Gradient (ft/mile): elevation vs. distance plots

The Local Anchorage Creeks:

The Mat-Su Regulars (Little Su, Upper Willow, Kings Magic Mile)

The Talkeetna Fly-in Creeks (Disappointment, E Fork Iron Ck, Damnation):

The mid-Alatna Valley Creeks:

The Arrigetch Creeks:

I have been using Spruceboy's USGS maps over Google Earth to estimate gradient, then R to make some contour plots of local steep runs and some creeks in the Arrigetch-Alatna Area. Too satisying.

I should have gone paddling, but no, I made these graphs instead.

They are pretty informative and suggest that the Arrigetch offers up the closest to California style granite creeks we have in Alaska. What makes the Arrigetch unique is the paucity of glaciers combined with steep glacial carved terrain, much of it above tree line and so wood free.

It looks like the two local boofy-creeks, Lower Ingram and Upper Willow, aren't as overall steep as they feel, while the granite boulder garden creeks, Little Su and Kings, are steep. This holds for Disappointment and E Fork Iron, too, as Disappointment is not as overall steep as East Fork Iron Creek, surprisingly, but is bigger volume and more pool drop. So pool drop, ledgy creeks hide their steepness on these gradient plots, while boulder garden creeks tend to be steepest.

All the kayakers already know this, of course, and this is just like a little homework assignment to see that clearly.

The Aiyagomahala Creek (aka Hot Springs Creek or South Arrigetch Creek) is super steep at top where it's full of slabs and slides and waterfalls. Just above its hot springs it's a boulder garden, like Magic Mile. Upper Awlinyak, I have not yet seen, but I expect that it is a gorge full of granite blocks, like the the Deceptive Pass branch of Awlinyak. Arrigetch Creek is least known to me. It's hidden in the bushes and glimpses I get of it are broken gneiss, rather than boulders.

All the little Alatna Valley creeks offer up a bunch of variety. None seem too hard for beginners, except the inner gorge of Nahtuk, which I have seen and expect to be Class III+ if not IV. Unakserak and Kutuk look like class II, maybe some wood, and Pingaluk is Class III (walked that a couple years ago). Awesome game trails in the Pingaluk. So a basecamp in the Alatna valley offers everything from Class I on the Alatna to Class VI in the Arrigetch, all in a ten mile radius.

Magic Mile II

Luc Mehl's video:



Crazy...

Magic Mile

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.

Kings Magic Mile: Learning to Walk

The Kings River “Magic Mile” is one of Alaska’s mythical whitewater runs. For about half a mile it drops at the rate of 400 feet per mile through a maze of granite boulders, tight constrictions, and tall ledges, a steep creek by any definition. The second half of the Magic Mile drops over 200 feet per mile with two gnarly drops. The Mile has been described as "a Little Su on steroids".

First run by Embick and crew in the mid-1980s at a level (175-200 cfs) shown in Tim Johnson’s Alaska Whitewater (page 120, “Pick your faith”), Embick’s descent was pretty far ahead of its time. Fed by glaciers, the Kings’ flow peaks when the snow melt overlaps with the glacier thaw in June. Recently Tim Johnson, Josh Smith and John Cox ran it at super high water. Last fall Brad M., JT, Tony Pirelli, Luc Mehl, Mark Outhout and I packrafted the so-called “Lower Kings” (including “Gotta Give ‘Er Gorge") at a level I wished we had this past week when Nate Shoutis, Thai Verzone, Paul Schauer and I hiked up to the East Fork of the Kings to packraft the Magic Mile.


Brad Meiklejohn has been pushing the Magic Mile for a while, so when Nate Shoutis was in town his suggestion of the Kings fit in with my envy of Brad in the Brooks Range running Alatna River tribs. So I contacted the usual suspects needed as back-up for the steep stuff -- Thai Verzone and Paul Schauer -- and off we drove in my son’s ’87 Four-Runner up the Permanente Road, parking where the ATV network spiders around mudholes and the two branches of the road split. This offers an ideal loop trip taking out at the “Gotta Give ‘Er” gorge.

We walked to the put-in in about two and a half hours, inflated and launched into water that certainly didn’t look as low as it seemed at the Glenn Hwy Bridge where no rocks projected in the channels.

“There’s water in the bushes.”

“Yea, and it sure seems pushy. I’ve never packrafted in water with this much flow,” said Paul, whose packrafting experiences so far have been low water runs of Montana, Bird, and Disappointment Creeks.

This was opaque, milky Kings River, and by the time we got to the first rapid, “Bubblegum”, at the top of the 400’/mile section, we all felt the push. The push to sneak, portage, and walk. Which we did for the next few hours in open woods and alders, rarely on boulders alongside as the water lapped at the alders and submerged the shoreline rocks’ moss and lichen.

“What do you think?”

“I want to run it, but the consequences look bad.”

"If you look good going down it, I'll go for it."

“I don’t mind a bruised ego over a bruised body.”

“My ego won’t be bruised. It’s cool just to be in here and see this.”

There were only little sections that looked runnable and they were stacked between sections that didn’t look swimmable.

“Let’s deflate and walk.”

Every now and then we’d hear big water and we’d poke our heads out of the brush to see what the river was doing.

“Wow. The flat water looks like Little Su. And the drops just look too big for us.”

We did a couple ferries between the big drops. We ferried and snuck between “Bubblegum” and “Pick Your Faith”, then again upstream of the bend leading into “Underground Railroad”. There were a couple other huge drops that have no names, too.

The walking was pretty good in open woods of mossy boulders or game trails, but it felt good to run the last bit below “Chunder” to the miles and miles of boogy water leading to the first, opening ledge drop of the lower Kings.

There was a log across the stream below the big tongue in a canyon that pours river left past a wide dry ledge, and plenty of juice in all the folding ledges below. We pulled out just upstream of the Gotta Give Er Gorge and walked the mile back to the truck from there.

The Kings has three sections: the super stout granite Mile, which is like a king Susitna; the middle miles of splashy Class II-III that would be every intermediate kayaker's dream roadside run, like a scenic Willow; and the final sharp schist canyons, like an easier version of Six Mile's third canyon. It's a classic run overall, worth all the hiking.

And it’d been a good day, if not a great one. A day to remind us that we can’t yet run everything in a packraft.

We’ll go back in September at 200 cfs when we can run the Magic Mile. But this June trip was a good scout.

After all, as everyone knows, you gotta walk before you can run, and that's especially true for packrafts on the Magic Mile.

Season Finale -- Three Cups of Tea from a Tin Can

Tim Johnson schooled me in real hucking at Turnagain Pass when he dropped and I spilled Tin Can's Tea Cups on Saturday evening. The Tea Cups are destined to become a packraft-flipping favorite.

On sunny but chilly Sunday, Brad, Luc Mehl (who in the 15 days since he's owned his dry suit has run Echo Bend, Bird, Six Mile, Talkeetna, Montana, Chickaloon and some other creek as well as Kings), JT, and I ran Kings Lower Canyon with Palmer local Mark Oathout (his first time in a packraft), which is beautiful up to and including the crux "Got a Give 'Er" out in the Talkeetnas. Worth doing once, but a long walk in and a long float out from the main attraction.....

I think my boating season is about over so I compiled a greatest hits of 09 video: