with a Voile strap. The knee-cup style whitewater spray skirt is a must to keep water from pooling in your lap and to keep your knees bent in the fully-engaged position with your boat.

Another six ounces that are worth bringing come in the form of the Alpacka Bow Bag. I keep my synthetic puffy jacket and a canister stove with its canister in my little one-quart Ti-pot, as well as food and map/camera/bug dope/head net/reading glasses in the handy dry compartment.

I went “E-free” on this trip carrying nothing electronic, but when I do bring dEvices I keep them handy here. It’s also a good place to stash my long handled Ti-spoon and inflation bag, too.

 Alpacka Bow Bag is worth the weight.

Of course, I had a paddle. I have a four piece Werner Powerhouse and a superlight Sawyer. But the four-piece is too heavy and the Sawyer is too fragile, so I brought a carbon fiber one-piece and lashed it to the side of my pack. It’s a great paddle, stiff and light.

Carrying it was never a problem for me, but it might be for others.

We had some pool toy paddle blades that we carried for spares that could be strapped together to our trekking poles for the mostly Class II and III water if we lost a paddle. But we never lost a paddle.

194 cm Werner Powerhouse Carbon fiber paddle and single adjustable Black Diamond pole.

Because the Arctic is, well, the Arctic, it’s cold, often windy. Its rivers are icy run-off from aufeis (Google that) or glaciers, so a dry suit is necessary.

Over the years I have been a tester for a variety of Alpacka efforts at lightweight dry suits and the version I have is my favorite. It provides more freedom of movement than my big, heavy Kokotat and is far easier to pee and poop (can I say that here?) while wearing, thanks to its clever zipper. It doesn’t have dry-sock feet, which means I can hike in it, if I wear some over-shells to protect its very lightweight fabric.

I love it but still suffer from “Oso-lo-lo” which Thai Verzone assure me means “wet-butt” in some Asian language. My particular version of Alpacka's Stowaway Dry Suit has watertight wrist, neck, and ankle gaskets. Swimming in it I stay quite dry.

My favorite dry-suit for landscape trips in Alaska has watertight gaskets at neck, ankles, and wrists.

It’s amazing how much warmer you stay if your feet are dry. Since I only had gaskets on my ankles, I also brought some Gore-tex and neoprene socks. I put on wool socks, then these Gore-tex socks (they had a rubber gasket on them), pulled on the dry-suit, adjusting the gaskets to match and then pulling on neoprene socks to complete the warmth and dryness. I couldn't wade for too long but I stayed dry, warm and happy this way.

Socks to stay dry: neoprene on left, Gore-tex on right. I layered these with Gore-tex inside and neoprene outside and wool next to my feet. The gasket o the drysuit was  between the Gore-tex and neoprene.

I wrote the first packrafting book about ten years ago. And if you read it carefully you’ll see I advocate that everyone take a swiftwater rescue course. 

These days you can find whitewater-specific courses taught in Alaska by Luc Mehl. 

In the Dark Ages at the birth of wilderness packrafting we carried no dry-suits, no helmets, not even PFDs! It wasn’t until I started putting kids in packrafts wearing PFDs that I decided I needed a PFD, too. Until then they seemed too heavy, if you can believe that.

For this trip I weighed the various options I had. These include the inflation-under-the-airplane-seat style, the Andrew-Skurka-chest-pouch that holds inflated Platypus bags, and even the stuff-the-Thermarest-pad-in-your jacket strategy we used in the mid-1980s for running some whitewater in the Gates of the Arctic National Park in an open Sherpa Packraft. 

But a real, foam-style PFD is by far the safest and most versatile. It makes a great pillow when dry, under-foot sleeping pad insulation when wet, and a lounge-chair sofa around a campfire.

My lightest foam-style PFD with whistle and a pocket for my compass (to tell time) and Dermatone.

I also brought a bicycle helmet since it weighed nine ounces and I didn’t think I’d be under water and head-down too often. It was useful for sleeping on the cloudy flight back from Barter Island to Fairbanks--better than a neck pillow.

