Yukon River boating

On my second patrol, June 18^th-26^th, my supervisor, Josh, and I embarked on a motorboat trip up and down the section of the Yukon River that lies within Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. Our objective was pretty much all-encompassing: we were to snap pictures of nearly everything of interest on the river. We were to get snapshots for everything from websites to brochures to art to simple internal documentation. Endemic flower species, rocky bluffs lining the riverbanks, vegetation, mosquitoes, scenic views, historical artifacts, fossils, public-use cabins, gold rush relics, and more. It was an epic trip. We boated over 800 miles in nine days, worked over a hundred hours, saw seven grizzly bears and four moose, and got completely coated in glacial silt from the river. I think there’s still some silt in one of my lenses’ focusing ring. The Yukon is an enormous, powerful river that inspires reverence in everyone who travels along it. It truly is an experience that must be had to explain.

On the first day, we took off downriver in a government boat from the preserve headquarters town, Eagle. We were to cover 100 miles in the first day, which takes about four hours on the boat without stopping—we took six hours, since we stopped occasionally to cut the boat’s motor and shoot items of interest.

As of last September, one of the first items of interest that one encounters while going downriver on the Yukon from Eagle is the Windfall Mountain “Fire”. In September 2012, Eagle residents heard a loud boom and felt a small tremor. In winter, preserve personnel went on an exploratory flight to look for what might have happened, when they encountered a collapsed ridgeline, flames, and smoke.

No one’s sure what happened, but the theory is that there is a shale oil or coal deposit of some kind that exploded and is now burning off. The ridgeline completely collapsed and remains unstable; more and more of it occasionally falls in. The last time I was in Eagle, I saw the US Geological Survey out there checking the site, so we may know exactly what happened sometime soon.

Further downriver, around fifty miles from Eagle by boat, near the Charley River’s confluence into the Yukon, the river traveler encounters a view of the uplands of the preserve and the mountains that line the Charley as it flows north. It’s an absolutely beautiful section of the river, and it’s rich with natural history such as geological structures, fossils, and rare plant species—as well as grizzly bears! We saw a sow and her two cubs on a bluff near water level as we rounded one turn; the three of them immediately bolted into the brush as soon as they saw us. It was nice to have my first wild bear sighting occur while I was inside of a speedy motorboat!

Further downriver, near the end of the preserve boundary, the river is rich with geological material. Each bluff’s structure is unique, and they all exude the sense of being walled into the river, as if the river wants its travelers to float all the way west, across the entire state, to the Bering Sea.

We arrived in the evening at Slaven’s Roadhouse, a nearly 100-year-old two-story public-use cabin located on the river left bank of the Yukon River about 100 miles downriver from Eagle. One of the preserve’s interpretive rangers, Randy, was stationed there, as is the norm during summer when the river sees a high number of visitors enjoying a float trip. We stayed the night at the roadhouse for probably half the nights during the trip; the roadhouse is a good jump-off point for most river excursions, and we had the luxury of a motorboat, which allowed us to speedily travel both upriver and downriver.

There’s an ATV trail leading from the roadhouse to an old gold mining camp five miles away, except during our stay the trail was blocked by damming beavers at a creek crossing! They were fine with us watching them build, however.

The camp supported the Coal Creek Dredge, a historic gold mining dredge in operation from the 1930’s through the 1970’s in the preserve. Huge mounds of gravel that the dredge chewed up, sucked the gold out of, and spat out line the Coal Creek drainage area.

The entire Coal Creek drainage is littered with all manner of gorgeous, colorful wildflowers in summer. They are usually teeming with bees, who are so happy at the pollen harvest that they don’t usually notice humans—the mosquito is the more troublesome flying insect in Interior Alaska. If you don’t believe me, just check out this video I took of Josh trying to shoot a flower while being attacked by them.

I am absolutely amazed at the grandiosity and variety of life and structure that is present in the Yukon River corridor. It’s my hope that my images will spur people on to come to the area to enjoy and protect this rich environment; it’s worth seeing, and it’s worth keeping, for sure.