Wild River Fish • August 2010 • Trip Report

On August 12, 2010, eight friends loaded into tiny float planes and flew into Ongivinuk Lake, located in the remote Togiak NationalWildlife Refuge in southwest Alaska. They were out to raft and fish the Ongivinuk River to its confluence with the Togiak River, an adventurous trip to be sure, but not much different that any of the hundreds of trips similar to this which are completed each year. What was different was that, out of the eight participants, two were paraplegics, two were amputees and one was legally blind.

The trip was the brainchild of Mark Rutherford and Malcolm Daly who had met at a film festival in 2008 and hatched the plan while wading for Rainbows in the Frying Pan River. After Erik Weihenmayer, totally blind, summited Mt. Everest and Mark Wellman, a paraplegic, climbed El Capitan, there was little reason that a group of people with disabilities couldn’t put together a first-rate wilderness adventure. Our idea was to gather a group of like-minded individuals with disabilities who would do whatever it took to plan, organize and participate in a real adventure.

We first organized a trip down the Nayoruru River in the Togiak in 2009, a river that had seen little sport fishing activity because, to get to it, you had to portage a mile over the tundra and through the alders just to get to the river. That’s a big deal for most groups of fishermen but to a group which included a paraplegic and an amputee, it’s huge. We signed up Vijay Viswanathan, a paraplegic and Malcolm Daly, an amputee, as well as Kate Rutherford, Karen Daly, Alex Rutherford, Mikey Schaefer and Richard Voss. Everyone on the trip had a proven track record in the outdoors and we knew that if anyone could pull this trip off, it would be this group. The entire team worked tirelessly to help Vijay do what he couldn’t: negotiate through the incredibly difficult Alaskan bush. While he could get his wheelchair through almost any terrain where you could negotiate a mountain bike, the hummocky tundra, thick alders and the rushing streamlets braided around the river required help. We sledged him in an inflated raft where we could and then backpacked him through and over the thick and steep stuff.

Once on the river, the terrain got easy for Vijay with perfect gravel bars to negotiate, the fishing got good, the weather stabilized and the rest of the trip was terrific. When Vijay wasn’t fishing, he was setting up tents, chopping wood, cooking over the open fire or washing dishes. We depended on his participation just as much as he depended on us to help him with the portage. More than a success, the 2009 trip inspired us further and gave us the confidence to put together trip for 2010.

Once the 2010 team landed at Ongivinuk Lake we started landing fish. Kitt Daly was the first and had a nice Sockeye on the line within minutes. Off to the side Larry and Wayne were teaching Nicole how to cast a fly rod from her chair and in short order she had hooked up with a nice Grayling. In the meantime the rest of the crew assembled and loaded up the rafts so we could begin the float. Because of our late arrival we made camp just a mile or two down river on a nice gravel bar on river left. Setting up the first camp is always a project and we split up into tent teams, kitchen teams and latrine teams so the first camp went up rather smoothly. That night we fished late into the evening and everyone caught lots of Sockeye, Grayling and ‘Bows.

We woke to a smattering of rain hitting the tents but it stopped in short order so we were able to dry out easily. Oatmeal and dried fruit chased down with coffee started our engines and we got out for a quick fish before we broke down camp and headed downriver. It was a lovely float with the sun chasing rain showers chasing the sun while the passengers in the rafts kept their lines in the water and the landing nets full. Camp was on a beautiful gravel bar that was easy for the wheelchairs to negotiate and dinner was fish tacos loaded up with freshly caught Dolly Varden.

Our goal for the next day was to reach the confluence of No Lake Creek and the Ongivinuk. The fishing there was rumored to be superb and everyone was looking forward to a two-night stay there. We battled out way downriver though wind, rain showers and mist, eventually making camp on a huge gravel bar at the confluence at around 7:30 pm. Little did we suspect that that day’s weather was a tiny taste of what was to come. We set up camp on the highest parts of the bar, 2-3 feet above river level, and made sure everything was staked down securely and the tents pitched taut. The fishing was slow that evening, even though we were supposed to be at the best fishing on the river. Maybe the fish knew something we didn’t?

The storm slammed into us early in the morning, waking all of us up and flattening our tents to the point where we had to brace them with our hands and bodies from inside. Everyone rallied and reinforced the tents, staking out all the guy-lines and switching tiny aluminum stakes out for deadmen. Two rafts were conscripted as wind barriers for the Parawing tarp and everything that was strapped down, weighted or clipped in was battened down securely. The rain poured down in sheets powered by gale force winds strong enough to pick water right up off the river and hurl it at us. Huddled under the ‘wing and holding onto the poles so we wouldn’t blow away, we estimated the winds at 60-70mph.

