Rafting the Copper River (Part I)
8/28 – 8/31/22
8-28
A foggy morning. Last night, in a moment of wild optimism, I had draped sodden clothes from every tree and bush within walking distance of my tent, hoping that the breeze would dry them. Instead, thanks to heavy dew, I succeeded only in restoring whatever moisture they had lost over the previous day.
Stowing my sodden clothes in my ever-heavier duffel, I hauled my gear to the two rubber rafts on which my group would descend the copper. Then I hiked a few miles along the old railroad bed, now a stony ATV track. At every bend, I was treated to sweeping views of the misty river.
Here and there, collapsing trestles reared up from the alders. After reaching a long trestle that slouched majestically over the road, I returned to the rafts, where one of the guides was waiting.
A few minutes later, the other guide arrived with the rest of the guests: a woman from California and a father and son from Georgia. After a safety talk, we boarded the rafts and set off on the swift current.
The sun began to burn through the fog, revealing soaring mountains on both sides of the river. After running Wood Canyon – enlivened by compression waves and several whirlpools – we stopped for lunch across the river from a crumbling trestle.
Only a few miles downriver, we made camp for the evening on a sandy beach in the shadow of majestic Spirit Mountain. Taking advantage of the brilliant sunshine, I again draped my clothes over bushes and trees, and even pulled out my solar charger. Dinner was burritos, served around a fire that brightened as the first stars began to spangle the sky.
8-29
The morning sun was filtered when I woke, and ominous clouds shadowed the southern horizon. After a breakfast of eggs and pancakes, we wriggled back into our drysuits and continued downstream past a spectacular series of snowy peaks and hanging glaciers. The clouds thickened, and a steady rain began to fall, pocking the river’s surface and rattling in the alders.
We stopped to see a station house – one of the tender residences placed every 15 miles along the railroad – but had to bushwhack through devil’s club and cow parsnip to reach the building, which has been converted into someone’s hunting cabin. A bear, smelling food inside, had torn most of the siding from the building’s rear.
After another slow procession of waterfalls and peaks, made ghostly by the rain, shimmering in shafts of sunlight, we reached the next campsite, across the river from a hanging glacier with electric blue ice.
8-30
A clear day, with bands of stratus clinging to the mountain slopes. A bright sun sparkled on the rapids just below the camp, yellowing alders along the banks snapping in the breeze.
That breeze swiftly matured into a full-fledged wind, blowing upstream with a force that threatened to stop the rafts mid-current. As the guides struggled with the gale, we passed beneath a truly spectacular hanging glacier, haloed by a sun just cresting the mountain behind.
A short distance downstream, we encountered two grizzly bears – a mother and adolescent cub – on a pebbly beach. They stood on their hind legs as we approached, trying to decide whether we were a threat, before shambling off into the brush.
For the next ten miles, the landscape had a mythical grandeur that absolutely dwarfed our rafts.
After stopping for a snack beneath a 500-foot waterfall, we came upon a well-preserved stretch of railroad. Long sections of rusted rail paralleled the bank, drooping over the water where a trestle or bank had collapsed. At the mouth of a rushing brook, we found an even more spectacular relic: the remains of a section house and maintenance shed, half-collapsed into the stream below.
After a late lunch on a sand bar covered with grizzly tracks, we made camp at the confluence of the Copper and Tasnuna Rivers. Mountains looked down from every side save the south, where sand from the Bremner Dunes hazed the horizon.
8-31
A clear morning, darkened by the promise of rain. Shortly after setting out, we passed Heney Glacier, pale blue beneath gathering clouds. The first burst of rain washed over our rafts soon after.
During a brief lull in the rain, we stopped at a beach apparently visited by a bear and at least one wolf in the very recent past, and headed out – still wearing our drysuits – for a short hike on the Bremner sand dunes. This dune field – about four miles long and as much as a mile wide – lies at the tangled intersection of the Copper and Bremner Rivers, and consists of sediment from the beds of the glacial lakes that drowned the whole Copper River valley in the wake of the last ice age. Even by the standards of this lonely region, the dunes felt desolate – a wasteland ringed by somber peaks, filled with the hiss of sand.
The rain resumed with a vengeance shortly after we returned to the rafts. After a sodden lunch beside a pale glacial creek, we continued along the river – here, a full mile wide – following shallow channels bounded by trees uprooted in summer floods. Summer seemed far away: the temperature hovered in the 40’s Fahrenheit, and a howling wind whipped rain into our faces.
At last, when even my dry suit was starting to soak through, we pulled into a cove overlooking the mouth of Baird Canyon, and set up camp. The weather refused to improve: as I write this, rain is hammering on the fly of my tent, and an insistent wind plucks at the door flaps.
