The Stikine River

If you want to be alone in the most beautiful countryside you can imagine, the Stikine River is for you. John Muir called it "a Yosemite 100 miles long," and we’re convinced the only reason he didn’t rave more was that he didn’t have time to go upriver any further. The farther you go, the better it gets.

The Stikine River—the name comes from the Tlingit for "Great River"—is about 400 miles long, starting deep in British Columbia. Fed by literally dozens of glaciers, the water in the river is a murky silver, laden with silt. Enormous runs of salmon return to the river each year.

The watershed of the Stikine is one of the largest on the continent, and it is the largest (over 20,000 square miles) that is un-dammed. It’s also the fastest navigable river on the continent, flowing upwards of five knots. At its widest, the river’s a bit less than a mile across, but most places are considerably more narrow, perhaps averaging a hundred yards or so from bank to bank.

The Stikine was supposed to be the original route to the gold fields of the Yukon—it took would-be miners from the coast to the interior faster than any other means, and it didn’t have any of the nasty mountains or glacier crossings that other routes did. The big problem was getting from Telegraph Creek up to Teslin Lake, where you could load gear onto a boat and head north. The Klondike News, on April 1, 1898, wrote, "The portage of 150 miles from Telegraph Creek to Teslin Lake is one that the traveler will never forget, even though made over a wagon road, and we would advise our friends to wait until the long-talked-of railroad is completed and go over this route by Pullman Car." Of course, if you had waited, you’d still be waiting.

Although hundreds of miners tried this route in the first years of the rush, not many made it. The miners traveled in winter, and the first thing that got them was the fairly constant 60-mph headwind that howls down off the glaciers all winter long. Gold is only worth so much.

Telegraph Creek, the only real community on the river (three streets, one shop, one church—although there is a little more town up the hill), is connected to the interior of British Columbia by road (see our Adventure Guide to the Alaska Highway for information on getting to or away from Telegraph by road). Not much that was ever supposed to happen at Telegraph ever did. The town was founded to support the telegraph line—it was easily accessible by river, a nightmare to reach by land—and it was, at one time, going to be the next big boomtown. Never happened.

If all you want to do is see Telegraph Creek, Breakaway Adventures, 874-2488, Alaska Vistas, 874-3006, and Alaska Waters, 874-2378, all runs charter trips all the way up, and can help put together a package with lodging, etc. Figure you’ll need three days: one up, one down, one there. Prices start around $700 per person, depending on the boat and what you need, as well as how long and how many people are going. Alaska Waters also has late-season trips that include lodging, starting at $725 for three days/two nights.

Traveling on the Stikine

You have quite a few options for getting onto the river from Wrangell. Our choice, and our choice for the single best thing you can do along the entire coast of Alaska, is to raft the Stikine, from Telegraph down, with Alaska Vistas. They are the only outfitters to regularly run raft trips down the Stikine. For a paltry $2,500—only a bit more than hiring a jetboat just to get you to Telegraph—you get first and last night at a hotel in Wrangell, another night near Telegraph Creek, and six days traveling and camping on the river. Each evening is capped off with the best food you have ever eaten in your life. You travel in a self-bailing river raft, with plenty of time to get out and hike around, enjoy the scenery, and sit back and relax in camp. This is one of the best deals in the state, and the trip’s river time will be some of the best days of your life. Contact them at 874-3006, or check out their Website at www.alaskavistas.com. We have been lucky enough to experience a lot over the 10 years we’ve been writing these books. This is, quite simply, the best thing we’ve done in the North, and there’s no way to recommend it highly enough.

You’ll be happiest in life if you just plan on spending several days on the river. However, should that be impossible, you can still get a taste of it by taking a day trip up from Wrangell. Alaska Vistas, 874-3006, Alaska Waters, 800-347-4462, and Breakaway Adventures, 874-2488, all offer six- to eight-hour jetboat trips up the Stikine from mid-April through mid-October, for around $150. All these trips take in the main channel, Shakes Glacier, and maybe or maybe not a stop at the hot springs. All three operators are good people who’ll show you just how beautiful the river is.

Breakaway Adventures, 874-2488, also has twice-weekly 4-hour trips on the river for only $65. This takes in the same scenery, but in a lot less detail. If it’s all you have time for, or all you can afford, go for it, it’s a great deal. But it will leave you wanting more. Phone or stop in at the Alaska Adventure Reservations shack or in the River’s Edge gift shop for the schedule.

Kayaking the Stikine

Few travelers go up the river past Telegraph Creek. Right past the town is the Grand Canyon of the Stikine, an area with Class IV and V whitewater (Paddler magazine calls it one of the great river runs in the world; National Geographic did the Canyon with the best paddlers in the world, helicopter support, and a huge budget, and they still almost didn’t make it). Below the town, there’s nothing more than Class II, and the very fast current (about five knots) that makes running the river a blast—all 150 miles down to the river’s mouth by the Wrangell airport.

