Hiking across Kodiak Island, Alaska

I take Vivobarefoot Ultra Pure (the older/lighter style) shoes along for rivers, and I put the insoles from my boots in them for camp shoes. They have been along for many trips now. Glad I bought a backup pair before they made [weight-gaining] changes to them.

I just finished a 3-day trip to climb the tallest peak on the north end of Kodiak. I'll try to get a video together soon(-ish).

Cheers.

The highest peak on the north end of Kodiak Island is Crown Mountain. I’ve hiked and skied past it a number of times on previous cross-island trips, but never tried to climb it because I was in too much of a hurry to be on my way, or because I didn’t trust the snow conditions. We just had ourselves a weekend of incredibly beautiful weather and I took advantage of my last days this summer to do a hard trip and climbed Crown Mountain for the first time before heading out on our research boat to do surveys. Town to Crown on Vimeo

I just did an 8-day, 100-mile packrafting and hiking trip from Lituya Bay to Yakutat along Alaska’s Lost Coast that you guys might find amusing. Here’s the video:

Hiking and Packrafting from Lituya to Yakutat

Wonderful!

Now that’s some serious bushwhacking. I’m curious about Brooks’ 24-hour tale; what happened? Even better, what’s his version?

What’s the area called at around the 8:38 mark?

Thanks for sharing.

It happened on Cape Fairweather which we knew had a 3-4 mile section of large boulders that we planned to negotiate by traveling on bear trails in the forest rather than on the beach. As we approached the start of the boulder section, I told Brooks we were heading to the top of the beach to find a way to scramble up the low bluff into the forest. He didn’t like the spot we chose to climb off the sand and went another ~75 yards farther down the beach and chose another route into the woods. It was instantly a class-5 vegetation maelstrom of layer upon layer of blow-down choked with devil’s club, salmonberry, and the like. We fought our way inland for about half an hour and then started to call and blow our whistles to make contact with Brooks who was struggling a bit farther along the coast. At one point we could hear him and figured all was fine, but soon after he decided the boulders would be better than struggling through the veg, and unbeknownst to us he dropped back down onto the beach and started around the cape that way. We searched for him for a while to no avail, and figured we would head back to the last point we were together as a group thinking he might do the same. It occurred to us he might just keep going and we might meet at the far end of the boulders where the sand started again, but the conservative thing was to consider his last known location (PLS/LKP) as a defacto rendezvous point (two of us are members of Kodiak Island Search and Rescue, so that was ‘protocol’, but we had not made an explicit plan as a group of what do if we got separated). We spent a very wet and windy afternoon and evening waiting, and ultimately the four of us spent the night in my Duomid. It was TIGHT, but we fit. The next day the four of us decided to continue as originally planned figuring he was ahead of us, searching for clues (foot or pole prints) and calling/whistling as we went in case he was doubling back to find us. He was waiting at a choke-point where the boulders ended on the far side of the cape. His account basically is the same as mine. We were not really concerned during our separation, and would have only escalated the search had we not found any sign of him in the sand on the far side.

8:38 is approaching Blacksand Spit between the Italio and Dangerous rivers. There are wide sand spits between the ocean and the river estuaries.

Glad you liked the video. It is austere and remote country, and I’m glad we did the trip, but not sure I’d be in a hurry to walk on that much sand again. The mountains are spectacular but the wide coastal plain is not too exciting, and there was a lot less wildlife than I am used to compared with Kodiak. Seeing wolves was cool though.

Wonderful video Philip, thanks for sharing.

What was the bird on top of the ice?

A dump duck (aka bald eagle). ;^)

Those are DeHaviland Beavers in the first and last videos, right?  Awesome plane.

And the video are awesome, too, of course.  You’re living the dream, Brother.

Yes, Beavers. I was shocked at the number of turbine Beavers and Otters in Juneau and flying around Yakutat. We have mostly conventional (original) radial-engine Beavers on floats here in Kodiak (and no Otters at all), but I saw a local air taxi operator has a turbine Beaver now too. It ruins the shape of the nose in my fuddy-duddy opinion (too long and pointy), but I bet they fly nicely. Beavers are very capable airplanes. Sort of like flatbed trucks in the sky.

