2 days
Riley, Matt, Isaac and I saw a lot of cool different water colors mixing on this route. Saturday morning we headed to Cantwell. We looked around for the best spot to park, and ended up picking the pizza place, unfortunately we did not get coffee. We hiked up ATV trails for a few miles until it turned to a tundra ridge trail. We then dropped down (maybe a little too far), and made our way up the valley. We found a couple game trails, and this walking was a mix of tundra and small bushes, along a very blue clear creek.
We saw this clear blue water mix with red-ish brown water. Eventually we took a bend left, we saw very brown red-ish water mixing with clear water, also cool. There were some intermixed boulders and snow patches.
We came to this open tundra area before bending up to the pass. We saw caribou here and a nice waterfall. There were flat tundra benches by water, so this would be a nice spot to camp.
We continued on for the sake of not being rushed the second day, and went over the pass. There were some boulders above a nice. It could have been faster to drop to the lake and then go up, but we went above to the left and crossed some snow patches to the top. On the other side it looked steep at first, but there was a nice place to go that cut left. Afterwards there was some loose rocks, where we came to a dead caribou. It was hard to tell what happened to it, it didn't seem like a lot of predators would be up there, but it also seemed weird it would have fallen off something. We followed the center right side down towards some tundra benches, but then the left looked like it had more tundra. We cut to the left down a steeper slope and then followed this tundra. Around the bend and a little straight we found flat tundra near water. This could likely be not dry often, but we were past peak snow melt and the weather had been very dry. Actually, we were able to keep our feet dry through a lot of terrain that looked like it could usually be water logged. Which I was happy about, given I had pulled off some of my toe skin with my day 7 of wet socks a couple weeks prior. Keeping the tape on it dry was really nice. This hiking day was around 12mi.
The next morning we hiked the remaining 4mi to the river. We saw an ATV track in the distance to the left, but ended up cutting a straighter line to river. The last bit was some bushes down to the river, but it was not bad. There were a couple eddies we spotted from above so we aimed for one of those. We ended up coming out at a mini eddie we hadn't seen from above. There was an open area above it to transition. The raft was maybe 15mi, max speed 8mph, average speed 3.3mph, average moving 3.8mph so that raft took us a little over 4 hours. The Jack River color mixing with the Nenana color was also pretty, nice to meet up with rivers from other trips. Probably 3-4 miles after the bridge there were some rapids. We went through both, but we pulled out on the left to look at the second set. Both were portage-able in the bushes.
We pulled out the second to last bend before the river went away from the highway. Could you pull out further down where Carlo Creek comes in and cut up to the pizza place? I hitch hiked while Matt jogged to the car (just in case). One of the owners of Northern Epics guiding company picked me up and then I picked up the others. We made it to pizza 5min before they opened at 5p, before driving back to Anchorage.
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