That’s not to say the river is easy. There are snags, sweepers, logjams, changing the current and meaning that you have to pay constant attention to what you’re doing. The river braids and twists, and you could end up detoured way out on a slough. The water is cold, and hypothermia is a constant hazard. We’ve met a lot of people who went out here unprepared and ended up swimming; and most Wrangell jetboat captains who run the river regularly have more than a few rescue stories to tell. Go prepared, or don’t go at all.

You can rent kayaks from Alaska Vistas (874-3006) or Rain Walker Expeditions (874-2549). Both also have offices on City Dock.

Traveling Safely on the Stikine

The main complication of traveling the river is that the channel is never the same twice. Huge amounts of silt are coming down the river, and the soft banks are cut away as the river digs new courses for itself. The lower reaches of the river, in particular, are heavily braided, with as many as 10 or 15 small channels reaching out. No chart can keep up with the river.

In winter, storms howl through the Stikine valley, combining with deep freezes; you can pass acres of trees where the tops have been simply sheered off through a combination of freeze and breeze. This means that, at any time of year, there is a lot of debris in the water, snags and entire tree trunks waiting to reach out and grab your boat. There are log jams and sweepers (trees that extend into the water but are still attached to the bank) that need to be watched for. The lower reaches of the river are tidal, which can cause other problems. Plus, the water is really, really cold. Should you fall in, not only are you going to be dealing with the possibility of hypothermia, you’ve also got to worry about so much silt getting between the fibers of your clothes that it can drag you down before you have time to get hypothermia. The river requires attention and respect; it’s not a simple float.

There is no really fast water on the lower river. There are some riffles, rated as Class II, but nothing at all to worry about. You’re not going to find yourself ripping down uncontrollable whitewater on the lower part of the river (up in the canyon above Telegraph is another matter entirely).

Because of the remoteness of the river and the very few people traveling on it above Shakes, you have to assume you’re on your own when you head out. Be prepared for emergencies. There is enough jetboat traffic running between Wrangell and Telegraph that you can’t go for more than a day or two without seeing a boat go by—unless you’re in one braid and they’re in another. However, even if a passing boat sees you, manners dictate that they just wave and keep on going. They’re not going to stop unless you’re signaling—they don’t want to interrupt your wilderness experience. To the usual first aid kit and emergency equipment, add a good signaling device.

Know what you’re doing. People go into the river, end up swimming (one woman was saved only when her bra strap caught her on a tree branch and kept the current from dragging her under), and when they finally flag down a jetboat, their first words are "Never again." It’s the most beautiful river you’ll ever see, though, as long as you respect it and know what you’re doing.

Camping

Camping on the Stikine is one of the great pleasures of life. There are plenty of wide beaches, sheltered by alder, pine, and spruce. Camp well above the water level—floods are generally seasonal, but anything is possible û and practice all bear safety precautions. We’ve been ashore on very few beaches without bear sign. You can get your water out of the river, but either boil it and wait for the sediment to settle, or filter it. If you’re going to filter, keep in mind what all the sediment is doing to your equipment.

This is a wilderness area. Practice no-trace camping.

Preparing For The Stikine

Anybody can go on the river at any time, although there are a lot of times you wouldn’t want to be out there. No permit is required. The prime season for running the Stikine is May-August. There are heavy spring floods before that, and in late summer the wind begins to howl up the river, making paddling downriver a bit of a nightmare. In winter, the entire thing freezes up.

If you are going to run the river on your own, the put in point is Telegraph Creek. As mentioned above, you can get there by driving in from the Cassiar Highway, or you can hire a jetboat in Wrangell to take you up. You can also fly, but regulations make it impossible for you to fly your boat into Telegraph, unless you can collapse it and fit it inside the plane. Canada no longer allows boats strapped to the outsides of airplanes.

You are renting the entire boat, so if you can find someone to share the ride with, it’ll be cheaper.

Alone, the trip will cost you between $1,000-1,500 to get a jetboat ride from Wrangell to Telegraph. The ride takes about eight hours. Any of the operators who run the river will book a boat for a Telegraph run.

Telegraph is your last chance to stock up on anything and, as there are only two stores, and in both, pickings are thin and expensive. Get what you need before you get to the river.

It’s about three to four days (six hours a day) in a canoe or a kayak to get downriver from Telegraph to the mouth of the Stikine. Obviously, the more you want to get out and explore, the longer it’s going to take.

For however long you plan to stay on the river, remember that you are on your own. You need to be entirely self-sufficient.

Glacier Myths

Native mythology has quite a story about the Great Glacier. It seems that, when they were first moving into the area, they found the river entirely blocked off by the glacier. There was, though, an opening in the glacial face through which water moved. They sent a couple of people up over the ice to see if the water came out anywhere, then sent a log through to see if it made the trip okay. Then they sent the most expendable member of the society, someone’s grandmother. When she got through alive, everyone else decided it was okay for them to follow, and the journey continued.