At 10:00am we noticed that the river was rising and had lost its beautiful clarity. Mud, debris and small trees were washing into the river and turning this normally tranquil river into an angry torrent. At 1:00pm the river was rising at more than an inch an hour and we started thinking about escape. First we searched for higher ground on our bar to which we could move. No such luck: if the river kept rising we’d be flooded out. Then the tents started to break despite the heroic staking-out job we had done. Broken poles sticking out of a $450 mountain tent is a sad sight and a clear warning that this storm meant business, so we began to plan our evacuation. By now, what had been low spots in our gravel bar were flowing river channels. Everything went back into their respective drybags which were lined up, ready to load into the rafts. Taking down the tents required planning and teamwork. With the high winds we were having it took at least four people to strike each tent: each person kept one hand on each corner and used the other to de-rig the poles. We found we could keep them the driest by pulling the poles out when the fly was still on then rolling the whole thing into itself. One set of poles got bent pretty badly but overall it went well. Then it was all hands on deck for the ‘wing. The upwind side was buttressed by the two rafts so we pulled the huge flapping ‘wing off the top first, stuffed it into its bag, then carefully laid the rafts over hoping they wouldn’t blow away.

At 6:00pm we loaded into the rafts and were chased down the river by 60-70 mph winds. At first we had the people in the front of the rafts hunker down to present a lower profile to the wind but, because of the high stack of gear on the back, the rafts would tend to weathervane terribly despite all our efforts at control. Our goal was to make it to a native allotment cabin that was marked on the map, 6 miles downstream. We ricocheted down the river to the cabin in less than two hours, pulling out at a grassy bench that was about two feet above river level. We unloaded and carried everything and everyone up a slippery otter trail, hauled the rafts up on to the bench and tied them securely to the alders lining the banks. Ascending this bit of trail was the only time during the entire trip that the paraplegic women had to be carried anywhere!

If you remember the school bus where Chris McCandless (Into The Wild) lived out his last days, you have a good idea of what this cabin was like. Pounded up out of  4’ x 8’ sheets of plywood, it was a classic trapper’s shack, complete with cracked windows, a leaky ceiling, a rusted out barrel stove that we didn’t dare to light, a pantry filled with very suspect food and a couple of sad-looking cots. But it was our home for the night and we made do.

At 8:00am the next morning we were awoken by voices outside. We would have been less surprised if a bear had knocked at the door. A group had landed at the lake just after us and was not even slightly prepared for the foul weather: they had been flooded out of their gravel-bar camp at four in the morning. They put on the river in the dark and floated down because they had no other options. They didn’t know about the cabin: they were simply floating on hope, and they got lucky. Three of the four were wearing neoprene wetsuits and summer sandals and by the time they got to us they were shivering through the early stages of hypothermia. We warmed them up with coffee, tea and oatmeal, got them dried out and helped them, via Sat-phone, arrange for a pickup on the Togiak River, another 4 miles downstream.

By the time we had cleaned up after breakfast the storm had abated and the skies had started clearing. Taking advantage of the mellow weather, we spent a few hours exploring the old cabin’s surroundings (we found an old, flattened outhouse that still had a toilet seat!), picking blueberries, drying clothes, making photos and planning the rest of our trip.

Given the sad state of our tentage, the unknown duration of our good weather and the willingness of our pilot to pick us up that day, we made the tough decision to shorten our already brief trip. Humping all the gear and the women down the hill to the rafts was a slippery ordeal and everybody went down at least once. We had hauled the rafts up on to the grassy bench the night before and that morning discovered that the bench was now under 18” of water. The river had come up another three feet since we landed! Good thing we tied them up.

The rest of the day was comparatively uneventful. We floated down to the confluence of the Ongivinuk and the Togiak and found that the gravel bar that is the usual pickup point was under three feet of water so we continued down another few miles until we found a suitable bar.  On the way we passed a native family pinballing downriver in a boat with a broken engine and no control so we gave them a spare oar and shepherded them down to our pickup point. The river at this point was madly swollen and full of storm detritus. Large pieces of driftwood, clumps of sod and bank moss were the most common but occasionally, and frighteningly, we would come upon an entire tree rolling downstream. These would disappear into the murky river only to rear up randomly at unsuspecting moments. All we could think of was the possibility of one of these coming up swallowing a raft. Or the floatplane. Yikes!

We had survived the worst summer storm in Alaska that anyone can remember in 60 years. We’d been dumped on with 16” of rain in 14 hours. The rivers had come up four feet and the winds howled at 70mph. But we’d survived, proudly, in style and with our spirits and humor intact. We’d done it by working as a team, drawing deeply upon the wide range of outdoor and survival skills that were distributed throughout the group and, importantly, treating every decision as if it was the last decision in our lives.