I’ve visited many parts of the 470-kilometre Copper River in Alaska, but wanted to see the last 160 kilometres that starts in Chitina, a ghost town from copper mining days with 23 year-round residents, to Cordova, a fishing town on the Pacific.
The Copper River is in the Wrangell - St. Elias International Park on the border of Alaska and the Yukon. It’s the largest international park in the world and a UNESCO world heritage site with nine of the 16 highest peaks in North America.
The seven-day rafting trip, with four guides from Copper Oar Rafting and nine guests, felt like a floating dream past glaciers, waterfalls, multiple rivers feeding in to the Copper, sand dunes, icebergs, and rapids. The braided river travelled at 19 kilometres per hour. Grizzly prints greeted us at each campsite. One of the guests caught a sockeye salmon, which was filleted, cured with lots of freshly squeezed lemon, cut into little sashimi strips, and eaten within 45 minutes of being caught.
This is the only fish I saw. The Copper is so silty, with a milk-chocolate colour, that I could only imagine all those thousands of sockeye under our rafts. To get an idea of the amount of silt, consider that more sediment moves down the Copper River in one day than down the Mississippi River in one year!
Our guides were in their 20s, two women and two men. They were strong, humorous, good cooks, attentive, excellent on the oars, and exceptionally personable. Laughter and riddles entertained us around the campfire each night. We met as strangers, and the magic of the river united us all by the time we reached the Pacific Ocean.
