By Wrangell-St. Elias National Park is the real deal….
It’s vast, it’s remote, and there’s not a soul around…. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park is larger than the country of Switzerland PLUS Yellowstone PLUS Yosemite! It sports glaciers that are as WIDE as many of the “lower 48” glaciers are LONG! Its got big bears and even bigger mountains, featuring 9 of the 16 tallest peaks in North America. This place is the real deal…
I was fortunate enough to visit Wrangell-St. Elias NP for the first time in 2010 on a tourist type trip to Kennecott Mines and I haven’t gotten the place off my mind since.
Since 2010, I visited the area again and again and again, slashing a bit deeper each time at a seemingly bottomless swath of wilderness. There are only two roads into the Park (McCarthy and Nabesna). Each present their own unique challenges, but it’s fair to say they are both long, remote, and plentifully potholed. There’s really only so much you can see from the road, so the name of the game here, like much of Alaska, is air travel.
In 2017 our crew made our off-trail debut in the area with the Nizina Traverse. It was a bit of an eye opener. As it turns out, this stuff is SUPER HARD!!! We learned (the hard way) what moraine travel looks like in Alaska, experienced some hazards of wilderness packrafting, and saw bears. REALLY BIG bears. Everybody was a bit awestruck after that first trip, but it was clear that we needed bigger, badder, and “radder”…Thus the impetus for the 2018 “Ice Route” was born. Looking back on it, if we thought the Nizina Traverse was tough, the “Ice Route” blew it out of the water in almost every respect. It was the single hardest wilderness challenge any of us had ever faced and, in the end, one of our finest hours. Dont miss the write-up for that one!
Once you get a taste for Alaska, it’s in your blood…
The spark for the Tana traverse came in 2018 somewhere along the “The Ice Route” while wandering around on the sprawling Bremner Glacier. The moment I saw it, I immediately knew out there on the icefield that I needed more of that in my life.
Planning…
Planning a trip like the Tana Traverse is no easy feat. There are inevitably copious variables that impacted decision making. Much as you might expect, given the remoteness of an area such as this, few if any people have visited (and shared their experience). For this reason, information collecting is damned near impossible. I use a number of electronic resources to evaluate route planning and feasibility including Caltopo, Google Earth, ESRI imagery, EO Browser and the Sentinel Satellite feeds. The initial plan was to cross the to the East from Iceberg lake, ascend the Jefferies Glacier, and exit either Granite Creek as a loop or Goat Creek as an extended dismount. After having conversed with Jim Harris, the only person that I’m aware of who has walked Goat Creek, it sounded like the stakes of packrafting this deproach would be unpalatable. Furthermore, ESRI imagery suggested intermittent, high grade rapids in lower Goat Creek. Lesson already learned along the many portages during “The Ice Route” in 2018, dissuaded me from considering an option with lots of portaging. So…back to the drawing board.
Ultimately, slope angle imagery from Caltopo suggested friendlier terrain along the Ice between Iceberg Lake and The Bremner.
Snow: From the day I dreamed up this route, a top concern was experiencing intermittent snow. Alternating, intermittent snow and bare ice is something that we had encountered in 2018 and frankly, it’s not much fun. Thin snow lends itself to thin snow bridges over dangerous crevasses. It’s also worth noting that thin snow almost always means wet boots and cold feet. Continuous snow = OK. Bare Ice = Good. Alternating snow & ice: BAD. For months leading up to the trip I watched the Alaska Snowtel website that quantified the snowpack in the Copper River Drainage desperately trying to conjure up a premonition or crystal ball that would let me extrapolate observations to future conditions. The problem was, as I had learned in previous years, the Copper River Drainage is absolutely humongous and certain zones behaved very differently than others with regards to retention of snow. Through the months of January, February, and March snowpacks in the Copper River Basin hovered around normal. Extrapolating this to historical satellite imagery during a the similar prospective trip window, it was looking more and more like wet feet, thing snow bridges, and heavy rope/crevasse equipment. The best I could ever settle for was, like any weather predictions in Alaska: It will be what it will be.
