TATSHENSHINI: Saving a River Wild by Robert Glenn Ketchum
In 1990, I was invited on a 10-day float down the Tatshenshini, a huge river system flowing from Western Canada to the Pacific Ocean that literally divides two of North America's largest national parks, Canada's Kluane National Park and Alaska's Glacier Bay National Park. A gold mine was being proposed mid-river. I broke the story in LIFE magazine. There were many other articles and a book. The mine was never developed and the river is now a wilderness corridor. This is a conservation SUCCESS story!
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
TATSHENSHINI: Saving a River Wild, #115
TATSHENSHINI - Saving a River Wild, #115: Looking back at where we had come from on the previous evening, you can see that there is some open water close to the shore. It is very shallow here, so the larger bergs ground before reaching this point. The ice that is here is small enough that most of it can be pushed around and thus the guides have gone back into the water to pull the rafts through and around the obstacles in these shallows, and get them over to the open water of the outflowing Alsek river below the massive ice jam. Once again our collective camp trudges the gear across the broad beach to where the boats will be reloaded. Having finished that, most of us are pondering our last views of this place and I am marveling that we made it at all. Again, scale fails me, BUT that blue berg is the size of a small house. It, and those really dirty ones on either side, have completely sealed off ANY path through where we past last night. As we would eventually learn, the next six river float groups to follow during the ensuing week had to be picked up by helicopter from the bar where we had our late lunch. There was NO passage through this to the outlet and no one could float on to the airstrip pick-up.
photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2016, @RbtGlennKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd #Tatshenshini @glacierbaynps @Life @Wilderness #WeAreTheWild @nature_AK
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