Every day of the trip so far we have seen ice in some form along the shore. There have been pieces of lake ice that shatter into crystal like formations when broken and leftover patches of stream ice that sit bright white in a northern exposed hollow of a mountain side and there are the large and increasingly frequent stranded grey river ice slabs that push up on the upstream side of islands and shallow bars. When the frozen river finally breaks up in the early summer it is because of the warming temperatures but also the increasing pressure from the water that flows below that cause the once solid sheet of fracture into pieces that slowly at first begin to flow downstream. It is like a river of icebergs. Often when the entire river starts moving again there are ice jams and also areas where the ice rams up on shore tearing up huge swaths of earth and trees along it's way sometimes eventually finding the head of an island or a sand bar and with the momentum of all the ice behind it, it grinds it's way 100's of feet up on shore. It will sit there covered with silt and sand, sometimes stacked up to twenty feet high in giant stretches along the river that last for a mile or more.
The ice jams are worse. In the town of Eagle that we just past through a few days ago there was a jam of ice in 2009 right in the bend of the river where town is. In just three days the water and ice rose and then fell around most of the towns in the town and village up to a height of 50 feet above normal level and floated many buildings and cars away. Thankfully things look pretty much back to normal in Eagle right now, normal for Eagle that is.
Eagle is a town of 85 residents from the last census data available. Those fine people live down a dead end spur road off of a highway that, although is an international border., closes every day in summer between 9:00 AM and 9:00 PM and in the winter just shuts down completely. They are also a town that apparently refused to allow a cell phone tower to be erected on the hill above it because of the harmful rays that could harm the folks that live there. It is also the town that is the American/Alaskan point of entry to all who come from Canada of the river. When we asked the kind gentleman who was having a roll-your-own-smoke and a cup of joe where the customs office was he said to look for a phone booth next to the closed down laundry-mat. The phone was yellow and had no keypad and it was under a plywood half roof that could have hardly been called a booth. All you have to do is pick up the phone and you are connected to a federal employee working out of the Alaska Highway border crossing about 500 miles away. A few jokes are traded, some numbers read off a passport, wait a little while for their dial up to connect, and we were back in the USA.
Right out of Eagle we entered the Yukon-Charley National Preserve, a stretch of river that is just as remote as any we have come through and arguably more beautiful. Tall rocky cliffs on both sides of the river, angled veins of quartz running up immense rock faces that run straight down to the river, and hardly any trace of human activity. We saw our first brown bear, then another family of wolverines, eagles, falcons, geese, and ducks, a moose woke us up one morning walking heavily through the slough that we were camped in, and the weather was hot. It has been a great run with only a couple of hang ups. A run across a gravel bar chewed up the propeller pretty good, the mosquitoes are hellish once you get into the woods just a little bit, and the Calico Bluff Incident.
I was driving, Jeff was kinda navigating and I thought it would be a good idea to get up close to the sheer cliffs of rock that jutted out into the current. Into and out of trouble fast is what I say and when the propeller locked up on a floating log and the eddy caught us with the wind and we slid five feet from the rock wall before Jeff cleared the log free and lowered the engine and I started it back up and in a moment it was just a memory. The way the river lulls you into feeling that everything passes slowly can quickly get shattered when your boat is spinning in wind and current that close to shore.
This stretch is also notable for all the fantastic cabins along the way. We have stopped at dozens of falling down historic roadhouses and telegraph offices and cabins so far but along this part of the river are some real nice old log cabins that are left open and are there for the taking. It is an Alaska tradition that remote cabins are left unlocked with dry firewood and provisions available to all who need it. All that is asked is that the cabins are left clean and locked back up with the bear protection shutters closed. (usually plywood with nails protruding every 6 inches) We never slept in one of these cabins (yet) but always enjoy pulling up and resting and looking around a perfectly sited log cabin with a view along the river.
Tomorrow we hit the town of Circle, Alaska, population 116. I hope there is a cell tower or internet there. Who knows.