Stop laughing: bike helmets are certified, whitewater helmets are not.

In all, my total packrafting kit weighed under 15 pounds. That’s everything: inside-tube dry bags; boat with engagement-connections for knees, butt, and feet; clothes and spray deck for keeping dry; paddle; and equipment for staying safe.

The Alpacka “zipper boats” have revolutionized classic-style packrafting. Getting the gear off the boat and into the tubes is the single biggest step away from Ramer and toward Dynafit I have seen in my four decades of packrafting  (80s, 90s, Oughts, Teens). Zippered loads mean far more stable boats and much drier gear. 

If you are considering upgrading a packraft, or even a first-time buyer who wants to camp and paddle moving water that's just Class II or more, then be sure to get a Cargo Zipper and a Whitewater Deck (I like the removable kind best). 

I have used open boats since the 80s, Cruiser-style decks since the Oughts, but the new whitewater decks and spray skirts are remarkably dry. Not as dry as a hardshell, but amazing to me for a seven-pound boat and worth the four pounds over an open, un-zippered Scout for landscape trips with moving, cold water.

When Alpacka first introduced the zipper boats they had zippered dry bags that went inside, nicknamed “Twinkies” or “Snack Cakes”. Now, I really like these. I use them for car camping because they are dust- and water-proof and the zipper in them makes them easy to access. I also like them in my boat if paddling lots of Class IV, since I have cut a boat in a remote rapid, had the air go out of the tube, but been able to paddle to shore with my thigh straps still engaged and afloat because the snack cakes held air like a second and third chamber. They are a safety feature.

However, on this trip where weight was more of an issue than cutting my boat on Class IV creek rocks, I opted for the first generation of Alpacka’s “Ultralight Internal Dry Bags”. Since mine were prototypes, I had to use a strap that I clove-hitched on a mule to the bag with a strap terminated with the female end of the buckle to attach to the inside of the boat. I think these bags are boss.

Because my pack is tiny and my back itself is curved, my stuff sacks go in cross-wise in my pack, not vertically. That way I can get my pack stuffed better since I can layer more readily as I fill it and use different paddings in different places. So these super long bags need only be partially filled, then packed. 

They make a good pillow too. In my boat I split the weigh evenly between the two bags, but in my pack I fill one with sleeping stuff and put it low, and keep the other in my external pocket to keep my clothes dry that I might want to wear during the day. That way I don't have to get into my pack. Once I close up my pack in the morning, I don't get into it until camp.

Internal dry bag with strap I clove hitched with a mule to the bag to attach to the inside of the boat. Also made a great pillow and much easier to pack in my 3400 Porter pack than Alpacka’s Standard internal dry bag.

Clothing

During the day in Alaska’s Arctic I wear light-colored, quick-drying polyester pants and button-up shirt. I try to cover up any dark clothing with light clothing to keep bugs away

The shirt and pants have pockets. I keep Dermatone in my right pocket and a compass in my left pocket to tell time and check occasional directions, or frequent direction if in a coastal fog for instance. In my shirt’s zippered pocket I keep a lighter and other stuff I might need (like some TP, or bug-dope). I wear stretchy underpants, sort of like bike shorts without chamois. These prevent chafing.

If it’s cool I wear a cut-off, short-sleeved lightweight wool zip-T neck underneath. If it’s cold and rainy I wear a polyester hoody over the wool and under the khaki colored shirt. I wear lightweight wool long underwear under the khaki pants in the boat or cold, windy rain. I have another thicker pair of expedition weight Capilene I paddle in and sleep in, too.

I have two pair of socks. One is only for hiking/boating, the other is colorful and only for sleeping until I get to “town” when I finally wear the sleep socks inside my shoes, once the shoes are dry (or inside the Gore-tex socks).

Daily wear: Clockwise from upper right: stretchy lycra/capilene mid-thigh underpants, lightweight polyester pants, shirt, short-sleeved lightweight zip-T wool, light-weight wool hiking socks, lightweight wool long underwear, expedition-weight Capilene long underwear,  blue polyester hoody in center.

