I came to floating rivers later in life, but I spent much of my childhood wandering creeks and streams with a fly rod in search of trout, salmon and steelhead. Rivers have always had a power over me.  Be they big and rowdy, or slow and gentle, I’m drawn to them. They all tug at my soul, pulling my imagination around the next bend, wondering …what might be. We need wonder in our lives. We need magical experiences that make us feel more than think. We need to push ourselves out of our comfort zones, out of our day to day repetition to feel alive. River trips do this. Every time. They create memories and stories that never leave you.

Recently, I rafted the Tatshenshini River. This trip begins in the Yukon–yeah, the Yukon–then flows through British Columbia and finishes in Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska.  It seemed as though almost every day, I was setting my tent up next to wolf or bear tracks. This place was more wild than any anywhere I had ever experienced. I had never seen a land that was so big and vast. Every day the landscape grew and became more spectacular – just as Mark, our trip leader, said it would. One day we saw wolf pups sprint down a gravel bar, launch into the river right in front of our rafts, swimming, for what they thought was their lives, to get to the other side. We then spent the next 45 minutes stopped, listening to the haunting, beautiful sound of wolves as they howled from the trees, telling their pups it was all going to be okay. And this is all after seeing first, a big black wolf with yellow eyes wander off into the brush at the sight of us, only to be followed seconds later by a massive grizzly bear tearing into the trees, throwing gravel in its wake. I will not forget this experience. Ever. These things do not leave you. It was haunting in the best sense of the word.

And with the river trips I have done, I will remember the people. So many fun, extraordinary people. Guides and guests. Solo travelers and families. Many now that I would call good or even great friends.  So many good stories told while floating down the river or sitting around a warm campfire. What is it about this lifestyle that is so addictive? What is it about river trips that magnetically draw you in, making you wish it would not end?  Is it waking with the sun? Going to bed under the stars? Is it the people? Maybe it’s just the feeling that when in the canyons, life, experienced with deeply felt simplicity and realness, is there, right in front of you.  

What ever your dream may be, quit waiting until next year. We don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Do it now.  Make your life extraordinary. Make your children’s lives amazing. Create burning memories that never leave. 

See more of Justin Bailie’s incredible photographs from the Tatshenshini River in Alaska.

The post A Life Worth Remembering appeared first on River Currents.

Giant peaks 15,000 feet high gnawed at our vista. So many exist here that most guides cannot keep their names straight. One, however, everyone knows. Windy Craggy Mountain. This pipsqueak tops out at a mere 6,000 feet in British Columbia 15 miles east of the Alaskan border and 10 miles from the confluence of the Tatshenshini and Alsek rivers, not far from our camp.

Windy Craggy could be instead called Mount Doom. This is because Windy Craggy is a Triassic pillow basalt containing 3 percent copper — 100 million tons of it — worth at least $5 billion. Windy Craggy lies in between Yukon’s Kluane National Park and Alaska’s Glacier Bay and Wrangell-St. Elias National Parks and Preserves in a region where mineral extraction was up for grabs. In mid-1993, Geddes Resources Limited of Vancouver pushed for a permit to pulverize the top 2,000 feet of Windy Craggy then gouge its nub into a mammoth, open-pit mine. This meant excavating a staggering 265 million cubic feet of rock by gnawing 60 million pounds off the mountain daily for fifteen years and piping it as slurry 150 miles to port in Haines. From there, Geddes would ship it to Japan.

A simple plan.

The Complication

Too simple. The complication? Windy Craggy is also 40 percent sulfide. When the 375 million tons of crushed tailings the mine would produce as waste became exposed to atmospheric oxygen it would unleash immense quantities of sulfuric acid to flow through the wilderness. This acid would leach out heavy metals like cobalt (0.1 percent of Windy Craggy is cobalt). This combination of acid and heavy metal contamination is so sinister it has its own name, Acid Mine Damage, or AMD. AMD permanently poisons a drainage ecosystem. It devastates fish and the creatures that eat fish—from grizzlies and otters to sea gulls and eagles. AMD is so hideous that already the USA was spending $1 million per day to mitigate AMD heavy metals along 4,000 miles of its poisoned streams.