Accommodations

There are two B&Bs on the river, one just below the Great Glacier, one on Farm Island. There’s no real way to contact them in advance; if you’re interested, just show up, and the odds are there will be room available. There are also six Forest Service cabins on the river, plus another six on the delta, which are not quite as nice in the scenic department but still great places to stay.

Most people plan on their pick up around the Great Glacier. There is a developed picnic site here, and it’s an easy place to tell your ride home where you’ll be. There’s an easy half-hour hike back to the glacier’s pond, with great views of the glacial face and floating icebergs. If you fly over the area, you can see that the glacier once reached much farther ahead; there are two concentric rings, moraines, that show how far up the glacier once moved.

Side Trips From The Stikine

A popular sidetrip on the river—where most of the jetboat traffic from Wrangell is headed—is to Chief Shakes Hot Springs, which is on a slough by the Ketili River. It’s about two miles off the main channel, and at high water levels, paddling up to the spring is quite doable; if the water is running fast, particularly at the mouth of the slough, you can pretty easily line your boat up past the rapids. Once you hit the springs, you’ll find the water is a toasty 122 degrees. There’s an indoor pool (reasonably safe from mosquitoes, but also with no view) and an outdoor pool that overlooks a meadow. On summer weekends, most of the view is likely to be kids from Petersburg and Wrangell and their coolers full of beer.

There is another hot springs on the river, Warm Springs, across from the Great Glacier and just above the Choquette River, marked on many maps, but it has leeches.

Before hitting the river on your own, pick up a copy of Stikine River: A Guide to Paddling the Great River, by Jennifer Voss. It has better coverage of the river above the Grand Canyon than it does below, but it’s great for outlining preparations.

Stikine Conservation

The mere fact that the Stikine River is huge, remote, and fairly pristine means that there are a lot of people who want to do something to it. The additional fact that many of its tributary rivers are rich in coal, gold, and other goodies, means that the Stikine is facing serious threats. It’s the last great undammed river on the continent, but that may not be true much longer.

The Iskut, perhaps the Stikine's main tributary, was the site of mining activities for years—the mine actually just closed between editions of this book. When it was still in operation, you’d see a large plane flying low overhead; it was taking ore out of the mines on the Iskut, two or three loads a day. Before the plane was used, a hydroplane was used, a behemoth that literally killed the river. The turbulence it kicked up in the Iskut entirely changed the river’s habitat, rendering the area largely sterile. Additional silt flowing into the Stikine, where the boat also went, made the river shallower and wider, greatly increasing bank erosion.

The ever-present possibility of the mines on the Iskut reopening are one problem; the huge coal deposit on the Spatsizi is another. There is simply no way to extract it without damaging the Stikine’s downriver flow.

Finally, there have been plans for years to dam the Stikine at the Grand Canyon (above Telegraph Creek). The river depends on regular flood cycles to maintain its equilibrium; without them, the river will die, the fish in the river will die, and the world will have lost another beautiful natural feature just so people can run their hairdryers.

Friends of the Stikine

The Friends of the Stikine have been around for a long time, trying to keep the river alive. They lobby actively for preservation of the river and its headwaters and, while a few of their positions may verge on over-conservation—in Wrangell and Telegraph Creek, there are fears that the FOS is trying to outlaw jetboats, which would cut off Telegraph and send Wrangell’s economy into a tailspin—they are the only ones fighting for the river. Friends of the Stikine, 1405 Doran Rd., North Vancouver, B.C., Canada, V7N 1K1.  604-985-4659. They’re on the web, but they’ve got one of those old-style e-mail addresses. Just put "friends stikine" in your browser. Trust us on this one. It’s a lot easier.

Bringing Back the Dream

Long before the days of jetboats, the kind of ship used on the Stikine were huge riverboats. In the earliest days, sternwheelers that had a small enough draft to make it up past the flats; later, huge ships with tunnel drives and still tiny, tiny drafts.

The last of these ships, the Judith Ann, was running as late as 1969.

And she’s still around. Sort of.

In her prime, the Judith Ann carried 12 passengers and 4 crew between Wrangell and Glenora—just below Telegraph. She did the run in three days uphill, 12 hours coming back down, and she made weekly runs between May and October. A ticket for the ride in 1954 would have cost you $55, and even in 1961, she was a bargain for $70. You’d travel in reasonable comfort in two-berth staterooms, and the views off the railings couldn’t have been better.

The last owner of the Judith Ann decided to bring the boat back to the river. She’d been drydocked for years, but he set up house in it and went to work. When he passed away, his son took on the dream.

Now the son, and the Stikine River Historical Society, are undertaking a nearly half-million-dollar project to fully restore the Judith Ann and have her making trips on the river again. Yes, they could build a new boat easier and cheaper, but it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun. It’s a good dream to have. You can see the boat, still drydocked, about 12 miles out the Zimovia Highway. They’ve also got a great website at stikineriverhistorical.org, with lots of good history on river travel. In town, you can phone them at 874-2664.

It’s the kind of thing that’s worth having back in the world.