Aug 16 - 17

Bob's canoe was hand built by his son Tom when Tom was in high school. Tom is now 40 years old and judging by the thick dust on it I think the last time the canoe got wet was over 20 years ago. (Bob traded something to his son in exchange for the boat so now it is technically owned by Bob.) Inside we found a couple of heavy paddles. The boat is made of wood and coated with clear fiberglass, rather attractive. Tom did a nice job on it.

It took us a while to select a canoe trip. Bob suggested a few day trips but we wanted to do some camping. Some of the rivers, like the Klehini looked far to wild for a canoe. What we could see of the Chilkat looked good but there was a lot we could not see. Finally I found a book that briefly talked about paddling the Chilkat and said it was a class 1 river. This was good enough for me.

We decided to put-in at Mosquito lake where a small swampy outlet would lead us to the river. From there it would be about 30 miles to where the Chilkat river becomes Chilkat Inlet then another 4 miles or so to Chilkat state park where there was a boat dock and good camping.

Just as the Mississippi River was a completely new kind of river for me, so was the Chilkat. The Chilkat is a glacial stream. It runs through a U-shaped valley cut by a glacier as opposed to a V-shaped valley cut but water. The difference is the river is "braided" across the valley. It splits up into literally hundreds of small channels across a 1 to 2 mile wide valley. Sometimes there is no main channel at all. Unlike the Mississippi however, none of the channels are dead ends.

Fine glacial silt makes up the floor of the valley. The silt is a cross between sand and mud.

Joan saw Bob walking around his farm in knee high rubber boots and decided she had to have a pair. She said they would be great for the canoe trip. I was skeptically of buying boots for just 1 trip when we already had Tevas and hiking boots with us. But fortunately Joan persevered and we each got a pair of boots for about $18 at a place in Haines. (Interestingly, Bob buys his rubber boots over the internet.)

These boots proved crucial. I would never paddle a glacial stream without them! In all the braided channels the boat is endlessly running up on shallow silt bars. This would be nothing if the water were 60 degrees and not 34 degrees! I am not kidding. That water is literally cold as ice. In Tevas your feet would be numb is seconds. With the rubber boots, you can just step right out and pull it over the shallow spot and never notice.

Bob dropped us off at Mosquito lake about noon. He said the channel out of the lake might be hard to find but to look for it near the "last cabin" - a vague direction but I figured we would find it somehow.

The canoe is not big and was slightly over-loaded with all our gear so it was a bit sluggish to steer but paddled nicely for the most part.

Well we didn't find the outlet near the last cabin so we started paddling around the lake. It's shaped like a backwards L, narrow and only about a mile long with cliffs on the south side and swamp on the west side. The grassy swamp and a thin line of trees separate the lake from the river. We paddled along the edge of the swamp and saw lots of small birds and lilly pads. It was about 60 degrees and overcast but it was calm and quiet.

Our topographical map showed an outlet at the north end of the lake, nowhere near anything you could call the last cabin. We decided to explore it anyway. The channel was about 4 feet wide with about a foot of water above infinitely deep mud. Within twenty yards we came across a log about 15 inches above the water. With some effort we got the canoe under the log and ourselves over it only to find another log right after that.

Our rubber boots gave us the courage to step into the swamp beside the channel. The swamp grass seemed to grow on a sort of floating ground that sunk a few inches with every step - hard to walk through, impossible to paddle through. We trudged about 40 yards in hoping to see the river on the other side of the thin line of trees. Instead we saw a football size area of exactly what we were in. I hoped to see moose, for their long legs are perfectly suited for this place, but we saw none.

We worked our way back out of the channel and headed back to the "last cabin" to have another look. We were not concerned though, it was our intention to explore the lake anyway.

We stopped along the swamp near the last cabin and ate our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches then laid back to relax for a while then a man and a boy motored over in a little fishing boat. We asked them where the channel to the river was and it turned out we were on top of it. We just had to paddle though about 10 yards of grass!

After breaking through the grass the channel is about as wide as one lane of highway. It wound along for about a quarter mile before we noticed some current helping us. It gradually becomes one of the many channels of the Chilkat. At this point the channels are separated by woods, making each one seem like it's own little creek. Once we heard voices from another boat but we still felt very secluded because of the maze of channels. I didn't worry about making a wrong turn because as long as you don't start going upstream, you're fine.

