Wrangell St. Elias - Part 3 of 3 - From Chitistone Pass to McCarthy

What Alaskans refer to as “Skolai Pass” is hardly a pass at all. Instead, it is a high alpine valley near the lateral moraine of the Russell Glacier. Skolai Pass is actually the high point between the Yukon and Copper River watersheds, and is an ever-changing location on the ice of the Russell Glacier. In the most pastoral valley nearby, a lonely airstrip provides a drop-off point for people hiking the Goat Trail. Travellers completing the longer trip from Nabesna, Chusana, and White River will probably pass by the airstrip without seeing it.

While this valley is not a pass, it is as windy as one. Frigid winds sweep down the Russell Glacier from Mount Churchill, lashing the treeless valley. There are medium-sized shrubs on the south side of the valley, directly below Chitistone Pass. They provide the best sheltered camping for backpackers who will be continuing on to the Goat Trail but don’t want to camp at higher, more exposed sites. It is an eight hundred foot climb up tundra benches to Chitistone Pass, a relatively easy ascent. Hanging glaciers frame the pass, and a herd of dall sheep high step away when we walk through it. The valley seems to descend gently from here to the Chitistone River, which is an illusion. In a few miles, the outflow from the Chitistone Glacier cuts a sheer, thousand foot chasm in this valley’s orange rock.

This is the location of the Goat Trail, a faint path first established by miners who crossed from McCarthy into the Interior during the Gold Rush. Miners of that era had two alternatives: Up and over the Nizina Glacier, or around the Goat Trail and over Skolai Pass. It is shocking anyone took either route. The Goat trail is actually a web of trails, some of which dead end at cliff bands. In some places, the footing is relatively secure, but in others there is slick 45 degree rock overlain with sand and small gravel. As you skitter across these sections, loose rock and sand bounces down over more cliffs, then into sub-gorges, and finally, perhaps, into the main gorge more than a thousand feet below. The gashes in the rock are far too steep and winding to see all the way to the bottom.

After a couple hours of this precipitous side-hilling, the path emerges onto a small plateau above the gorge. From here, it is fifteen hundred or more feet down to the Chitistone River, first through highland tundra before the final steep descent through brush. We arrive at the banks of the Chitistone River in the evening, exhausted. The river is a grey torrent, so choked with sediment it looks and sounds like slurry. Small chunks of glaciers float down the river periodically. Within minutes, the river rises nearly a foot following the release of a glacial lake upstream, only to recede an hour later.

Glacial rivers have wild swings in volume, from low water at night and early morning to high melt-driven flow by the afternoon. When we awake in the morning, the formerly violent Chitistone is merely fast. We eat breakfast, chilled by the cold air off the water, and put on every article of clothing we have, plus drysuits, to begin the float downstream.

Packrafts are nimble things, and a marvel of outdoor engineering. Most weigh less than ten pounds, but are sturdy enough to bash down rocks in a cobbly glacial river like this one. In the absence of a heavy load, they are easy to maneuver through Class III whitewater even for relatively new paddlers. With a heavy load, however, in completely opaque glacial water, and in a stream with relentless gradient, they’re not easy to maneuver at all. Unlike the pool-drop rivers that are common in most of the Lower 48, glacial streams tend to have steep gradient spread out nearly evenly. The individual rapids may be smaller, but the velocity is relentless and there are few large eddies. It makes staying together as a group extremely challenging. When I eddy out the first time for the group to reconvene, one of the other paddlers attempts to eddy out as well but broaches on a rock and swims in the 33 degree water. No more stopping for the group to reconvene--people in the back have to keep up. The current is ripping, and after only an hour we’ve gone about ten miles.

The tight Chitistone valley begins to open up as the river sweeps from one side of the valley to the other. Soon it approaches the massive Nizina floodplain, and three-thousand foot high towers of rock rise above the river. Waterfalls cascade off cliff walls, falling so far that they seem to evaporate before reaching the ground. With the river coursing along, still at eight or ten miles per hour, the panoramas begin to feel unreal despite their resolution: Who ever saw so much scenery in an hour without motor driven power?

From the Gold Rush period, an series of old bridge abutments cross the river. This is the takeout, a nine mile walk back a double track to McCarthy, along which we won’t see any traffic. McCarthy itself is still sixty miles out a dead end dirt road. But after a week crossing from the Yukon to the Copper River watersheds over ice-bound passes, it feels like walking into Vegas.

For the length of the trip, we didn’t step across any fences. No highways marked directions or property boundaries. Not a single light flickered in the distance at night. Watersheds, mountain ranges demarcated the landscape. The vast fields of snow and ice, illuminated by moonlight, were the only thing that would have been visible to a plane overhead, but there wasn’t one to look down on it.

This is the last in a series of articles about walking and paddling through the Wrangell St. Elias mountains.