3) Winter Rivers

Alaskan Rivers are fascinating in the winter. Not all freeze, and those that do, do so quite differently. Back home, my house is about 200 yards from the Kenai River as it approaches Soldotna.  The lower stretch freezes more often than not, although it is rare for the section above Skilak Lake to solidify.  Several years ago, a winter ice damn broke in the mountains when it was 20 below 0 F.  The massive release of water froze into a river of ice that didn't quite move at a glacial pace.  It slowly, but visibly, tore through the lower Kenai toward Soldotna and scoured the banks. Metal walks were twisted and ripped out of pilings.  Boat docks and shore-side outbuildings splintered and were carried down in the jumbled ice. There was talk of setting off explosives down by Slikok Creek to break up an ice jam that clogged the ice upstream.

In the lower Kuskokwim Delta, I've lived along the Johnson River in Kasigluk Akiuk and Nunapitchuk.  It was my first experience water-skipping a snowgo.  The packed snow down the mid-channel trail would gradualy become submerged in overflow and melt water.  Locals would take ice augers and drill holes in the remnants of the dry surface and eventually the still solid mass of ice below the wet would float to the surface.  To access the now-floating trail, one had to skim a snowmachine across open channels. There was a short period when you could see boats and snowgos on the river.  As skiffs needed to cross the ever thinning ice trail, the pilot would gun the boat's kicker and slide the bow up on the ice while simultaneously pulling up the prop. The boat driver, and any passengers aboard, would then jump out and slide the skiff across the strip of ice, jump back in and take off.  All the while, snowgos would water skip to the ice and speed away on the floating trail.

Tree years ago, the Kasigluk Senior Prom was held on the Akula side of the Johnson. Students and teachers from Akiuk, dressed in their village finest under snowsuits, hopped in wooden freight sleds behind snowgos and skipping across to the ice trail on one of the last days that it possible to do so.

The Kuskowim River becomes a highway in the winter. A strip gets plowed every now and again and tractors, trucks, cars, snowgos, walkers and the occasional skier travel between villages.  A reality-show film crew, pushing the breakup window, nearly got stranded in Napaskiak last year as their rented 2wheel drive sedan almost couldn't make it up and down the slushy bank.

Here in Tuntutuliak, the Kinak River, a tributary of the Kusko  is some 25 miles from the bay.  The elevation of the tundra here might be 6-8 feet above sea level and like the rest of the delta, there is scant dryish land.  Bering Sea tides reach far upriver and change the characteristics of the Kinak throughout a winter's day.

In January and early February when most of Alaska was gripped by a severely frigid air mass, the incoming tide created jagged pressure ridges parallel to the bank. It was a plate tectonic visual as shelves of ice shimmied some four to six feet  high above the shore ice.  Overflow seeping up through cracks instantly froze in brownish rounded mounds.  In the main river channel, perpendicular cracks, formed like escalator steps to allow for the rise and fall of the subsurface fluid tide. On walks, I could feel the vibrations of the expanding and contracting frozen fault lines and the sound of river flowm stiff now in the cold would be replaced by the creeks, groans and retorts of ice grinding on ice.

Now that more reasonable winter temperatures have returned, the seeping overflow no longer freezes instantly. Depending on the ambient air temperature, the fresh liquid either puddles in small ponds along the river bank, forms thin sheets of ice over the flow, or sometimes crystallizes in thousands of tiny gossamer wings.  I walk or ski the river most everyday and there has yet to be conditions alike one day to the next.