Anderson Pass

The only thing there is to do for fun in Alaska is trudge out into Mother Nature and let her kick the crap out of you. Alaskans say there is no such thing as good weather, only good equipment—a fact I slowly came to realize after months of hiking and camping in Denali’s back-country. In my spare time I spent hours poring over topographic maps, daydreaming and planning, always coming up with an expedition more challenging than the last.

After months of research I identified the most difficult trek that can be undertaken without technical climbing equipment—though it is still recommended. The four day journey would begin sixty miles into the park where we would be dropped off by bus in the middle of nowhere. We would then hike up the Muldrow Glacier—the largest glacier on the north side—climb over top of the Alaska Mountain Range through a narrow gap called Anderson Pass, descend across the West Fork Glacier on the other side, raft twenty miles down the West Fork of the Chulitna River, then hike back up to a highway where we had no reliable plans for catching a ride back.

This trip is only made possible by an ingenious piece of Alaskan engineering - the packraft. A packraft is a one man raft that maneuvers like a kayak, is extremely durable, built to withstand whitewater rapids, yet ultra lightweight.

I was having trouble convincing anyone to accompany me on this endeavor, so when my friend Steve announced that he would be coming to visit, the timing sounded perfect. During the planning stages I had two main concerns. The first was the cold. I had never camped at elevations as high as the ones we would be crossing. The second was our ability to raft safely down the river. As it later turned out my list of concerns ought to have been much longer.

As Steve later put it, “it was the hardest four days of my life.”

With these concerns in mind I briefed Steve long before he came to Alaska about what equipment he would need to acquire, and what equipment I had for him already. Rain gear I stressed above all else. In Denali rain is a cold, cold reality. It rained during every camping trip I had been on in the previous three months. It was inevitable.

We stayed up late packing our bags and triple checking to make sure that we had all of the equipment necessary for any possible scenario. The next morning at breakfast we met up with a friend of mine named Drew. Drew is short and stocky with a long beard, a seasoned hiker, and, I suspect, a direct descendant of one of Tolkien’s dwarfs. He is the only person I had ever met who climbed Mt. McKinley, or who owned a packraft. Drew was supposed to accompany us, but that morning he began to have second thoughts. He had intended to skip work that day, but was suddenly worried about tarnishing his history of perfect attendance. He decided that he would catch up to us after work, and we arranged to meet the following day at noon.

During our five hour bus ride into the park, the bus driver took great concern with our plans, and Steve’s attire. She warned Steve about using cotton as an under layer, and cautioned him about the frailty of his shoes. She told us about her experience working in Antarctica, and her familiarity with hypothermia.

When we got off the bus at our destination and began to unload our bags, the bus driver walked up to Steve, put her hand on his shoulder, and said “You know you don’t have to do this.” Her words frightened both of us, but when Steve looked back at me, I merely shrugged and gestured us onward.

“You’re going to get so cold and wet!” she added.

“Look, we are fully prepared,” I said, displaying a confidence I did not entirely feel. “If our bags were to be fully submerged in water not a single article of clothing we have would get wet.” Anything less than this level of preparation could prove disastrous.

It was an unusually perfect and sunny day though, and it was hard to imagine anything going wrong. After several hours of hiking we began to encounter glacial features. Most glaciers in this part of Alaska are not the flat frozen sheets of ice people typically think of. Instead they are covered with lots of rock and debris. Even small plants manage to cling on in some areas. These features are called glacial moraine. Amidst the moraine we discovered a lake that had formed on top of the Muldrow Glacier, surrounded on most sides by giant ice cliffs.

I was ecstatic and decided to put our rafts to good use. We climbed down the side without a cliff and launched our boats in an area that was free of icebergs. Out on the lake we watched as rocks fell from the melting cliffs, slamming into lower ice shelves, and causing a growing cascade of debris. This also turned out to be a valuable crash course for Steve with the packraft.

We had intended to reach the base of Anderson Pass before nightfall, but that evening Steve’s knee began to cramp and spasm with pain. Our backpacks weighed about sixty pounds, and after miles of hiking the strain had taken its toll.

We were forced to camp early. “I hope this doesn’t mean I have to turn back,” Steve told me. For almost anyone else it would have. The next morning the pain in his knee had subsided only slightly, but Steve was determined to continue.

