August 2022
By Mat Bozek
SUMMARY – for detailed report and pictures, click on this link to get to a google doc. Noatak River Trip Report – Alaska – August 2022
Years ago I’d seen an article by Cliff Jacobson about 5 must do rivers, the Noatak being one of them, and I’d kept it in mind for a future trip. Potentially source to sea”, lots of wildlife, no portages except at the put in, and mostly CII or less (potential for CIII if flooded), and entirely above the Arctic Circle. Some 430 miles from “12 mile slough” to the sea, plus 18 mi of open water to Kotzebue. Decided to do it for my 2022 big trip. For the first time, I would not be going solo, but would have my partner Judy along. Judy is mainly a kayaker, with minimal canoeing experience, but the logistics involved meant we needed a folding canoe – in Alaska, it is illegal to fly a boat on a pontoon. So I bought a Pakcanoe 170 for this and future trips, and also a spray deck for it. If we could keep our entire load, including ourselves under 600 lbs, we could take a Cessna 185 instead of a larger plane, saving us a $1,000 dollars on the flight in. We drove to Alaska, but still had to ship all of our gear by plane, so keeping the weight down would save us money there too. Spent a month and more early in the year working on our gear, and ultimately ended up with 615 or 620 lbs, which they said was ok. The logistics for this trip were the most involved and most expensive of any trip I’ve done. We drove to Fairbanks, shipped most of our gear to Bettles (Brooks Range Aviation) and booked a flight from Fairbanks to Bettles, and float plane from Bettles to the River. At the end of the trip, we would need a flight from Kotzebue back to Fairbanks; getting to Kotzebue would involve either an 18 mile open water crossing, or more likely having an outfitter pick us up by boat at the end of the river – so 3 plane rides and a boat ride. Our bail out plan was to fly back to Kotzebue from Noatak Village.
Not being fond of mosquitos, I’d booked the flight to the river for August 1st, which I hoped would be fewer mosquitos and warmer temps. I also bought a Nemo Bugout screened tarp shelter so we could eat without bugs – 12’x12’ (they were out of the 9×9, but the larger tarp came in very handy later). I also rented a satellite phone in Fairbanks, even though Judy has a Garmin Inreach that she could send messages with or do an sos call, I felt having the capability to talk to someone if we got into trouble was worth the extra expense, as it proved to be.
Our goal was to start as close to headwaters as possible (12 mile slough) and go all the way to Kotzebue if we could. Various sources said that it was a 21 to 28 day trip. I was planning/hoping to do it in 21 days, but we brought 28 days food just in case – we would eat at least one day’s food at Bettles waiting for our flight out. We had to land at “Pingo” instead of 12 mile as the water was too low to land us at 12 mile slough – the pilot said that they hadn’t been able to use it all year. The lake isn’t named on the map, but you can find a pingo marked on it near the small lake. I downloaded and printed out 24 topo maps for the trip. Not a lot of detailed info about the river, it gets only 3 or 4 pages in the Alaska Rivers book, and that in general terms though a few areas were roughly located by mileage. I went thru all my maps and put tick marks every mile, so I would have some sense of where we were. The river was really low and we grounded out on gravel bars a dozen or more times while zig-zagging back and forth to avoid most of them. For every mile downriver by map, we paddled 1 ½ miles by GPS. We would have liked to have had at least 6” more water, and a foot would have been perfect. The river was a little silty, but not too bad and we often filtered water from it.
The upper section is noted to be the most scenic and best hiking, so we took our time at first, using 2 layover days to climb a mountain and sit out a rainy day. What a difference a day or two can make !
Our plan came unravelled the night of day 9 when a Grizzly Bear decided to use our boat for a playtoy and did his best to wreck the boat, breaking the frame in 9 or 10 places and tearing up the bottom of the hull. One big hole in the bow big enough to pass a basketball though, and ripping up the center in multiple places so you could drop a soccer ball through, as well as many more small holes. I’m not sure I could have repaired it without the additional repair materials provided by a group that came down behind us. The repair kit included with the boat was totally inadequate for the amount of damage and the glue was not very good. It took two days to repair the boat enough to float, and without the Bugout tarp to keep it out of the rain, It would have taken longer – we were able to get the boat under the tarp diagonally
so we could work on it – weather was wet and cold then. In any case, we did get it fixed enough to get us downriver to “Cutler Lake” – a mile or two past Cutler River – where we portaged more than a half mile across marshy tundra and willows to a spot that a floatplane could land to pick us up. We did have to wait for 5 days for that plane as they were booked up and would have to squeeze us into their schedule.
It was cold and rainy waiting there, with snow falling on two of the days.
We only made it 150 miles downriver, 200 according to the GPS, for a much shorter adventure than we had planned. On the way back to Denver we detoured to Bowron Lakes to do the canoe circuit as a sort of consolation prize,and the drive to and from Alaska is its own reward.
Our shared costs were about $9,500 which did not include the boat or the Nemo shelter, not any of our meals out. The two flights by Brooks Range Aviation cost $3,771, plus about $1,000 for the 2 flights by Wright AIr; gas for the van was most of the rest – at an average of about $6/gal. Worth every penny.
Mat and Judy