As tradition dictates, the trip began over a hearty breakfast at The Potato, town meeting place and breakfast-joint extraordinaire. After loading up into that old, yellow, Wrangell-Air Beaver I’ve come to know so well, we took to the air. En Route, Wrangell Mountain Air was willing to add on a nice loop out over the Bagley Icefield, which is only describable as awe-inspiring, and we were able to quickly check out conditions on and around our route. Much to my surprise, snow levels had dropped considerably since the last Sentinel satellite photos had posted to the interwebs. Although at the time it felt a little like cheating, we flew over the highest part of the proposed route, and confirmed how little snow covered glacier would need to be navigated. Ultimately, it permitted us to safely dump rope/harnesses/crevasse rescue gear back onto the plane and off of our backs. WIN…
Hit the ground running…
There’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed on these trips in which the gravity of the remoteness of these places comes crashing down on you the moment that bushplane lumbers into the air and the engine drone fades to silence. I’d describe it simply as very sobering…
Iceberg lake, an interesting little glacial anomaly, was the starting point for the Tana Traverse. Below the “landing strip” the river valley drains off from the tundra and perpendicularly T-bones the West Fork of the Tana Glacier at it’s midpoint. The river backs up against the ice forming a lake that, on occasion, completely drains when the ice dam that prevents the waters continuation downstream catastrophically collapses. The lake rushes underneath the West Fork of the Tana Glacier and drains the entire pond leaving icebergs marooned on the sand. We camped on the ledges above the lake that first night and were regularly woken to popping, groaning, and calving of the ice that the strange.
Out on the Ice…
When I tell people about these trips up in Alaska I think they unilaterally have the wrong impression of what things actually look like up here. In most of the world, being on a glacier is potentially dangerous endeavor, likely involving some degree of high angle mountain climbing. Mountain glaciers cling precariously to the sides of steep, tall, peaks. In places like Alaska, there is such an abundance of ice, particularly at low elevation, that those steep mountain glaciers flow down into the valleys below and converge into low angle icefields and/or broad valley glaciers. Valley glaciers often lack the crevassing and complexities of hanging glaciers and cirques. Consider it a highway. Walking is often, but not always, pretty easy and straightforward. Often times the biggest challenge with navigating these big Alaskan valley glaciers is getting on and off of them across their extensive, ankle breaking, moraine fields.
As we left Iceberg Lake, on a fine sunny morning, and worked our way up on to the West Fork of the Tana Glacier I was immediately struck with how straightforward jumping on to the ice was. As climate change tears these places down with recession and deflation of the ice, it often makes entry and exit onto the ice a complete nightmare. As I has previously eluded to, Iceberg lake is quite the anomaly in that it came about from a non-glaciated valley meeting the sweeping West Fork of the Tana Glacier at its midpoint and I think the fact that we were not attempting to enter the ice at the glacier’s terminus is the sole reason it was so straightforward. The West Fork Glacier itself was cruisey. Until its upper reaches, there was essentially no crevassing and walking was quick.
Before long we had made it up to the elbow intersection of the West Fork glacier and an unnamed glacier spilling off to the north into the Bremner drainage. At the intersection, a conveniently little rock island, that we would later refer to as “Marmot Island”, protruded from the ice that guarded it from all sides. A considerable cloud coverage and a little sprinkles of rain had moved in by this point in the day. Camping on the rock island sounded considerably friendlier than camping directly on bare ice, so we set up shop for the night. Interestingly, when later exploring Marmot Island we discovered 1) beautiful beds of lupine flowers that seemed SO out of place 2) a robust colony of marmots (hence Marmot Island) and 3) interestingly, a University of Alaska earthquake monitoring station on the summit of the little rock. We would later in the trip feel an earthquake of 3.1 magnitude that would have an epicenter mere miles from this monitoring station.
One-Star Glacier…
The next morning, we awoke to angry skies rapidly approaching from the East. We rapidly broke camp in attempts of keeping what little we had dry and when the drizzle finally hit, it the cold really started to sink in!!! We spent that morning navigating across the ice cap at the glacial elbow and then down one fork and up the other of an Unnamed Glacier we would later call One-Star Glacier. In all reality, the unnamed glacier was astounding in all senses of the word, however, it never really seems that way with wet clothes and cold hands. In an attempt to avoid crossing snow covered glacier (which potentially would hide dangerous crevasses below) we crisscrossed the ice cap in a very convoluted manner much like running a maze. As we came off One-Star Glacier at it’s head up a very very steep tundra hill, the fog-of-war that we had been enshrouded in started to lift. Wrangell St-Elias National Park is full of huge mountains that wouldn’t seem out of place as the centerpiece mountain in other great ranges around the world but as the clouds began to lift, it was apparent that there were real monsters hiding out there. A mountain that was DRASTICALLY larger and more ominous looking that all of it’s nearby cousins came progressively more into view. After researching further post-trip it was revealed that this serious, serious looking mountain was 18,009′ Mt St-Elias almost 100 miles away across the icefields!!! Visibility like that is something to really marvel at. We spent the remaining part of the day marveling at the One-Star Glacier, the Bagley Icefields, and the mystery giant peak in the distance from the 5000′ campsite which we later called “Tundra Camp” perched on the hillside above the icefields. Tundra Camp was easily in the top 3 most spectacular campsites I’ve ever seen and really represents Alaska at it’s best. In good weather I would happily stay two nights there and scramble the peak behind camp.
