Charley River Packrafting Adventure
It was back to Alaska this summer for another packrafting adventure.
Four of us floated the Charley and Yukon Rivers in Yukon-Charley Rivers Preserve in eastern Alaska.
Our adventure began by flying with Wright Air Service from Circle, Alaska to the remote Gelvin’s Airstrip located on the Charley River. This took two flights in their Helio Courier to get the four of us and our gear into the river.
From Gelvin’s, we first did a side hike up to the crash site of a WWII-era B-24 bomber. The hike was just under 3 miles each way, but required 5 hours to complete due to the fields of wet tussock grass that had to be traversed.
It was humbling to see the actual crash site. Most of the airplane is laying right there on the ground, but parts are scattered all over the place. There was a lot of bent and twisted metal. The resulting fire was obviously intense enough to melt some of the aluminum pieces.
Wreck of B-24 bomber above Gelvin’s Airstrip.
One of the five crew, Lieutenant Leon Crane, managed to survive by parachuting out through the bomb bay doors before the crash. Given that the crash occurred at the start of winter (December 1943), Lieutenant Crane went through quite an ordeal of survival. He initially stayed at the crash site for 9 days, using his parachute as a sleeping bag and hoping that a rescue team might find him. Realizing that wasn’t going to happen, he started hiking down the Charley River and found a fully stocked cabin that had been abandoned for the winter. After staying there to recover for several weeks, he then walked 120 miles through snow down the iced-over Charley and Yukon Rivers to safety. The amazing story is detailed here.
For us, we had the luxury of making this trip down the Charley and Yukon rivers in summer by packraft.
The Charley River starts with 15 miles rated Class III, composed mostly of long boulder gardens. However, low water made this feel much closer to Class II for us.
The rest of the Charley is rated class II. We covered the length of the Charley River in a little over 3 days.
We finished off the last bit of Charley River and began our float down the Yukon on our 4th paddling day. The Yukon is big and relatively fast moving. We did some paddling down-river, but much of our paddling was just shifting laterally to maintain position in the quickest current. We were able to cover 50 miles on this day.
Confluence of Charley and Yukon Rivers.
Our float on the Yukon was in mixed weather. We were lucky to have blue skies or light clouds directly above us, even though there were lightning storms banging away just a couple miles off to our side.
Watching lightning storms as we float on the Yukon River.
That is until our final morning, when we had a lightning storm pass right over camp.
Thunder storm over camp on Yukon River.
On paddle Day 5, we arrived back in Circle by mid-day, where we picked up our rental car to begin our journey back to Fairbanks.
Mosquitoes on this early-August trip were ruthless at Gelvin’s Airstrip and on the hike out to the bomber crash site. This had us nervous about the rest of the trip. But, thankfully, mosquitoes density dropped off as we got further from Gelvin’s. Good mosquito-resistant clothing is highly recommended.