When we did finally reach the base of Anderson Pass later that morning the view of Mt. McKinley was phenomenal. The mountain itself is so vast that it manipulates the weather systems around it, and shrouds itself in clouds 75% of the time. That morning though we had a clear view of the Muldrow Glacier climbing up the East side of Mt. McKinley.

Noon came and went and Drew was nowhere to be seen. At 2:00 I began jogging back down the trail. At 2:30 I climbed to the top of a hill and peered several miles back with my binoculars. This gave Drew the equivalent of an extra hour to catch up with us, and still I did not see him. We had no choice but to go on without him.

Before we started the trip I warned Steve that even though it’s called a “pass” it’s going to look like were climbing a mountain. Even after saying it aloud I was unable to heed my own advice. Looking in the direction of Anderson Pass our view was obstructed by giant hills of moraine.

“Is that Anderson Pass?” Steve asked, pointing to a steep slope off in the distance that rose to the height of the snowline—a difficult feat given that it’s the end of summer.

“No dude,” I said condescendingly, “that’s obviously a mountain on the other side of it, much farther off in the distance.”

After hours of navigating across dangerous moraine and giant sheets of ice we stood panting and staring as Anderson Pass curved parabolically towards the sky until it reached the ridge that Steve had pointed out. Hail began to dance on the rocks around us. We labored onwards, scrambling on all fours as we neared the top.

The crest of Anderson Pass marked the height of our elation throughout the trip. We could see through our binoculars the route we would take, where far off the glaciers gradually melted into green. It was raining in that distant land. A rainbow wedged itself almost perfectly across the valley. It’s all downhill from here we wrongly agreed.

“Let’s pretend that its paradise,” Steve said.

“Compared to the inhospitable land around us, it more or less is,” I said. “Our goal today is to get to the edge of paradise, to hike to the end of that rainbow.” Steve frowned. “It’s just a joke.” Steve knew that already, but he could also see just how far away paradise really was. It turns out this goal was no more feasible than any other attempt to the end of a rainbow.

We threw back a few shots of whiskey and skipped excitedly down the mountain. The glacier on this side of the Alaska Range fit a more stereotypical description — a large white sheet of ice flowing out of the mountains. We hiked across it, cautiously stepping over the hundreds of tiny creeks that cut their way down the glacier’s surface. When the glacier merged into moraine we were careful to heed the advice of the park rangers and stick to the ledge on the left side of the valley. Giant crevasses formed around us.

After two hours of hiking our path narrowed to a small slanted bridge of ice about eight feet wide that crossed over a giant bottomless pit. I imagined myself crossing it, straddling death, and fell breathless with fear. I began to worry that there might not be a way off the glacier. Our enthusiasm was swallowed into the abyss. We turned back.

The crevasses had grown deeper exhibiting steep icy cliffs where before there had been hills of rock. After about twenty minutes of backtracking I found what looked like a plausible crossing point. Needless to say, descending into the crevasse was easy, but once at the bottom I struggled with what had appeared in the distance to be moraine. The rock layer was less than a half inch thick and every time I tried to pull myself up or dig down with my walking stick, I slid back down in an avalanche of rocks. After flailing against the wall with little success I learned to turn my walking stick sideways and gather just enough friction to inch upwards.

At the top we were both tired, but I pressed on hard, determined not to spend the night sleeping on rock and ice. Steve was beginning to understand the bus driver’s warning about his choice of shoes. With every step he could feel the rough edges of rock as they dug through his thin soles. It was nearly 11 PM and darkness was approaching. My fear of camping on the glacier, and Steve’s fear of hiking in the dark elevated into a shouting match. Exhausted, we gave up and collapsed on the flattest ground we could find.

We awoke amidst a thick fog. As if hiking through a maze of moraine was not enough, we could no longer see more than fifty yards in front of us. I had a general idea of where we needed to go though, so we proceeded.

“How do you know which direction were heading in?” Steve asked.

“I can see the outline of the mountain range through the fog, and I know that we need to be hiking parallel to it,” I explained. As the fog lifted over the next hour we realized that what I had taken for a distant mountain was in fact a massive cliff of ice gouging into the sky nearby.