I also have a superlight pair of “rain” pants and an HMG prototype rain-coat that I don’t know much about except it’s superlight and surprisingly dry with a great hood. In the boat I wore the pants and rain coat to bolster and protect my dry-suit. I also used the two pieces as rain gear but it never rained long enough during the day to need them, really.

Rain pants left, prototype-jacket right.

I also absolutely needed my hat. It kept the sunshine away and my wild hair under control. It seemed faster drying than typical ball caps.

Patagonia Duckbill: classic!

For shoes I go with the Salomon Speedcross 3 ($120). My feet are narrow and I am easy on shoes since I am sort of tender-footed and tend to walk gently to keep from hurting my feet. This keeps from wearing out my shoes. I also try to walk on game trails to keep the brush from wearing out the fabric. 

Tom had a pair of the $30 versions from eBay that came direct from China and they pretty much wore out FYI on this one trip. Still, I doubt mine would last four trips like this! It was entertaining to listen to Tom describe the wear on his shoes. Before he retired he worked at Nike, Merrel and Patagonia where he helped design and then bring to market some classic, fishing, whitewater and lifestyle shoes. He's a shoe expert!

Salomon Speedcross 3 with my sleep socks I wore at Waldo Arms in Kaktovik and on the airplane back to Anchorage.

Cooking

Once in camp, we set up Brad’s big HMG Ultamid 4 with the floorless bug liner. Absolutely amazing Arctic shelter. We had a separate ground cloth. We used trekking poles lashed together with Voile straps to hold it up. In high winds we used rocks with the stakes to secure it.

My group gear was the little canister stove. I think it’s called the Soto Micro Regulator. 

A trick I learned from Thai Verzone is using the stove to start fires. We cooked dinner on willow fires in Alaska and used the stove in Canada and for breakfast.

Using the stove to start fires makes every other fire-starting technique feel like barbecuing with charcoal briquettes while this is like barbecuing with gas. Generally Tom would collect wood, then help Brad set up the tent while I got water, then built the fire around cook-pot to boil the water.

Clockwise from lower left. Micro-stove, rubber thumb and two-finger pot gripper, long-handled Ti spoon, 2 liter Platypus, time and direction piece, aka compass. By finding the declination-corrected, true bearing to the sun you can determine true local time: at 6 AM the sun is due east, at noon due south, at 6 PM due west. It moves 15 degrees an hour across the sky. Some people choose to ask “Does anybody really know what time it is? Hey, does anybody really care?” Me, a scientist, I like to measure nature and apply the measures in practical sense.

Call me old-fashioned (lash straps with ladder-lock buckles instead of Fastex; rain pants; sharing a shelter, cooking on fires, paper maps from USGS) but I like a big, communal one-gallon cookpot if there are three people or more. I have several of these and some, as Mike Curiak says, are the “pots of a thousand trips”. Unsure why people feel the need to get the black off them, I prefer to keep them round, with tight-fitting lids to keep the black out of them. I put  them in several plastic grocery bags to keep the black off my pack contents. I think they heat faster if black.

I also keep my chips in the gallon size cookpot while hiking. I buy the big box of assorted chips (Doritos, potato) at Costco, then put holes in the bags to squeeze the air out, tape the holes shut, and take great pride in keeping them and great pleasure in eating them unbroken. One ounce of these chips (a single bag) can have 160 calories. 

I am not a calorie counter, but it seems like many folks want to know, so there you have it: caloric, salty, tasty, and crunchy. I like the barbecue chips. The single one-ounce bags are just the right size for a stop, have a savory flavor, and offer up needed salt for me as I hustle to keep up with Brad on a sunny day.

Blackened one-gallon cook pot of a hundred trips with a tight-fitting lid and little deformation to its body.

It has taken me four or five years to adjust, but I am now fully on-board with the “every man for himself” cooking routine. 