The estimated cost to de-toxify Windy Craggy Crater once Geddes sucked it dry stood at $1 billion. If nothing went wrong.

Geddes planned to hide their hundreds of millions of tons of sulphide tailings from atmospheric oxygen under a 2.5-mile long reservoir three miles from the river. The problem? Windy Craggy sits in the most active earthquake zone in North America, one triggered by the Fairweather Fault. In 1899, the second largest earthquake in North American history, 8.6 on the Richter scale, hit 75 miles northwest of Windy Craggy and lifted entire mountains 47 feet higher! The quake also sent glaciers slamming down their canyons half a mile in five minutes. In 1958, a Richter 7.9 quake epicentered 30 miles from Windy Craggy shook it like a rag doll.

The upshot? No dam can withstand such force. Indeed, British Columbia’s Commission on Resources and Environment (CORE) estimated that an ecological disaster would occur here every twelve years.

It Gets Worse

But Geddes’ overall plans proved even more frightening. They aimed to build hundreds of miles of roads, bridges, and pipelines through virgin wilderness and to construct a town and processing plant on site. These alone would be the ecosystem’s kiss of death.

An economist might argue that losing some wilderness was worth the metals. Yet an economic analysis of Geddes’ mine made no economic sense even in the short run. To gross $65 million non-sustainably per year for fifteen years, the mine would permanently devastate sustainable fisheries worth almost as much, forever. Fisheries in the Tatshenshini-Alsek system and the Lynn Canal into which Geddes planned to dump slurry effluent are worth $49.5 million yearly. Spills from Geddes’ slurry line would also endanger the world’s largest concentration of bald eagles, 3,500 of them, who converge on the Chilkat and fuel a lucrative tourist industry.

Grizzlies Threatened

The icon of the north is the grizzly mainly because men have wiped it out nearly everywhere else south into Mexico. As with sex, religion, and politics, grizzly bears never plod a neutral path across the convolutions of the human brain. For nearly a century, California’s only grizzly has been Samson, the bear depicted on its state flag. Oregon also extirpated its thousands of grizzlies. As did Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah.

The most important stronghold of this threatened species lies along the Tatshenshini, a habitat so perfect that one grizzly exists for each three square miles. AMD from Windy Craggy Mine would devastate the ecosystem. Geddes’ roads would expose bears to hunters. Geddes’ tailings reservoir would block their migration. “Grizzly bear populations,” reports Stephen Herero, head of the I.U.C.N. Bear Research Group, “would be lowered, degraded, fractionated, and alienated from prime habitat … The most important area in the Tatshenshini drainage known for grizzly bear denning would likely be abandoned.”

The Fight To Protect And Preserve

After spending $47 million developing the mine Geddes said, “[Windy Craggy Mine’s] impact on the environment would be negligible.” Besides, explained Geddes’ president Gerald Harper, the Tatshenshini region “isn’t wilderness, it’s barren land.”

In contrast, British Columbia’s Bureau of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources decided: “It is clear that there is a serious lack of understanding [by Geddes] of the actual potential for AMD from the pits, both during and following mine operations.”

Because AMD caused by mining Windy Craggy Mountain would violate the World Heritage Convention, the U.S.-Canada Boundary Waters Treaty, the Pacific Salmon Treaty, and the Migratory Birds Convention, a coalition of 50 conservation organizations urged British Columbia’s provincial government to create Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Wilderness Park. Combined, this 36,000-square mile protected region of the Yukon, British Columbia, and Alaska is the world’s largest international park and Global Biodiversity Reserve.

On the Tatshenshini-Alsek things have gone well. The area was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994 for the spectacular glacier and icefield landscapes as well as for the importance of grizzly bear, caribou and Dall sheep habitat.

We soon rowed a mile-wide river flowing into the heart of the Saint Elias Mountains, arguably North America’s most remote — and now protected — region.

This essay was originally created for the 2011 O.A.R.S. catalog. For more compelling stories from other renowned writers, request your catalog copy today!

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