Savage Paradise

A landmass roughly twice the size of the UK, reaching from British Columbia up above the Arctic Circle, the Yukon is home to some of the wildest and most sparsely populated landscapes in North America. In the east of the territory, where its border forms a perfect right angle with Alaska, the Tatonduk River forms one of its most spectacular valleys. Armed with packrafts and climbing ropes, David Weimer set out to explore the Tatonduk Valley and make a rare descent of its river. This story first appeared in issue 07 of BASE magazine.

‘I don’t even like to fly over that canyon,’ said Dan Reynolds, the bush pilot and hunting guide who was flying me to the headwaters of the Tatonduk River – an obscure ribbon of whitewater I had obsessed over for the better part of two years. The canyon in question was the crux along our paddling objective. It was the reason why people didn’t go there.

Dan owns a massive hunting concession which extends from his cabin near Dawson City, Yukon Territory, all the way to the Alaska border – 6000-square miles of some of the most remote, pristine areas of North America. Our goal, the Tatonduk River, flows directly through it. 

‘I take 12 hunters out a year,’ Dan said. ‘That’s what the land can support.’ As we flew over the area in his Super Cub – a one passenger, supercharged monoplane, with cartoonish oversized tundra tires– I realised that everything below us, the forests, rivers, mountains, all of it, stretching into the horizon – is all Dan’s. And I was a little curious why he had limited his clients to so few. Wealthy, big-game hunters from all over the world want to hunt moose, caribou, Dall sheep, wolves, and even grizzly bear on his concession. A guided moose hunt, for instance, averages $23,000 US dollars per client. With prices like these, Dan’s backyard is a veritable goldmine. However, he didn’t seem to care. His interest lies in game management. ‘It was a hard winter for the Dall sheep,’ he mused. ‘There are half as many as there were last summer.’

Dan has a small cabin with a primitive airstrip on the bank of the Tatonduk. His father owned it before him, along with the hunting concession, and he’s been coming since he was a child. As we neared, I saw a huge trail leading down to a grassy meadow beside the river. It was a game trail, or perhaps a game highway, the Dall sheep had rutted-out over the centuries. This was where the ewes came to give birth. Dan banked the plane hard to avoid the area and startle the animals. The river had recently flooded and took out half the airstrip but Reynolds maneuvered the Super Cub expertly and lands in an area small enough for a helicopter pilot to be proud of. He dropped me off, then flew back to retrieve my two friends, Oliver Amann and Ueli Staub. The plane, as well as the airstrip, is only big enough to fly us in one at a time.

In June of 1980, Jerry S. Dixon was working as a Fire Management Officer for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Eagle, Alaska. He had been a smokejumper – a highly trained wildland firefighter who uses parachutes to access remote and rugged areas. But then he had an accident. Jerry is among the few smokejumpers in history to have survived a double parachute malfunction. Afterwards he had an epiphany. He decided to stop jumping out of airplanes. 

Jerry was the only BLM representative for an immense tract of public land around Eagle. The establishment of Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve had been proposed but not yet implemented, and in Eagle, there was almost unanimous opposition to the park. The idea that the government was now going to control the wilderness and demand permits for things like mining and hunting did not sit well with the residents. Store owners posted signs that read: PARK SERVICE NOT WELCOME HERE.

Although many of the townspeople thought of Jerry as ‘one of the bad guys’, he was outgoing, amicable, and he had something in common with most of the residents: he loved the Yukon wilderness. 

Dixon was also a whitewater kayaker. During this time, he had accomplished a daring, solo first-descent of the North Fork of the Tatonduk River, was mesmerised by the area, and wanted a shot at the South Fork too. This time he implored his paddling friend from Idaho, Ron Watters, to join him in the adventure. Having flown over the South Fork and seen the canyons for himself, Jerry knew there would be some monstrous portages to contend with. The pair decided to use Spezi inflatable kayaks, which were heavy, but easier to portage than the typical 13-foot fiberglass hardshells of the day. The Spezis, however, couldn’t quite fit in a backpack. They also had a nasty reputation for wrapping around boulders, trapping their occupants. Packrafts would have been ideal, of course, but they had yet to be invented.

Jerry described the trip in his book Wild for Alaska. The duo named the many topographical features along the river which I have adopted for this article. Sadly, Jerry died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2010 and I was never able to speak with him about the accomplishment.

The word Tat-on-duk comes from the Hän Athabaskan word which roughly translates to Broken Rock. That might be the best description of the gorge we were about to encounter. Imagine a mountain that has split in half, the entire river forced through the crack. Ron Watters sent me this vivid description of the canyon as he remembered it. 

The walls are smooth and vertical, sometimes overhanging. The water is slow at the beginning and it’s strangely inviting. You can almost hear the Sirens inviting you in. It might be tempting to paddle a short distance – just a short distance – to see what it’s like. But if you did, it would be a black widow’s embrace. You would be there for the duration – however short or long that might be. Once in the gorge there would be no way to climb out from river level. And what might you encounter?  Walls closing in. The river beginning to hurtle downward. Then the black widow herself: a mass of logs forming a narrow spiny plug extending 30 feet or more above the surface of the river.

The ‘spiny plug’ Watters is referring to is every river-runners worst nightmare: a strainer of monolithic proportions. Years of debris piled together to create a natural dam capable of purifying the river of any unfortunate soul brave enough, or dumb enough to get near it. I have paddled a fair share of rivers and have never seen a strainer able to form in a river with such high volume. It was impressive and terrifying at the same time.