Alaskan Odysseys: 11 ‘Trips of a Lifetime’ into the Alaskan Wilderness

By Joseph Ebertz

Alaskan Odysseys chronicles 11 different journeys into 11 different parts of Alaska, all of them remote areas that require significant effort (logistics) to access. Much work went into the planning for these trips, because they involve much by way of preparation, transportation in and out, and all the gear necessary to be self-contained for up to two weeks in a land that will make you pay for any mistakes. This is much more than a ‘how-to’ collection of chapters, there are the daily events to relate, daily events that might include a hair-raising descent through a series of rapids, or a sighting of brother griz on the prowl, or observations about the uniquely Alaskan geography we find ourselves in. These 11 trips of a lifetime were some of the most challenging times of my life, and brought out the best in each of us, providing me, at least, with stories for a lifetime. This book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the Alaskan wilderness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781663251077

Joseph Ebertz

Joseph Ebertz is a life-long traveler; in his 20’s and 30’s he traveled widely, from lengthy trips to the South Pacific, including Fiji, New Zealand and Australia, to many trips in Central and South America later on in those years, into his 40’s. Alaska beckoned to him in his 50’s, and, apparently, still hasn’t finished with him, now in his 60’s. A suitable work history is needed to support this travel, and a lifetime of work in seasonal construction occupations, including owning his own Landscape Design/Build business since the mid-90’s has provided that support. A spirit of adventure, which includes a burning desire to know and experience other places is also essential to the mix. This is Ebertz’fourth self-published book, and the one that provided him with the most enjoyment.

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Copyright © 2023 Joseph Ebertz.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-5108-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-5106-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-5107-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023909791

iUniverse rev. date: 06/02/2023

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ALASKAN

ODYSSEYS

Acknowledgements

A hearty thank you to my daughter Allison and Valerie for their work on my hand-drawn maps.

Contents

Anderson Island And Beyond… Way Beyond

Halcyon Days on the Copper River

Admiralty Island – Big And Tall Water

Tatshenshini – Alsek Rivers Throw Down The Gauntlet

HULAHULA RIVER: BROOKS RANGE TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN

The Kongakut River – More North Slope

Kobuk River – Fishing In The Rain

Charley River: A Wild Ride To The Yukon

Marsh Fork And Canning Rivers: North Slope Reprise

Alatna River: A Paddle & Hike To Arrigetch Peaks

Noatak River: The Western Reaches Of The Brooks

Appendix

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Anderson Island And Beyond… Way Beyond

In August of 2006 I took the chance to realize a life-long dream by traveling to Alaska (AK), along with a couple of friends, John and Peter, guys with similar ideas of how to have a good time. This trip would lead to subsequent AK trips, eleven of them total, and would morph into a huge force for good in my life. I couldn’t know its significance then, but I have for a long time now, seventeen years and all those trips later, how these Alaskan odysseys affected all of us who participated. They left their indelible mark on my heart, soul and psyche, changing me forever in the process, I’ve come to see. If you can exit a bush plane on an Arctic river in the midst of the ominous, barren and baleful looking mountains in all directions, rain squalls breaking out around you out of the cold gray Arctic sky, and set off in a northerly direction on a river rushing by in great earnest in the direction of the Arctic Ocean, with nary a soul between you and that Ocean, then you are good to go most anywhere on the planet. But I get ahead of myself.

This trip, to Cordova AK (Southeast, coastal Alaska), Sheep and Gravina Bays, not far out of Cordova and Anderson Island and environs, was the first trip of many, the inaugural trip as it were, of a series of increasingly ambitious and complex journeys—what we came to regard as trips of a lifetime. Here’s an open question: how many trips of a lifetime can you squeeze into one lifetime? We didn’t know it at the time, but AK can and will change your perspective on things, on life. As if being immersed in this vast, vast and rich in all things wild wilderness would likewise explode your limitations in other venues. It would draw back some or all of us for repeat performances for many years to come.

Back to August ’06: we exited a plane in Cordova AK, a forty minute flight from Anchorage, not quite sure what to expect, but ready for anything. Ready to be surprised. What we got, the next three days or so, was a storm one might only see in this part of the world at this time of year. Two to three days of heavy rain, gale-force winds, and resulting confinement to the town of Cordova, a quirky, quaint old S.E. AK coastal fishing town, and a place cut off from the outside world due to its location, and a lack of road access; not a bad place to spend a little confinement, and we discovered a funky downtown bar or two that became a little familiar to us.

