Northern Exposure: Rafting along B.C.'s Turnagain River

We're going in!" shouted guide Ian Kean as the rubber raft lurched toward swirling waters of a deep hole in the middle of the longest rapid in the Turnagain River of northern British Columbia.

What had been a serene wildlife viewing experience suddenly took on drama and peril. An icy, runoff-swollen river more than 75 miles from the nearest road is a dicey place to have a mishap.

We came close. The Turnagain sucked the raft into waters whirling in a circle beneath a giant boulder. The raft spun around and was swept over another giant rock. More swirling eddies held it in place as waves poured down on six frightened passengers. The tube on one side of the raft was sucked under. On the high side, Al Claney, a 68-year-old retired White Rock, B.C., businessman, found himself paddling thin air.

"High side!" Kean bellowed. Somehow the rafters understood, shifting weight and spinning the craft free of the river's hold.

Pigskin Rapid (named for a football that flew out of a raft during one trip) is normally a modestly demanding Class III rapid. In early June, at peak runoff, the Turnagain's top rapid had turned into a major Class IV challenge.

"It was the most exciting 30 seconds I've ever been in a raft, the biggest hydraulic I've ever put a raft through," Kean said, using rafters' term for a deep hole in which water won't let go of a raft. More white water lay ahead before his rafters could dry off and decompress downstream below Recovery Gap (where that football was retrieved after a six-mile downstream journey).

Fellow guide Patricia Thomson proved a better player of the fearsome Pigskin Rapid. She made a split-second decision to hold the second raft closer to shore. It rode the top of the waves down through the rapid and avoided whirling hydraulics near the center of the river. Passengers were splashed but not scared.

Few people have ever heard about the Turnagain River. Our early June party was only the fourth group ever to raft the river, which flows north and east out of British Columbia's Cassiar Mountains, bound for the Arctic Ocean.

The far north of Canada's West Coast province -- wild, mountainous country that borders the Alaska Panhandle -- offers rivers that are just being mapped and rafted for the first time. Our party included researchers from British Columbia's forest and environment ministries, the Royal B.C. Museum and the Canadian Wildlife Service.

Much of the discovering is being done by The River League, a Vancouver-based rafting outfit headed by Kean and Thomson. In addition to the Turnagain, they are spending this summer on the Jennings River just below the Yukon border, and the Taku River, which pierces the Coast Mountains and empties into an Alaskan inlet near Juneau.

One northern British Columbia river system has gained fame. About 1,800 rafters each year run the Tatshenshini and Alsek rivers at the northwest corner of B.C. They helped persuade the provincial government to cancel a giant mine planned for the valley and create a wilderness park that adjoins America's Glacier Bay National Park.

The "Tat" is fashionable. Its preservation was championed by Vice President Al Gore. River runners have included Canada's retired Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Trudeau is in his mid-70s but is still a white-water enthusiast and expert canoeist.

"The Tatshenshini is no longer a wilderness in my opinion, not with 1,800 people going down it: The grizzly bears don't think it's a wilderness," said Syd Cannings, an entomologist with the British Columbia environment ministry.

Nobody says that about the Turnagain because nobody knows about it. Except for an ugly mine camp at a headwaters lake -- and a hazardous miners' cable hung across the river at one point -- the Turnagain runs through more than 100 miles of completely wild terrain. It joins the Kechika River in a vast watershed that covers 2.4 million acres into which not a single road intrudes.

The first half-hour of our June journey revealed an Eden-like sanctuary of nature. A mother moose, a calf between her front legs, stared at us from the river bank. Canada geese squawked from the next lagoon. Harlequin ducks and a loon scooted past us on the river. Osprey soared overhead. A bald eagle glared down at us from its nest high in a spruce tree.

Our party lapsed into contented routines. I shaved on one bank while a beaver gathered twigs across the river. Rhonda Millikin, a research ornithologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service, used mist-nets to collect and band songbirds. One morning she gently held up an orange crowned warbler to show the egg sticking out of its belly."Wow, it's light," said Darrell Abrahamson, a high school teacher from Prince George, as he weighed the bird.

"They winter in Central America and they come all the way north to the Northwest Territories in summer," said Millikin.

Scientists enhanced our experience. One night in camp, a wolf yowled from a nearby ridge. The yowl was promptly returned by Dave Nagorsen, curator of mammology at the Royal B.C. Museum. A chorus of wolf calls responded, complete with the yipping of pups.

"They like you, Syd," Nagorsen joked as Cannings took up the human side of the yowling.

The wolves left other marks. While hiking, Nagorsen used a stick to pry apart a lump of wolf scat. In its midst was a man's shoelace. Wolves are known to devour lots of things, even shoes, but not their owners.

One day as we broke past the tree line, hiking 2,000 feet above the Turnagain, Nagorsen studied the ridge with binoculars. "Grizzly!" he shouted. Silhouetted against the sky was ursus horribilis, a big male grizzly marching through a domain in which he reigns.

We were to see other grizzlies. The rafts surprised a sow and two cubs as they turned over logs in an old burn. The mother bear's nose rose into the air, she signaled alarm and all three took off with amazing speed.

The Turnagain drains a vast area. Our hikes revealed chain upon chain of mountains, one tributary valley after another, and high lakes too many to count.

The river and its lakes are full of rainbow, lake and bull trout, the latter a species endangered in the "Lower 48." And, amid the profusion of birdlife and tail-slapping beavers, nowhere is fishing more sublime. Our fisherfolk took rafts out until past midnight in the endless light of late spring in the north.

The Turnagain takes its name from the stream's many bends. Its turns hold many surprises. About 11 miles downstream from put-in, the river suddenly enters a short canyon with a tricky little rapids. A tiny shoreline allows rafters to clamber ashore and watch Evelyn's Falls tumble into the canyon.

The rapids reappear at about the 30-mile point. Sixty miles downstream from put-in, the river goes into a large canyon and drops 200 vertical feet in several thunderous waterfalls. Raft trips conclude at a sandbar about two miles upstream, or require helicopter portage around the chasm.

Pioneering a northern river doesn't come cheap. The River League charges about $2,000, a tariff that includes float plane rides to the river and the helicopter portage around the unrunnable falls.The experience is also rigorous. Pampering begins and ends with gourmet meals. Rafters burn off the food by paddling, hiking and assisting with camp chores.

Coastal rivers in northern British Columbia, such as the Taku and Tatshenshini, are visited by prolonged, fierce storms as well as days of gray overcast weather.

Inland, in the Cassiar Mountains, conditions vary constantly. "You get a blast of rain, then sunshine, then winds -- it alternates through the day," said Ken Newman, who grew up in northern B.C. and was conducting a recreational study of the Turnagain.

We were blasted by sleet, hail and (at higher elevations) wet snow. But after 10 days on the river and its lake system, we savored every minute as we waited at Rainbow Lake to be flown back to civilization.

Millikin banded more than two dozen birds on the last morning. "I'm ringin' and flingin,'" she joked. A loon floated serenely just offshore. Cannings, who can converse with both birds and mammals, cupped his hands and called out to it.

In the distance, at that moment, came the drone of the 40-year-old Otter seaplane that would take us out of the wilds. Couldn't it just go away?

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