As water travels across a glacier’s surface its forced deeper underground. At the base of this glacier all of the water suddenly exploded upwards through the earth, forming, in a single spot, the beginning of the West Fork of the Chulitna River.

Now rested, rehabilitated, and finally finished with glaciers, our moral had returned. I had been looking forward to rafting as the most fun part of the trip. The park rangers had told us that the first four miles of the river are treacherous, filled with rapids class three and up. After hiking a few hundred yards downstream Steve and I decided — based on the almost no river rafting experience between us — that the water didn’t look so bad, and that this warning, like the one we had been given about the glacier, was probably wrong.

We geared up and launched. The river was an unsettling sort of fun, the kind of fun you feel only during the brief moments between averting disasters. After ten minutes the river had given us not a single moment to rest. I launched over a rapid, and feeling my raft begin to slow down I let my arms collapse from the exertion. Seconds later my raft began to spin and drift backwards. I turned around just in time to see myself get sucked into a giant rapid.

I gasped before tumbling under, then, in an explosive burst of energy I tore myself loose from the raft. My head broke the surface with just enough time for me to take a second breath before being sucked back under. Moments later I was free of the rapid, tumbling downstream, desperately holding on to the raft, my knees slamming into jagged rocks. I dragged myself and the raft to shore. I ran back up stream, and when Steve came around the corner I shouted and gestured emphatically for him to swerve around the rapid I had crossed. My words were muted by the rushing river, but the scene alone conveyed the message.

As he passed nearby I shouted at the top of my lungs “GET MY PADDLE! I’M FINE! JUST GET MY PADDLE!” Steve stopped a few hundred yards downstream, and I began to untie the ropes to break down the raft. I untied the final knot just as my body began to shake uncontrollably. The water was cold — I mean just thawed from an ancient glacier a few hundred yards ago cold, the kind of cold that sucks the heat from your body and leaves you gasping as if you’ve been running for hours kind of cold. I swung my backpack on, grabbed my raft in one arm, rope in the other, and began walking quickly to try and heat up my body.

I had recently begun reading a book about an adventure in the arctic. The main character had run into a similar situation. He warned that running would waste too much energy and draw in cold air, without giving the body’s muscles sufficient time to warm up. Walking was the best answer. As I walked quickly, it dawned on me that I had put the book down in the midst of this scenario, and never found out how the situation was resolved.

Walking didn’t seem to help. My jaw clattered so violently that it began to cramp up. I grabbed my face to massage it, not realizing that I had dropped the rope in the same motion. A disorienting lack of clarity is symptomatic of the first stages of hypothermia. When I noticed this happening I forced myself to concentrate hard on every thought. It felt like squeezing the last drops of toothpaste from a tube.

I tried to backtrack and find the rope, but a white rope amidst white and grey rock seemed invisible and I could not manage to remember where I had walked only a minute before. I gave up.

I concentrated and weighed my options. Normally I could just change clothes, but that cold cold rain had just begun to set in. If I changed now, and my backup clothes got wet, I would have nothing to sleep in that night, and that is the most dangerous of all scenarios. If need be we could set up the tent, I could crawl inside and warm up, while protecting my dry clothes from the rain. But it was early in the day, and with all the setbacks so far, I didn’t think we could afford to waste that kind of time. Again we pressed on.

Even though he had not flipped Steve’s raft had filled up with water, and he was forced to pull over before catching up with my paddle. I cursed the river up and down and Steve along with it.
“I thought I saw the bear mace floating down the river. Did you lose it when you flipped over?” Steve asked.

“Yes!” I shouted. “You saw a red bear-mace-looking object floating down the river and you didn’t grab it? What else could it be?” I was overreacting. Grabbing anything out of that river is about as easy as planes refueling mid-air in the midst of turbulence. We were, however, crossing the border into bear country.

As it turned out it was lucky that I flipped early. Walking alongside the river we watched the rapids get much worse. Occasionally the river narrowed to where only a few large jagged rocks forced water through gaps too small for our rafts to fit.

