Copper River Float

One float everyone in the Kingfisher’s Perch family looks forward to in the spring is the 5 to 7 day trip from Gakona in the interior, to Cordova on the coast, via the Copper River. The following description is the best we can do to help you experience this trip until you contact us and book a spot.

The trip starts on one of the tributaries of the Copper River. It takes a few minutes to a couple of hours to enter the Copper depending on where we embark. Entering the Copper River is quite obvious because the water changes from clear to an opaque gray. The majority of the water entering the Copper is laden with silt, washed out from glacial moraine, causing the water to be this way. Particulate matter is so dense that the noise on the bottom of the raft sometimes sounds like bacon cooking in a frying pan!

Early in the trip passengers can expect to see a lot of open ridges covered with new foliage and a variety of wild flowers. They provide an important part of the spring diet of black and interior brown bears (grizzlies). Bears are numerous along the Copper River, and spotting them from the raft is common as they come out on the ridges to eat or along the river to scavenge. Bears are hungry in the spring. Until the moose and caribou start having calves and the salmon run begins, their food is limited to new vegetation which they graze on many hours each day.

Within the first day of the trip wild bison can also be seen along the river. Two separate herds were transplanted in Alaska in the early to mid nineteen hundreds. One of these has taken root on the eastern side of the Copper River, and has been so successful that a limited hunting season has been established for them.

Frequently, KFP guests will spot a large brown body in the brush, and it isn’t clear for a while whether it is a bear, bison, or just imaginative thinking. What an incredible experience!

An hour or two after leaving the bison herd, the rafts will pass under the Chitina-McCarthy Bridge. This is the only bridge in the interior of

Alaska which crosses the Copper River and is one of two vehicle access points into the Wrangell St. Elias Park and Preserve. Having crossed this landmark, the landscape changes dramatically! Silt ridges give way to huge spires of rock, mountains, and the famous Woods Canyon. Goats are right at home in the canyon along the river, and their white shaggy coats are easily spotted. Water in the canyon is shifty and the diversion is welcome to those who fret. In a few minutes, however, the rafts leave the canyon behind, and the river widens again. Occasionally, sockeye salmon can be seen scooting up the shallows or swirling in the slow deep sections close to shore. These are some of the hundreds of thousands of famous Copper River Reds that end up in the individual rivers in the Copper River Basin. From this point on, seals are commonly seen, as they follow their food source (salmon) upstream.

Along both sides of the river, majestic mountains rise steeply, and each day wet heavy snow mixes with rocks and mud to create slurry which seeks the lowest point, and the easiest way to get there. The noise is relentless, and mixed with rushing water around the rafts is not easily forgotten. In reality, most of the sights and sounds on the Copper River are not easily forgotten.

On this trip you will experience many different climates. Because of the long distance traveled, you will see some of Alaska's sand dunes. The Copper River Valley opens up and on both sides of the water there is sand. The dunes roll for miles until the abrupt rising of the Mountains.

Another day’s travel, and the river seems to flow into a freezer as the ice and snow becomes a common sight along the water’s edge. South facing areas, however, are clear and provide camping areas for weary rafters in the sand. After several hours of travel in the “icebox” the river opens up into Miles Lake, a large body of water which is bordered by Miles Glacier. It is through Miles Lake that rafting with huge icebergs becomes a reality. Seals are a common sight now, and they can be seen swimming in the frigid water, heads bobbing along, or resting on ice flows with their freshly caught salmon snacks. As Miles Lake is exited, rafters travel underneath a bridge which, at least for now, is only partly functional because the end of the last section collapsed under tremendous geologic forces generated during Alaska’s “earthquake of 1964”. Most spend little time staring at the bridge, however, because Childs glacier looms just a few hundred yards downstream. Childs is an actively retreating glacier, and the warmer spring weather increases the frequency of enormous ice chunks calving into the Copper River. Rural legend has it that rafters were caught in a wave generated by one of these calving ice chunks and transported nearly 400 yards from the glacier onto the banks on the opposite side of the river.
"Floating under a glacier is one of the most amazing experiences of the trip."

It is so hard to describe, we won’t try.