First we met up with Boris Popov, a vague descendent of the Russian who authorized the sale (gift) of Alaska to William Seward for $.02 an acre, and a friend of Peter’s at the time (he would become our friend in short order). Boris was determined to reap the benefit of his ancestor’s land deal by filling up his lodge as often as possible with mostly American fishermen, and charging them a premium for the privilege. But we’d worked out a deal with Boris, almost as good as Seward’s deal, due mostly to Peter’s longtime friendship with him (Boris is an American, btw). We were supposed to make our way out to his secluded island lodge, an hour or two boat ride out of Cordova, into a place called Sheep Bay, up the coast a ways, to a promised mother lode of Silver Salmon fishing. We made our way no farther than a local rooming house (formerly a cannery, built right on the wharves above the sea, where 20’-plus tides regularly occur), and we walked around town, leaning into those gale-force winds at about a thirty degree angle. An interesting and exciting welcome to Cordova, but not what we had in mind, and we itched to be heading out to Boris’ lodge, and the fishing, kayaking and exploring awaiting us.

Cordova is surrounded by temperate rain-forest, and even for this region the storm we encountered was exceptional, a rowdy, ass-kicking August blow on the S.E. coast. Don’t think it can’t happen. Record rains shut down and flooded the local airport, built on the shores of Eyak Lake, and shut down various roads in the area. The wet weather made us scrutinize more closely our gear; the locals believe in one kind of rain-gear: rubber. None of us had rubber... Gore-Tex, coated nylon, durable plastic, these we had, but no rubber. Maybe a little shopping was in order? On this, our very first trip to AK, Peter bought his famous rubber rain hat (orange), and breaks it out in rainy weather to this day. Looks a lot like the fish-stick guy of yesteryear. Remember him? You’re dating yourself.

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Cordova is a town you get to by air or by water. No way to drive there directly, although a spur or two of road do go some distance before petering out, so one gets the frontier feel loud and clear. Not a bad place to be stranded, and stranded is how we felt. We made the most of it, walking around canted into the gale, exploring the town, savoring some of the local brews and brew-houses. When the weather finally broke we couldn’t get out of Cordova fast enough, soon heading out of the crowded and busy harbor on Boris’ boat, past the numerous sea-otters making their homes in or near the harbor; they took little notice of us, intent upon their dinners, food resting upon their stomachs while floating on their backs. These creatures apparently like to dwell near ready and easy food sources, and the fishing fleet of Cordova provide much by way of ready meals for them. The itinerary ahead of us included a great deal of fly-fishing for Silver Salmon (peak of the season), some sea-kayaking (kayaks rented in Cordova) and whatever else made sense in the week-and-a-half left in front of us. The three of us had studied maps and plotted our moves during that storm induced respite.

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Arriving at Anderson Island, where Boris’ cabin-like lodge sits, is something like arriving at shangri-la, or a version of it, I imagine: the small island is heavily forested, and from the floating dock (20’ + tides) a rocky trail leads to the lodge sitting well above and overlooking Sheep Bay. The lodge has large windows and a deck offering a view to a spectacular waterfall across the bay, up high in a ridge line leading to snow capped coastal mountains. Sea Otters float on past, the occasional seal breaks the surface of the bay, and beneath the water’s surface a huge migration of chum, pink and silver salmon go by almost unnoticed, toward the lagoon at the head of the bay to the east. Dinner that first night consisted of a couple of fresh pink salmon caught near the island, in salt water. Our chef expertly grilled them over charcoal on a grill on the deck, waterfall visible coursing white and audible in the distance, and some cold beer to lubricate the process. Mountains stretched inland, getting higher as they went, some of them sporting snow higher up, year-round snow, ice fields on high. We were late getting to Anderson Island, at least a couple of days late, but it felt like the welcome mat had been put out for us. The ordeal of the previous days, the gale in Cordova, was quickly forgotten.