At first I found myself dumping water in a bag and spooning out the re-hydrated cardboard that sells at what must be $40/pound ($5/2 oz at Wallmart for Mtn House Lasagna). Curiak does some home prep, but it still looks like freeze dried bought at an Armageddon survivalist shop. 

The best food I’ve seen is what Thai Verzone and Gordy Vernon put together and what I have turned to myself, now that I have trouble with wheat.

Sure, I carry some gluten-free Asian-flavored freeze dried, but I use it to flavor rice noodles. Or I go with dehydrated potatoes and add either jerky or cheese. Whether noodles or 'taters I add red curry paste or Indonesian rending and powdered coconut milk, even tamarind paste. My son introduced me to this when making something delicious on Australia’s Franklin River where he also added peanut butter. Cheap, flavorful, and with a little preparation somehow better than eating instant dinner in a foil-lined bag.

I eat and drink hot fluids (usually full-cream milk powder, brown sugar, and Earl Grey tea) out of my one-quart Ti cookpot. This is what I heat everybody’s three cups in the morning with. At night everybody wants closer to six cup; hence the gallon-sized cook pot on the fire.

One-quart BackpackingLight.com Ti-cook pot from 2006. Starting to split around the edges, but maybe my favorite piece of camping gear.

Sleeping

For sleeping and camp I have a puffy jacket and pants that Ryan Jordan gave me back in 2006 for a long, 600 mile walk across the western Arctic, where we crossed the De Long Mountains, Utukok uplands, Lookout Ridge, and Gates of the Arctic. I save them for special trips, like this one. The puffy jacket is a hooded pullover. I wear it under my dry suit if it’s cold, rainy, and windy when paddling. It dries very fast.

Puffy pullover and pants for sleeping, camp, and cold paddling.

At night I slept in the puffies under a summer season down quilt made by GoLite back when they were still producing. Many “nights” I got too hot when the sun came up at 2 AM, the clouds were gone and the Easterly winds not yet started.

In fact, you can travel quite light in the Arctic mountains and foothills by becoming nocturnal, like the bears, sleeping during the day in the sun with a cooling wind if you need it, paddling wind-free after midnight when the easterlies have calmed. 

It's one of my favorite aspects of travel up there: letting the landscape and weather dictate not just your route but your routine and timing of activities. 

My down quilt, the ideal complement to my synthetic puffy pants and pullover.

--> As I’ve aged I need more comfort. 

I can’t just bivy on the rocks curled under my wet raft in the rain anymore with no pad and no bag. I carry a Thermarest Neo, full-length. To keep it from popping I pad beneath it. 

Brad uses a ground cloth in his tent, so that helps. But I also empty my pack and use my PFD to make a protected place for my air mattress.

 The best pad ever (for me). 

Because a sleeping pad is so crucial for warm and comfortable sleep in the permafrost-ed Arctic, and I have had decades of air mattresses springing mysterious, untraceable slow leaks that let me down before dawn, I have a back-up to plug the gap between my pack and PFD: a short piece of Cascade Designs’ Z-rest.

This is great for lounging around in camp, or standing on, making a sofa system by the fire, and other applications you never knew you needed until you carried it.

An old bicycle toe-strap I may stop carrying in favor of a Voile strap. But rubber straps will not replace webbing straps with ladder-lock buckles. A three panel Z-rest. Sometimes I take a two panel one instead. 

I have often said that we pack our insecurities. Mine seem to center around food and being cold.

I ran out of food in the early days of my landscape crossings, since I was still operating under an alpinist mentality. Alpinists belay half the time (maybe less if moving together a lot) and since they are going straight up, weight matters more than in most other multi-day adventure sports.

I remember my older, wiser partners saying things like, “That route should take 5 days, so we’ll take 3 days of food.” And then it would take like ten days, with five spent in a snow cave drinking hot water.

Well, that doesn’t cut it when you cover 20 or more miles a day.

I ran out of food a couple times and so I developed the mantra that food is light. It’s light because if you do it right you start with say, 22 pounds of food and end with say 2 pounds (just in case!), thus eating 20 pounds over ten days. Then the average weight of your food was only 12 pounds. On the other hand, gear is heavy. It doesn’t get lighter.

