4 days
While Sara, Charlotte, Kelly and I were driving up from Anchorage the weather looked better towards Eureka, so we decided to start there since the direction we travelled was a toss up. I've had great luck avoiding car shuttles and hitch hiking or making trips loops the past couple years, but we did take two cars (at least it was only 2 hours away). We started in clouds along ATV trails up to Belanger Pass with pretty fall colors. We walked along ATV tracks and saw motor homes in the middle of no where, trash, some random old equipment, I was surprised how much trash was out here. Originally when we had "drawn" the route on Gaia it grabbed the "tracks" that are on Gaia. These don't follow the ATV tracks. Does anyone know how to access the ATVer’s track data base? Where do they share their information??
We cut up from the river around 10 miles, for a break from the river ATV track. We intersected with an ATV track that looked like it went to the cabin we had seen along the creek. This ATV track meandered around 3mi down to the river again. We saw a track going off to the right but I'm not sure if it cut over to Caribou Creek. When Alfred Creek was about to meet Caribou Creek, the trail along the river looked pinched. We went down a little further and found a social game trail up to the right that we followed. Eventually it came to private property that we avoided, and then took an ATV track up the hill towards Caribou Creek. We got off this track and walked over towards Caribou Creek where we found another ATV along the creek bed, we camped here after around 16 miles of walking. The nice camera type pictures are from Kelly.
The next morning we slept in and woke up to rain. We started walking along the ATV track up the creek. After around 5mi we followed it up the hill. From above we were glad we had gone up, because it looked like the creek got pinched. The ATV track turned up to follow above Chitna Creek. We saw the usual trash like an old bathtub, backhoe, containers (what are people doing out here?). This part of the trail was lovely and we had snow dusting and colors. We found a good spot to cross Chitna and walked through some bushes towards Chitna pass, and then found a game trail. Overall the day had low rain after the morning, but it started to rain/snow and we saw snow on the ground around us. We stopped around 4300 in a clearer patch after 11.5 miles to avoid camping in too much snow. This day we saw around 25 moose! We saw a couple pairs, a group of 8, and a group of 10. Kelly also almost stepped on a snowy owl in the tundra that flew up right in front of her.
Lots of snow overnight and then it got clear and cold. The next morning the sun hit early and it was super warm, it felt like April vibes with the snow and sun. We continued up to the pass and then continued down the left side of the pass, into a creek gully and then crossed to the right side.
We found a super nice game trail going down the right side. In hindsight, we would have tried to stay to the right of the creek or maybe higher to the right and then connected with the game trail. The right was also snow free compared to the left north facing slope.
The game trail took us all the way down to Boulder Creek bed. The fall colors on south faces and snow on north faces after a fall snow fall is my favorite, it was gorgeous! We saw a herd of caribou up here, and then a single caribou as well. Hopefully he was doing okay in his social life. We continued down Boulder Creek for a few miles and then found a very established camp, stopping after 14mi of walking. Even though we only saw 3 ATV groups, one at the very beginning, one at the very end, and one from above on Boulder Creek we could imagine how busy it is during hunting season.
Day 4 we got up earlier. Our shoes were frozen for the second morning in a row from being wet and then cold overnight. We started hiking in our socks and crocs and then I actually just kept mine on the entire day (in all terrain mode of course). We followed ATV tracks again, staying left in the creek bed. There was an option to go up high or cross the creek. We crossed the creek but it was very cold without the sun hitting for a few more hours, and it looked like the high game trail along the edge came down pretty quick. We connected to ATV trails and up (Purinton Creek trails?). We saw 3 moose and a large group of swans with grown children this day. In hindsight we should have parked at the closer turn off, but we followed the trails to the pull out we had parked at that was further for 11 miles this day. There are so many traverses I want to do in this area, specifically during the second and third week of September colors, and not enough time!
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