Around every bend I thought we would see a moose or a bear. We stopped on several little islands and on the soft silt of every, and I mean EVERY, beach we saw clear and distinct tracks of both animals.

The temperature dropped some, or at least it felt much cooler along the river. A little breeze picked up and as it blew across the icy water it could be bone chilling cold. That chill along with the fresh bear tracks gave us a slight uneasiness.

Joan decided it was a good time to try out our bear banger, a pencil sized device that shoots an exploding flare that scares bears away. (I think we described these in a previous chapter in British Columbia.) We have been carrying this thing around for a month and wanted to try it out. We wanted to know how far it would shoot so when the crucial moment came we didn't shoot it so far it went behind the bear and scared it towards us.

Joan held it at 45 degrees and aimed across the channel. It makes 2 explosions it turns out - one when it shoots and the other louder one a second later about 30 yards away when the flare explodes. It sounds like an M-80. We'll have to remember it next New Year's eve.

That explosion probably guaranteed we wouldn't see any wildlife for a while.

Glacial streams are the exact opposite of the rivers I'm used to in the lower 48. They are at their highest in July and August when the weather is the dryest. Rain has little affect on the water level. It mostly has to do with the rate of melting of the glaciers. Farmers in the area face an unusual paradox during a hot dry summer: low fields will be flooded out while higher fields are in drought. During our trip the water, while not flooding, was very high and moved us along quickly.

This also meant there would be a lot of strainers. Everywhere along the banks trees hung in the river where the swift current had undercut their roots. Inevitably, the current wanted to suck us under the trees as well. It reminded me too much of a trip down the Grand River at high water in which a similar log jam capsized (our cousin) Robin and scared the hell out of the rest of us as we waited several seconds for her to pop up on the other side.

So despite the fast current, we could not just ship paddles and float. We kept quite busy navigating around hazards. In some places trees had fallen almost entirely across the channel.

I don't believe any of the strainers would have been fatal. Mostly it was just 1 or 2 trees hanging over. But it would be damned uncomfortable to get soaked in that water. When you are already chilly on a cool overcast day, you can't bare to think about getting any part of you body in that ice water even though we were prepared for it with good warm clothes in the dry bag.

We passed under the Haines highway after about 6 miles of winding through the narrow wooded channels. Below the bridge the Klehini river brings in a lot more water from the west. The Klehini is another braided stream and its "delta" merges with the Chilkat River for 2 miles.

We stuck to the east as much as possible here. In the delta, the islands mostly don't have trees so there is a wide open plain of silt and gravel cut up with hundred of channels from the two rivers. From here we could see the two mountain ranges on either side of the river. The mountains on the west side form the backside of Glacier National Monument and we could see spectacular glaciers hanging down between the peaks. The glaciers got more spectacular as we got closer to the inlet.

We passed the native village of Klukwan then decided to look for camping. Since the Haines highway runs along the left bank, we started working our way to the right. The lack of trees made it difficult to find a good spot. Finally we found an island near the south edge of the Klehini delta that at a few birch trees for shelter and for hanging our food. We were in the eagle preserve and a not sure whether it was legal to camp there or not but since the eagle preserve extends for many miles, we didn't have much choice.

There was no good way to get from the water to the island. It was basically a large sand bar that had somehow survived being cut down by the water for a couple decades. The banks raised about 4 feet out of the water but were composed of such loose rocks and silt that they crumbles as we climbed them. Joan stood on top of the bank and I stood on the bottom handing her stuff, the ground under my feet being swept away periodically requiring me to move to another place until it got swept away too.

We never did get the canoe on shore. We just carefully tied it to a tree for the night.

As usual, we found lots of bear and moose tracks around. I was pretty much resigned to having a bear visit us that night. We hung the food as best we could but the trees were small and shrub-like. I got the bag about 10 feet up but only a few feet away from the tree. A hungry bear could have had it. The only thing going for us is that we didn't have any yummy smelling bear bait. Mostly we just had noodles and oatmeal, although we still had 2 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.We went to bed early because it got really cold out there. We slept warm and cozy in the tent among the birch trees.

Next: Chilkat river canoe trip part 2.

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