So it is with clothing, too. Earlier I mentioned that I have been boating packrafts since the early 1980s. From 1983 through to 1996 I never used a dry suit or even a wet suit and pretty much just shivered in rain gear on Alaskan rivers. It’s a miracle that I boated for over 10 years mostly freezing my butt off in a "shiver boat"!

Hence another insecurity of mine: cold and wet. So I carry some extra clothes.

On this trip I had a down vest for sleeping if my puffy pullover was too wet and an extra wool hoody. These two items were used on one cold night for something other than a pillow, but most nights were found under my head. They were also almost totally clean and odor free when we finished our trip and I could where them in Kaktovik, Fairbanks, and on the plane without stinking out those around me.

Extra clothes that served as pillows and “clean clothes” when reaching town: down vest (bottom) and wool hoody 

Odds and ends 

 There were some other things I used rarely: one mitten shell and one woolen glove for paddling in the wind.

 When hiking a shelled jacket sleeve and long woolen sleeve can be one set of hand insulators while these two can hold the trekking pole. 

 I kept my food in three food bags: 1) lunch food at roughly one pound a day, 2) hot drinks and breakfast at roughly 8 ounces per day and 3) dinners roughly 4 ounces per day.

I eat about two pounds a day when hiking twenty miles or more a day and only one pound a day when floating downstream. More when paddling into headwinds and on flat water. Knowing this allows me to be smarter about my pack weight. For example, we paddled 7 days (7 pounds) and walked about 8 days (16 pounds) for a total of 25 pounds of food for 15 days.

 Three food bags and some olive oil for extra calories. 

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I carried ibuprofen and took it on hiking days. Two in the morning and two in the afternoon, for my hips. Without it I came to a grinding halt by about noon. I also carried Dermatone for my lips and a lighter. Often these things were in a little HMG bag with my reading glasses.

 Stuff I used daily. 

I brought insect repellent (aka bug dope) a head net, toilet paper, some Aquaseal and zipper lube. I used the toilet paper and the zipper lube, but the bugs were never bad because of good route choice, early season, and sunny weather. I never put on any bug dope or my head net in two weeks in the Arctic. Compare that to the horror story I mentioned earlier!

Clockwise from upper left: TP, head net, glue, lube and patch kit, blister pad, bug dope, and the bag it went it in.

Pretty sure this is all recognizable and necessary.

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Of course, I flossed and brushed daily, carried a knife, enjoyed a few ear cleanings, had an extra lighter and band aids and bunion pads for blisters and soap if I needed to clean wounds, hands, or body. Pretty sure this is all recognizable and necessary.

 First Aid 

My first aid kit had pain killers (opioids), some Cipro antibiotics, Tinadizol to get rid of Giardia, a wound wash kit, gauze, more band aids, butterfly band aids, Betadine and alcohol swabs, some antibiotic ointment, Tylenol, and Aleve. My dental floss I rewound on its spool after flossing rather than throwing it away, just in case I needed to use it for some repair.

 Gear head? 

 Well, this might make me look like a gear nut, and if a gear nut is someone who gives close attention to what goes into the pack or onto the boat, then I guess I am guilty as charged. I mean I do weigh my gear and write the weights on it often.

 On the other hand, the only thing new I bought for this trip was the down vest. I haven't owned one of those since a Frostline Kit I put together when I was 15!

 Once I have something that works well, I tend to stick with it, rather than always shopping for something better. I do watch what others bring -- like Voile straps and maybe pot grips. Tom brought a pair and I sure like picking up the gallon pot with them. I didn't have any milk packets to fold as grippers. Sticks are clumsy, the little orange two finger gripper hard to use in a fire and none of my sleeves were long enough.

 I don't really like to talk gear or shop gear, but maybe this gear list might come in handy for others, or maybe provide another viewpoint to make room in their pack for a raft, so that they too might discover the freedom and joy of landscape trips across Alaska's Arctic.