This summer, with Fort Lewis College alumni and a current FLC history student, seven of us canoed Birch Creek, which is one of Alaska’s wild and scenic rivers east of Fairbanks. We paddled for 6½ days and 111 miles and saw no one.
I’ve never been immersed in wilderness for a longer time nor been more conscious of the need to wear bear spray because of grizzly bears. The Alaska state bird is not the mosquito, but when you move away from a river corridor, off cobblestone gravel bars and into adjacent thick vegetation, ’skeeters arrive in squadrons.
FLC graduates Anthony and Becky Reinert from Anchorage, organized the trip and Daniel Frauenhoff, a current FLC history major, flew with me from Durango to Fairbanks. We were paddlers together in a vintage green 17-foot-2-inch-long Old Town Tripper canoe. He’d never paddled rivers before, and neither of us had ever experienced the tight turns and downed spruce trees that continually blocked our passage the first few days. We played pinball in canoes. Time and again we hit fast current, moved quickly toward the eroding bank of Birch Creek and then had to duck to keep from being clobbered by a downed tree branch.
If the water was too fast and dangerous, we’d get out and line our boat hanging on to fore and aft ropes. Never before had I canoed wearing Muck Boots, but those rubber boots stayed on us along with the bear spray we wore on our hips. To practice for a wild Alaska river, we canoed across Lake Nighthorse. I know that probably wasn’t the best training opportunity, but I needed a powerful stroke in the bow of the boat and Dan certainly had that. He’d worked as a firefighter on the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad shoveling 5 tons of coal a day.
Then, there was the tricky business of choosing the right river channel. One day I chose the wrong one. As it got narrower and narrower, in front of us was a log jam. Yelling, shouting, we backpaddled as fast as we could but we still almost hit it sideways, rocking the venerable Tripper and almost capsizing. But we were able to stabilize the boat, the cold Alaska water was not deep, and I stepped out of the canoe filling both Muck Boots with Birch Creek. We were able to scoot around the log jam and line the boats 30 to 40 yards downstream.
Evenings, we had camp cuisine cooked by Anthony and Becky and plenty of time to talk around fires expertly started by Anthony’s father, Mark. As we scanned both shorelines looking for grizzlies, we saw moose and beavers. On the water, we were able to get close to eagles perched on branches.
At FLC, where about 45% of our students come from Indigenous communities, our second-largest Native group are Alaskan Natives. A summer mini-grant from the School of Arts & Sciences covered some of my trip expenses because I planned to research and learn more about rural Alaska. Many of our Alaskan students choose to write about their home along with researching laws such as the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (1971) and the Alaska National Interest Land Claims Act (1980). For Alaska Natives, these federal laws are as significant as historical treaties are to FLC’s Native American students.
I spent time at the Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center in Fairbanks viewing exhibits and studying government documents. Dan and I also enjoyed the University of Alaska’s Museum of the North with its displays of Native and village life and interpretive panels on historical events such as the forced removal of Aleuts from the Aleutian Islands during World War II.
But on Birch Creek’s stony beaches, what we talked about during the long evenings – sunset came at midnight and sunrise at 3 a.m. – was Alaskan subsistence and living off the land by fishing and hunting. Anthony Reinert and his friend Melody “Mel” Buhr, one of our canoeists, both work for Food Bank Alaska. They have firsthand knowledge of how quickly things are evolving in the bush because of climate change. For villagers in more than 200 Native villages from the rainforests of southeast Alaska to small communities above the Arctic Circle, it is becoming increasingly difficult to live off the land by fishing and hunting. Alaska Natives catch and shoot what they need with a little extra to trade, but climate change is upsetting wildlife and fish patterns that have lasted for millenia. It hasn’t been this warm since the end of the Pleistocene, 9,000 years ago.
Permafrost covers half Alaska’s interior and it is melting, creating sinkholes and mud and slush instead of cold ground, snow and ice. Higher utility prices and already high rent make for food shortages in a family’s monthly budget in the largest towns of Anchorage and Fairbanks. The villages now face fire seasons; salmon canneries are closing; animals change migratory patterns; and with ice melting earlier, traditional hunting methods are imperiled.
For villages along the Yukon River, the salmon is so depleted that it’s only been legal to fish once in the last decade. A century ago, the Yukon had five separate salmon runs. The ice pack used to provide a buffer for winter storms but now as storms increase in severity into Category IV typhoons, coastlines erode. Melting permafrost destroys traditional pit freezers for food storage. Fish camps, hunting camps and boats have been lost. Two dozen communities will be forced to move hundreds of miles inland but there are no firm relocation plans and few federal dollars.
These were heady facts to ponder as we massaged sore muscles after strenuous days of paddling. We were deep in Alaskan wilderness in the 1.2 million-acre Steese National Conservation Area yet we learned that a full subsistence lifestyle is no longer possible. Whaling communities need sea ice and Anthony told us, “Without solid ice it’s hard to get whales near boats and harvested.”
In remote villages, melting permafrost is destroying pipes, upsetting house foundations and literally moving cabins as the land ripples and changes shape. Across Alaska, the reduction in sea ice and melting permafrost are permanently altering traditional lifestyles. The boreal forest may become shrubs. What will happen with the migratory caribou? How will the bears fare? What does a warming world mean for moose?
Climate change may even impact the famous Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. “Low snow cover makes the trail conditions too precarious,” writes Bill Sherwonit in “Iditarod: The Great Race to Nome.” He adds, “Arguably, Alaska has seen more impact from a warming climate and shifting seasons than any other state. Rivers that used to be reliably frozen from November to May are now breaking up in the middle of winter.” The most comprehensive look at climate change comes from Gwich’in elders in the book, “The Gwich’in Climate Report.” They reflect on decades of subsistence hunting, fishing and observing nature. Elders add Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge to modern science.
In the Gwich’in language Birch Creek is the Ikheenjjik river. We paddled from scrubby spruce into a world of birch trees, from a narrow creek three canoes wide to a swollen river. At Beauty Peak, the Ikhhenjik turned north across Yukon Flats and as the current slowed mosquitoes swarmed to greet us. After paddling 111 miles, we took out at the Lower Birch Creek Wayside, and the wild river entered Native and Native-selected lands. We removed our mud boots and our bear spray. Our wilderness journey ended where a gravel road came down to the wayside. In winter, Birch Creek ices over and it becomes a frozen route for snowmobilers, hunters, and the Yukon Quest dog sled race, but for how much longer?
Andrew Gulliford is an award-winning author and editor and a professor of history at Fort Lewis College. He can be reached at gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu.