The Bremner…
What we called “Bremner Pass”, between One-Star Glacier and the Bremner Glacier, was a relatively uneventful climb from Tundra Camp. The West side of the pass had yet another unnamed glacier that descended gently to the massive, 25 mile long, 2 mile wide Bremner Glacier. Even in August, snow to some degree persisted on leeward slopes at 5000′ in the pass. The views as we descended to the Bremner Glacier were ones that I will treasure for the rest of my life. They emphasized the gravity of how truly remote we had wandered back into this icy wilderness. The Little Bremner Glacier has some interesting ice-slot canyons at it’s terminus, some of which go subterranean and later re-emerge downstream. My mind raced which what treats might be hiding down in those corridors but the realities of the required equipment, particularly in such a remote area, made it clear that these places will remain only for the glacier to know.
Once on the Bremner proper, our pace accelerated dramatically. Walking was straightforward, free of snow or crevassing. That all changed when the glacier rolled convexly and cracked up. Navigating a 2 mile wide glacier in a crevasse maze is no joke. The going gets pretty slow and inefficient once you’re in the maze. Think back to the old arcade game Frogger. Right, forward, left, backward, right, dead end – reverse course. We jumped over so many crevasses I stopped counting, none of which felt particularly dangerous with microspikes on. A trend emerged that as the glacier ungulated and rolled in a concave fashion crevasses closed, streams formed on the ice, the water would run until it abruptly terminated at a moulin which was a fluted pit that water would drop through the ice to bedrock. Walking was typically easier until the glacier rolled convexly. Cracks opened. The streams ran into a crevasse and were no longer contiguous. We started losing elevation and running the maze: Forward, right, back, right, forward.
Moraine travel is everyone’s least favorite part of a trip. A wise friend once described it as “the punishment at the end of the glacier”. We discovered what this can look like back on the Nizina Traverse in 2017. Hours feel like days. Inches feel like miles. The footing is loose. Everything is unstable. There’s rocks…lots of rocks. Big, small, and every size in between. You scramble up a steep, merciless scree slope, on to descend sharply on the other side and then repeat the process hundreds of times. I didnt know what to expect on the Tana. I always try to formulate an exit strategy to minimize suffering on moraines by copiously examining sattelite imagery. The reality is everything changes so quickly on moraines and nothing is what it seems. The plan ALWAYS goes to shit. In the end, you put your head down, make direction decisions at every crossroads you come to, and suffer through it. Much to my surprise, things moved super smoothly dismounting the Tana. After only an hour of slogging there was a light visible at the end of the tunnel and before long we things were out in dry riverbeds below the morraine.
The Rio…
In the planning phase I had initially expected very little in the way of whitewater on the West Fork of the Tana River. The sole image of the area thats discoverable on the interwebs suggested the West Fork of the Tana River was class I, flatwater. ESRI Worldview suggested otherwise. The imagery suggested that the first 2 miles below the glacier could have demanding whitewater. As tempting as a wild ride sounds, typically on deep wilderness traverses such as this, our risk tolerances for such excitement is rather low. The packrafts we use allow all of our belongings to stowed within the hull of the raft. It keeps everything safe and dry…until you lose you boat because you got pitched by a big man-eating hole. When we arrived, our local observation supported the ESRI imagery. Sustained, swift, class IV. No-go.
The West Fork of the Tana tamed out pretty quickly after a short section of whitewater described above. The gradient changed and the water slowed. The lower part of the river was slow, flat, and scenic. Enjoyable class I. There was, unexpectedly, zero camping until the cobble bars of the Main Fork of the Tana which made for a pretty long day.
The area near the confluence of the two forks of the Tana seemed pretty “bear-y”. In the absence of copious choices, we elected to camp on an island in the middle river. It came with a built in bear-moat. In theory, the idea was that you could hear an animal coming onto our little fortress campsite, however, we awoke to fresh wolf tracks in the morning and our little bubble was burst.
When we met the Main Fork of the Tana the pace picked up to >10mph. Although big raft trips pay serious money to fly in and run the big water of the Tana River, our group did not unanimously have the comfort to tackle such and endeavor. Plus, the Potato was waiting for us back in McCarthy. 😉 We reluctantly flew back into the real world after having successfully forgotten about responsibility, routine, and last but not least COVID.
Special thanks to Austin, Diana, & Samantha at Wrangell Mountain Air and Nyssa with the NPS.
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