In my haste I had neglected to look at the map, and did not realize that we got out on the wrong side of the river until we came to a dead end. The rapids ran up against a cliff for a quarter mile before turning away. We stopped to weigh our options. The rapids looked as dangerous as ever, and neither one of us wanted to give them a second try. The only other option, it seemed, was to boulder along the side of the cliff until we reached the other side. This looked so risky however, that we even considered climbing over the entire mountain rather than boulder the cliff. But the mountain looked dangerous too, and there was no telling whether or not we would be able to climb down the other side.

In an attempt at safety, we put on our lifejackets, and unbuckled the straps on our backpacks so that in case we fell in, we could slip them off easily. Our progress was painfully slow, and at times the cliff became so sheer and slippery from the rain that we were forced to drop down into the river and wade along beside the icy rapids.

We made it across without incident and cooked ourselves some warm food on the other side. It wasn’t long however before we found ourselves trapped again. This time the West Fork of the Chulitna River was merging with the North Fork, and we were right in the middle. We had no choice but use the rafts, if only to cross to the other side.

At this point I began to feel the pinch of another unforeseen factor — time. At the pace we were going we would not get out of the wilderness in time for Steve to catch his plane three days from now. We had emergency provisions for such a scenario, but only as a last resort. The packrafts were intended to save us considerable time. Using them we could span a third of the trip in a few short hours.

In addition to our new, healthy paranoia of the river, we were left with only one paddle between us. However, this was the point where the river was supposed to get calmer. Despite the grim outlook Steve was optimistic, and gave me some words of reassurance. This was my lowest moment during the trip and his enthusiasm was invaluable. The only other thing that helped to stifle my fear was an indifference to plunging back into the river. I had been shaking for hours. I was so cold that I didn’t think that the water could possibly make it any worse. We broke Steve’s paddle in half and challenged the river yet again.

After twenty minutes our fears had dissipated and we felt a renewed sense of excitement. Rafting this section of the river was all the fun we had hoped it would be, and we were making great time - about four miles an hour as it later turned out. We doubled the distance we had traveled that day in an hour and a half.

The next morning we got back in the rafts and paddled another ten miles downstream. We both recognized immediately the landmarks that indicated where we needed to disembark. Once again morning fog obstructed our use of large mountains as directional indicators, but we had a map and compass.

After about an hour of hiking we had gone little over a half mile and I was beginning to worry that we wouldn’t make it the four short miles back to the highway before nightfall. The weather in this region comes from the south, and when the clouds hit the Alaska Range they slow down or stop completely, dumping far more precipitation on this region than the North side where we started. Instead of tundra this land is covered in underbrush as thick as a jungle.

Finally, after days of setbacks we ran into a miracle - an old dirt road originally used by miners. I came across the road on maps when I was planning for the expedition, but I never even considered the possibility of finding it amidst so much terrain.

“This is victory road,” I said. “At least now we know for sure that we will make it out before the end of the day."

Further up the road we ran into train tracks. This meant that we had been heading in the right direction, but now there were several different roads to choose from. We saw some people through the trees, and despite signs warning us to stay off the private property we decided to introduce ourselves.

A mother, a daughter, and two dogs greeted us, and told us which road to take.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a phone we could use would you?” I asked.

“Of course! Come on back to the trailer.” We sat down and she handed me the phone. “You guys want a beer?” She asked. How could we refuse?

“This is the best beer I’ve ever tasted in my life!” Steve exclaimed. I called Natasha, and arranged to get picked up in about two hours.

“In the meantime do you guys wanna come back to our cabin and warm up?” The woman asked. “I’ll fix you guys some food. You don’t need to worry about doing any more hiking. We’ll drive you back up to the road when you need to go.”

We went back to their heated cabin that they had built by hand years ago. We changed into warm clothes and ate halibut tacos with all the fresh fruits and veggies you could want, even homegrown tomatoes from the greenhouse, even avocados. We swapped adventure stories, and had a great time.

“You went out in those shoes?” They asked Steve. We could finally laugh about it. “And yall didn’t bring no guns with ya? I mean we go out that far all the time, but we bring a truck, guns, and backup gear.”

When the time came one of the younger guys drove us back out to the highway where Natasha was waiting to pick us up.

We shook hands before departing and thanked him for the help. “Yall’s a bunch a crazy sons a bitches!” He told us, and then sped away, sandwich in one hand, swigging a beer from the other.