Your videos are always one of the highlights of BPL for me, Philip – and this one is no exception.  What a great trip!

Awesome video!!

Well done.

Would you bring a bike, in retrospect?  I asked Eric Parsons the month after their Yak-Gus trip, and he said (in essence) that walking the sand would suck more than schwaking with a bike.

Scout, and an interesting cargo sling for it?

Fatbikes were batted around as a possibility, but you are gaining speed across the sandy sections in exchange for an absolute horror show in the brush as well as a lot of pushing on the cobble/boulder sections. I was the only real cyclist in the group, and even I don’t think I’d bother with a bike for this trip, personally. Also, there is no way we would have gotten 5 bikes into the Beaver with all of us, so the fly-in cost would have gone up dramatically. All the sand walking was kinda lame, but after a few days it got to be sort of rhythmic and you could space out as you trudged along. Roman, Mike C, Eric et al are more hardcore than our group (averaging about 20 miles per day vs our 13, including more/worse brush and ocean paddling sections). It was a cool trip, but I don’t think I’d be in a hurry to go back and do it again, bike or no bike.

I added a modest spray deck to my Scout and bow tie-down loops for my pack just like you find on the bigger Alpackas. The Scout was fine for the river and glacial lake crossings, but I did ship a little water paddling into headwinds with waves. The Scout is also noticeably slower than my larger rafts and despite being the strongest paddler in the group I sometimes had to work to keep up. A Curiak might be a better option if you didn’t want to go with a full-sized raft. Perhaps I would bring a bigger raft next time just for speed and safety, but the Scout handled our conditions fine.

I’m surprised your legs fit inside a Scout!

Awesome video. How do you make the graphic where you show the map and then your route? Is there a film-geek technical term for that?

Did anyone else hear that beep-beep in the soundtrack and think it was a low battery warning?

Beautiful adventure

How do you make the graphic where you show the map and then your route?

I do it in Apple’s Keynote (it’s like MS Powerpoint, but doesn’t suck). You find a nice background map like a google earth screenshot and plop that in your document. Then you start drawing your route as lines. You can make it dashed, give it a drop shadow, whatever. You then give it an ‘animation’ where the route appears, but you tell it to ‘wipe’ in from one end to the other. You can determine the speed and direction of ‘wiping’. Since it can only wipe from, say, top to bottom or bottom right to top left, if your route has lots of twists and turns, you need to break it into segments and have each wipe in the correct direction. You can have the next wipe occur immediately after the previous one so they link smoothly. Break up the wiping sequence with camp locations and such if you like. Preview the animations and if you like the results, you export the ‘slideshow’ as a Quicktime movie that you can import into iMovie or similar.

It takes a bit of experimentation, but the results can be pretty nice.

Thanks – will have to play around with that.

I just completed a solo, 110-mile, 6-day packrafting and hiking trip up the length of Kodiak Island from Alitak at the south end, to the city of Kodiak on the north end. It was a lovely trip with lots of wildlife and plenty of brush. Check it out if you have 8 minutes to spare: Crossing Kodiak Island: Alitak to Kodiak

All of your videos are beautiful. Thank you for posting them.

Agree- awesome video – amazing adventure and professional looking video.

I just got back from a 5-day trip to the northerly-most island in the Kodiak Archipelago. Shuyak Island is a state park and one of the most remote spots in Southcentral AK. There is an old cannery on the south side of the island that is a mail plane stop, so flights from Kodiak are cheap. I headed up with three friends and we spent our time wandering around the interior and western and northern coasts of the island, and it was glorious. I hope you enjoy… Shuyak Island hike and packraft 2016

Phillip,

Thank you for sharing your trip report; as usual, it was extremely well produced. This trip seemed to be a lot “tamer” than most of your trips (smile).

There were trails and they stayed in huts! Not the typical Tschersich vid.

Yeah, I’m getting soft in my old age. ;^p

In our defense, few of the trails were made by humans. Most are either bear or deer trails (bears make the most incredible trails). The cabins were, in fact, made by people though.