Days 3 and 4: Kantishna

I have decided to combine the reports of the 3rd and 4th days of the trip, because of extensive bus travel and these are the least documented in photos due to the wet weather.

On the night of day 2, we all rigged for night time rain. The weather looked like it might get bad over night, but other than a little bit of rain and some wind we came through the night pretty dry. As the previous morning, I ate a quick breakfast of oatmeal and granola, and broke camp quickly. This morning though I set to hydrating while purifying water for the day's travel.

Shortly before departing camp I happened upon what appeared to be a big porcupine. This all occurred by accident, when I heard a sort of hissing sound and saw this mound of creature. Now, I have seen porcupines before; on the Bowron Lake circuit I saw one swim across a lake and he was pretty small. About the size of a opossum, but with all the prickly porcupine bits. This guy was much different. Big, he was sitting, kind of coiled up looking, like he might jump, and looked to be in a ball about 2.5 feet across. He was all black too. Judging from the sounds he had made and the way he watched me I am guessing he wasn't all that friendly. With this in mind and the fact that he has all these pointy little quills that I didn't care to come into contact with I gave him a wide berth. I tried to capture some pictures, but they all came out pretty poor. The best is shown on the right.

On leaving camp we headed south along the main branch of the Toklat River. Walking along the bed, we had to cross many braids of the river. This was all glacial and (as could be guessed) quite chilly, but we never saw much water higher than knee high, so all in all the crossing was uneventful. We made it to the Toklat Visitor Center around 1pm. This is where me and Zach bid farewell to Mark and caught the bus to Kantishna. Before Kantishna, we stopped at the Eielson Visitor Center, which is where I snatched this photo of two moose skulls. Apparently these bulls got interlocked during the rutting season where they challenge each other for mating rights. One got a fractured eye socket and both eventually became critter food.

It was here at the Eielson Visitor Center that the weather really started heading south. Eielson looked amazing. I'm really hoping to get some exploring done out here. I've got a cool multi-day hike that would be fun through here, but my split days off at my crappy job may prevent that. Below are some pictures from Eielson.

Kantishna is a district near the end of the park road. Kantishna was originally a mining town (a "not so successful" mining town as the bus driver Scott would say), which was used to explain the presence of abandoned cars, barrels, equipment, and junk. The weird thing is that all of this stuff was of 1970s build and later. Most of it looked pretty functional, not rusty or covered in weeds or anything, which gave the area the feeling of a functioning deep-backwoods redneck village. There was an outhouse even. We didn't stick around long, nor did we take pictures. This place was far creepier than seeing a bear on our ridgeline.

We disembarked from the bus at Eldorado Creek, which is only a couple of miles from the very end of the park road. We hiked through a steady drizzle and with full rain gear on we spotted a trail up a nearby hill to the south of the park road. After getting past the redneck village, we failed to meet up with this trail, but liked the idea of going up the Eldorado Creek. This turned out to be one of the most fun portions of the entire four days!

Moving up Eldorado Creek we found there to be a bit of a road or path (possibly for horses) that was broken up by the creek frequently. This required us to find ways across the creek, often hopping from stone to stone to get across. We did this for a mile or two. It was great, the red rocks of the creek, steep tundra hills to the left, and steep rocky walls to the right provided a beautifull setting for some exploration reminiscent of being a kid again.

We eventually got to a spot where the tundra hills on the left weren't so steep, so we found our path and began climbing. We were immediately met with the welcome sight of ripe blueberries and the unwelcome sound of mosquitoes buzzing. The hills were covered in thick, soft moss that gave anywhere from 4-10 inches when you stepped on it. I looked forward to sleeping on it, but that would be many mosquito bites from now.

We climbed the hill slowly swapping between eating blueberries, hiking up, and looking for clear-ish, flat-ish land for a camping spot. This wasn't easy. For one, clouds had moved in and the hill we were standing on was only visible for another 200-300 feet higher, which wasn't far. For two, there was a lot of willow brush everywhere. With the memory of "that area looks clear" from yesterday's campsite finding, we were skeptical of any site seen from a distance of over 300 yards. As we explored the hills connected to the one we were on we were pretty well disappointed with our prospects.

We eventually bushwhacked through a small valley and found a decent site. I say decent because the the site had two large negative aspects. The first was that it wasn't too flat. We both ended up in a feet down sleeping position and more than once I found that in the night I had slid down to the foot of my tent. The second negative aspect, and this is a biggy, is that this site by far had the best blueberries of any we had seen to that point. Not wanting a close encounter with a bear, but wanting to eat and get to sleep (it was getting late, past 10pm if I remember correctly) we slept with bear spray close at hand, picked as much of the blueberries as possible, and stored our packs (with the picked blueberries) over 100 yards from our site.

This turned out to be adequate as we had no bear encounters. We decided the night before to forego breakfast for a couple of reasons. The reasons being that we wanted to conserve water due to the fact that the creeks we were near are contaminated with heavy metals, we wanted to conserve time to catch the early bus out of the park, and we had some snacks to tide us over until we got a long enough bus stop to cook breakfast (this would be at Eilson).

We broke camp early and after finding the trail from the night before made it to our Eldorado Creek crossing near the bus stop in record time. Unfortunately we needed this extra time. Zach lost some wet footwear and his bear spray during a mild fall on the trail down (it was muddy), but he was able to backtrack and get them, while I munched on a 2 of my 3 granola bars :)

We caught the bus and began the 65 mile drive out of the park. About two miles after getting on the bus we saw this moose, which was neat. It would have been neater if he would have stood up. Then we ate the most amazing oatmeal at Eilson Visitor Center. We added the blueberries from the day before and devoured the oatmeal in probably about a minute flat. Amazing!

We got back to the Wilderness Access Center at around 3pm. Here I bid Zach farewell. It looked like he had acquired a trip back to Anchorage pretty quickly. This was good, because we were a little worried about how hitchhiking would go for him, considering he was soaking wet and without a shower in over four days :)