Canoeing in Alaska, Part II
We expanded our love of canoe camping when we discovered the Swan Lake Canoe Trail in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge on the Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage. The canoe trail was a system of both lakes and rivers to combine in various routes. It was further off the highway than the smaller trail system we’d used, and it was full of not only moose but also bear.
The nearby Kenai River is an extremely popular fishing river for when the salmon come upstream to spawn. I’d gone there with friends and slept in the truck to get up and fish shoulder to shoulder with 100 of your closest friends. No thanks! The canoe lakes and trails were much quieter.
We would cross several lakes in getting to Gavia Lake, where there was an island in the lake with a campsite. It was like a magical kid’s book come true. I’d read such a book about a secret camp in an island in a river. We knew some folks who would go there over Memorial Day weekend in a large group and party. They would even have someone carry in a keg of beer a few days ahead, and they would play music. Again, no thanks. But, it alerted us to this spot which was ideal when paddling in on a quiet weekend. We also upgraded from our 80 pound polyethylene canoe to a 49 pound Mad River Explorer in Kevlar. A smooth and beautiful green canoe with natural ash seats and gunwales.
An awesome part of going to this area was our encounters with moose. We once followed a pair of swimming moose across a wide lake. This lake system has a couple water portages, which were narrow canals between the lakes. We had several encounters with moose along these water portages. Once, we had to wait a while for a mother and child to move out of the water before we could continue. Like bears, you don’t want to mess with a mother moose. The scarier thing to me was the human we ran into with a huge pistol strapped to his hip.
We did get a bit of a fright one time by surprising a moose we couldn’t see until we were right on top of it. He stood up and we tried to very slowly back up. We were all startled, and he ambled off into the weeds. We also woke to a couple of moose on our little island one morning. They were cool.
We thankfully did not encounter any bears, but you could definitely smell them and see their droppings on the portage trails. We hoped they wouldn’t swim to the island, and we actually canoed to the shore and cooked in a separate campsite to keep food smalls aways from our tent site. We had an orange Eureka tent, and I remember waking up to a beautiful orange glow in the morning. I always slept really well in that tent.
The biggest downside of camping in Alaska is mosquitos. Giant mosquitos. They were worse, as I recall, in the other trail system up north. We would go just canoe around the lake in the daytime, for fun and to avoid the mosquitos. Sometimes, we would pretend to fish. Sometimes, you just had to hole up in the tent because you couldn’t avoid the mosquitos.
All in all , though, loon calls, paddling silently across a lake and sleeping in a tent were just great. !