As I said somewhere in part 1, the plan was to spend our first full day at One Fish lake cutting wood, repairing the cabin and resting. And when we woke up in the morning the first thing out of Travis' mouth was, how ya feeling, ready to go? So much for a day of rest. I understood that we were under kind of a time crunch, the bears aren't going to wait for us to show up to have there fill of salmon before winter comes.
The Toklat Springs area is a shallow part of the Sushana/Toklat river, easily accessible to wolves and bears, that is full of salmon that have swam all the way from the ocean to spawn. At this point in the season the salmon are considered dog salmon and are not very nutritious but I'm sure the bears and wolves don't mind.
Our adjusted plan was now to load up the snowmachine and one trailer with a minimum amount of gear, take a day trip 7.5 miles from the cabin to the Toklat river and see if there is any bear sign along the river. Well, that was the plan...
We got started a little later that we wanted to which meant we'd probably be coming back in the dark. We figured, no big deal, it's only 7.5 miles.
Travis was well aware of what the trail was like and explained a few things that we'd have to stop and do make it to the Toklat. The first job came about a mile from the cabin and would be the most physical. We needed to make a snow bridge across a creek that was cut about 8 feet deep into the earth. The banks of the creek were not totally vertical, in fact they were fairly slopped on both sides from being crossed by snowmachine and dog sled in the past. What we needed to do was just fill in the creek bed and some of the washed out trail on the banks with sticks and snow. Luckily when we got to that crossing we discovered the creek was frozen solid
so that gave us a good base to work from. That job still took us around an hour to complete but the up side was we didn't have to do it on the way back.
After the snow bridge the trail presented more of the same terrain as getting to the cabin. Stopping to chainsaw trees downed over the trail and tight winding corners which lead to more cutting of trees to squeeze through was a frequent occurrence. All of this lead us to "Pinball alley."
Since this was just going to be a day trip we had left the dog, Buster, back at the cabin. This was the only thing that saved my sanity during our trudge through Pinball alley. That section of trail got its name from being so narrow and lined so densely with black spruce that you literally bounced from tree to tree, like a pinball! And if that wasn't enough the tussocks were really bad too. And if we weren't bouncing off trees or getting tossed of the machine, we were getting snagged on the trees. This meant we had to cut ourselves loose and widen the trail to continue forward. My assumption from the previous day that snowmachining could not get anymore difficult was proven wrong.
By the time we got to the Toklat river it was dark and both of us were exhausted. We decided with the trail in such poor condition that we'd spend the night. But first we needed to get to a decent camping spot. Travis new of a nice cleared out area on one of the islands and to get there was about another half hour on the machine. "Ok, lets do it." I said, just wanting to eat and lay down. The cold I'd been fighting was not only sucking the energy out of me but also putting a serious dent in my morale as well.
To get to the island we were going to camp on, first we had to cross the Sushana river, which intersects with the Toklat, onto a large island. The river bank to get down to the river was very steep and we had to pile up some snow at the bottom to ease the grade a little. Going down wasn't a problem but going back up might be a issue. At that part of the river it was very shallow (still open water) and driving the machine across was no problem. Then the trail wound through the heavily wooded island and we had to cut more downed trees off the trail. Once across the island we pulled out onto the Toklat river basin. Most of the river was frozen solid and had broken apart and shifted. This created very wide cracks, almost like glacial crevasses and large vertical ridges that stretched for hundreds of yards across the river. With all of those cracks and ridges we had to weave back and forth on the river a couple miles just to go a half mile down the river.
At last we reached our destination for the day/evening, six and a half hours later. Yep, six and a half hours to go 7.5 miles! After breaking trough the brush on the island for several minutes we stumbled onto the camping site. Travis came across a tripod made from sticks to hold a pot over a fire, left by one of his dog mushing friends. At first Travis was a little disoriented from all the trees that had fallen down on the island, trees that he used to use to tie a shelter to. But the tripod told us we were in the right spot.
After locating our camping spot for the evening we were making our way back to the snowmachine, to unpack our gear and heard wolves howling on the other side of the Toklat river. Travis said he was going to take a look around and see if there are any bear tracks. He came back and said there was a lot of very fresh wolf tracks, maybe only hours old. And some bear tracks, probably a couple days old. "Ok, we've got a lot of action going on around here so be on your toes," he said.
We had packed our sleeping bags just is case this situation come up but neither of us had a tent. So we used the tarp that all are gear was covered with in the trailer and strung it up in some trees. We also didn't bring any type of sleeping pad so we went across the river, cut down a bunch of small spruce trees, de-limbed them and piled the needles on the ground. Travis had a giant gear bag, that most all our gear was in, that zipped open and laid completely flat. That was our ground tarp, that we laid on top of the spruce.
To complete the shelter was a giant fire, constructed in a way that it would continue to burn all night to keep us warm and keep unwanted predators at bay. Of course we also used the fire to dry our wet clothes from all the "fun" in the snow we had that day. During the trip so far the temps had been around 20 to 30 degrees so any snow you got on yourself stuck and melted.
I hadn't packed a lot of food for the trip, thinking we'd be back at the cabin in the evening, so we started plotting against the salmon we could see in the open part of the river. The plan was one guy would walk along the shore with a stick to corral the fish, the other would wait in the shallow water and when the fish got close we'd grab one. As is turns out grabbing a fish still half in the water is pretty difficult, but, a swift kick with your boot into a fish towards the shore works pretty good! Granted this technique only works when you get the fish into really shallow water and more of their body is out of the water than in. And don't forget the right footwear, Travis had on Bunny boots, the Alaska winter standard. And I was wearing my waterproof dog mushing style Pac boots.
With the food situation taken care of, it was time to get some much needed rest. As we drifted off to sleep we could still hear the wolves howling off in the distance, probably upset that we moved in on their feeding ground. Both of us slept with our handguns within reach and Travis had his rifle loaded in case we had a visitor during the night.
Thankfully we didn't have any animals come around when we were sleeping, I'm sure the large fire helped deter them. In the morning Travis took a walk around to see if there was any fresh bear tracks, but it looked like nothing had changed. Either we were to late to catch the last of the bears before hibernation, or me made so much noise that we scared them off and needed to wait around longer for them to return.
Hoping it was just us making a lot of noise that was keeping the bears away we decided to pack up our gear head back to the cabin. When we got there we'd load up all our gear, come back and stay for several days. Since we had come through, broke trail and cut a lot of trees out of the way we figured it'd be a lot easier to get to and from the cabin. As was the going trend, we figured wrong...
The pics start off with a fresh salmon kill, most likely from a wolf. Then a bear track, probably black bear. Both right along the river. And the rest are of our tarp camp on the island.
The video shows the snow bridge not far from the cabin. Travis was only stuck for a minute, after both of us lifted the back end of the machine up and put it on some fresh snow it pulled right out. Then onto a little, on the trail trailer repair. And next some video Travis shot along the river and ends with a look at the camp in daylight.
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