The next few days were idyllic, with much time spent in a smallish lagoon at the head of Sheep Bay, fly fishing (in my case, learning how to fly fish) for the silver salmon that were greatly outnumbered in large clouds of pinks. Boris, as the seasoned veteran and our guide in this area, could pick the silvers out of the crowd in milliseconds, and cast accordingly, bypassing the pinks with his casts, zeroing in expertly, in the crystalline waters of the lagoon, on the far fewer and more desirable silvers. (God forbid that you should have to eat a pink for dinner!)

One day we stood in a cold rain for hours, me in a pair of waders in three feet of water in the lagoon, casting for silvers and catching mostly pink salmon. Where the lagoon emptied into Sheep Bay was a short, shallow but swift section of shallow river, so full of salmon you could have walked across it on their backs. Heady stuff for a boy from the upper Midwest, a guy used to Walleye fishing, mostly in Canada, and catching, in a good day, maybe 20 fish total. Here, the trick was to not catch the pinks. Or foul-hook them as the hook dragged its way over, around and through the surging, squirming salmon. Truth was, pinks were fine for eating, as long as they weren’t too far from or too long out of salt water. I’d never seen anything like this, and I was digging it. It was the best fishing I’d ever experienced by a wide margin, and for days I felt a bit… giddy. Over-stimulated perhaps. Fish-induced euphoria.

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Out of our base at Boris’ lodge on Sheep Bay we did a couple of adventures; the first was an overnight hike up past the aforementioned lagoon and along the stream that fed it, and up out of this valley to a small alpine lake we’d seen on a map. It was pure bushwacking, but we were intrigued by the location of this little lake and wanted to give it a close-up look. It was not a long hike in terms of distance, less than ten miles for sure from the lagoon, but were we in for an education in AK geography and topography. We walked along the stream for maybe a mile, making lots of noise to alert the well-fed brown bears (signs in the form of fish heads and tails, bear tracks and scat, as well as trails everywhere) of our passage. We decided to climb up out of the bottom of the valley to get away from any potential bear contact, and traverse at a higher elevation parallel to the main stream, to the stream that fed out of the lake we were looking for. That turned out to be a big mistake.

On my desk in my home office sits a framed photo of John Parkes in the foreground, twelve gauge in hand, and me behind him, struggling through the dense rain-forest that carpets this region. Downed trees everywhere, a carpet of moss on everything, dead or alive, vegetation growing on top of and out of other vegetation. At times it was necessary to crawl over the obstacles, at other times I remember being suspended above ground on vegetation growing mostly horizontal, struggling to keep my balance and keep moving. I don’t know that I’ve ever worked harder to travel what was certainly less than ten miles, perhaps closer to seven or eight, than on this hike. At one point we found ourselves traversing a slide area where all the trees were gone, but the area revegetated in lower and thicker growth, alder and spruce and birch thickets mostly, and it was nearly impossible to move, a dozen branches clutching at you at once, the ground they grew out of as tortuous a jumble of moss-covered boulders in all shapes and sizes.

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Some hours later we emerged, sweating profusely and tired, very tired, near the lake we’d been aiming for. Wasn’t exactly what we’d envisioned; no beaches, no meadows next to the lake for camping purposes, nothing but tumbled and jumbled rock, some of it the size of buildings, and thick vegetation where the rock permitted. There had to be a lake over there, wasn’t there? A clearing was evident, but how to get there in this hellish terrain? Fifteen minutes later we were standing on the rocky shore of the tiny lake, wondering if it would be possible to fish it, deciding not to try. No place to stand and make a decent cast, rugged and uneven terrain right down into the water, everything covered in a thick blanket of vegetation. This little alpine lake was the very picture of uninviting, surface of the lake as still as a tomb.

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We looked around and searched for a place to pitch a tent, some kind of small, open flat spot in an area completely devoid of places or spaces fitting this description. The ground in this area was so rough and uneven, it was like a gigantic explosion had happened, or a series of explosions, in a densely built urban area—maybe what Dresden was like after the fire-bombing, or Stalingrad during the Nazi invasion.

We finally found a huge boulder with a flat top, just large enough to accommodate a tent and three guys. Beneath this massive stone, but not visible to us, we could hear the stream running that exited the lake and flowed down into the drainage that flowed toward the lagoon where we’d started. A precarious perch, but exactly what we needed, and we were grateful for it. Without it we’d have been sleeping in an upright position. Never seen or been in country so fiendishly rough and rugged, and that