It’s a summer night in early August 1988. Debby and I are in a corner booth at the Chena Pump House in Fairbanks, where we have come for a glass of wine after my flight arrives from Seattle. I’m equal parts excited and nervous, listening to Debs talk about the upcoming horse trip we will make two days from then. She tells me “If you come off the horse in the middle of the river, grab the horse’s tail – it will come out of the river alive”. Excuse me, what? You’re telling me this now, I’m thinking? What about the last six years when we’ve been talking about me taking this trip with you, but never had the same time off in the summer to do it together. Any one of those conversations could have clued me in a little better to what I was signing up for. And truthfully, I’m sure she never sugar coated it or tried to deceive me, it just suddenly had become very real at that moment.
The next day we watched Jennings the farrier put new shoes on her dad’s horses, shopped for our provisions for the trip, and packed up. We were up early the day after and headed south on the Parks Highway heading for the town of Healy, where we would turn east and drive about 8 miles on a gravel road until we came to the closed gate where we would unload, pack the horses and head towards Wood River. The first glitch in this plan was that the day earlier they had dropped two of the horses off at Goat Mary’s (another true Alaska legend), and the horses had gotten loose and were being very difficult to round up. I’m sure they knew the drill by now. Ten and a half months of the year they lived in a pasture south of Fairbanks in the warmer climate near Delta Junction, then for 6 weeks every year they went into the mountains to take hunters to high elevations tracking game and hauling huge carcases. Why be in a hurry to go do that work?
Finally the gang was all there and we were saddled up and ready to ride in. Bill Waugaman was a Master Big Game Guide in Alaska and experienced horseman. I recall him trying not to ask me too many questions about my experience, knowing he could trust Debby’s instincts. Here he is adjusting my stirrups.
We’re off, very much later than planned, and heading up Healy Creek. We need to get another six miles to a small cabin where we’ll have lunch, then another eight miles up and over a mountain pass, then down and another three hours into a wooded area where there will be a cabin waiting for us. At this point we’re still burning off energy and Debs is horsing around as Vince takes the lead.
This is the cabin now called Fourteen Mile (it’s 14 miles from the Parks Highway). Debs and her brother Eds have owned this for many years and it’s a nice cabin now where riders can stop overnight either on the way in or the way out. In 1988 it was very rustic and we didn’t even open it up, just had lunch and headed on our way.
We follow Healy Creek toward Cody pass, over the never ending rocks. At one point we pass a string of Llamas packing out. The horses totally did not know what to do about them and gave them a wide berth.
When we could find an animal trail through a stand of willows up off the rocky creekbed, we would take the opportunity to give us and the horses a break. It was always a calculated gamble, though, because sometimes the trail would disappear and the willows would close in, or the trail would end abruptly at the top of a ledge high above the creekbed. This was a time when we had to fight out way out of the trees.
It was a bit gnarly getting back down to the creek, but Bill’s horses were exceptionally sure footed and carried us easily through whatever challenges Debs considered safe.
This is our dinner stop that evening. The bus had been hauled in by a tractor some years prior to this. It’s not the same bus that Jon Krakauer made famous in the book “Into the Wild” about a kid named Chris McCandless who gets a bus into Stampede Trail and ends up dying there. That bus was finally hauled out by helicopter in 2020 to keep people from getting hurt. This bus held up pretty good for a lot of years, but last time I rode in the horses would go nowhere near it. In front of the bus is the trail up Cody Pass, our after dinner trek where we’ll go over that little saddle and down into the Wood River drainage.
And here I am celebrating all the hard work Pete did to get me that far up. OK, truth, I did walk part of it when he was getting too tired. Now we go down the other side, another couple of miles across some benches on animal trails, and turn into the woods for Cody Cabin.
We always take a break on the pass and take pix of each other. On years when the weather is clear, the view from up there is stunning. Even on a cloudy day it’s still pretty remarkable.
There was one small event that Debs never let me forget. We were off the pass and up ahead I thought I saw a small bear. “Shoot it Debs, Shoot it” I shouted in a panic. Of course that was the absolutely wrong answer. Even if it had been a bear, which it wasn’t. It was a porcupine.
It was dark by the time we got in to the cabin. In Healy in early August the sun sets at 10:30 pm and it remains Nautical Twilight until sunrise at 5 am. Once you’re in the woods, though, there is complete darkness. This is when lead horses totally earn their keep. We’re coming down the creek and know there’s a turn into the woods somewhere, but not sure which animal trail takes us there. Debs just tells Vince to find the cabin, lets the reigns go slack, and he follows the creekbed until he makes a hard left into the woods, and in another five hundred feet we come out of the woods into a clearing where the cabin waits for us.
Cody Cabin is at the junction between Wood River and Cody Creek, a popular hunting area. Many who pass through will write their names on the log walls inside. I wish now I could go back and take pics of all the times Debs has signed that wall. Here is her and brother Eds from 1974 to 1987. She and I are just above that to the right, 1988.
In the morning we decide a nice fresh dip of our heads into a glacier fed stream is a good way to start the day. Luckly it was a sunny beautiful day.
We pack up Elmo, saddle Pete and Vince, and lock up the cabin. Time to head east for another long day into Sheep Creek. In recent years they have been stopping at Kansas Creek to stay with friend Bonni, but we didn’t have that option and knew we needed to make a lot of miles.
I absolutely love the trail out of Cody for some unknown reason. Sadly, though, it doesn’t last long and soon enough we’re out on the river looking for good places to cross as we traverse the valley downriver.
Shortly out of Cody we run into this massive beaver dam. They’ve compeltely rerouted the river and created a huge lake that we have to get around. I remember cursing the stupid beavers for a long time. I’ve never seen another one this size since that first year.
We stop for lunch at what I think was the original cabin at Kansas Creek. Debs’ friend Bonni has lived there now for decades and made a beautiful compound, so I may be wrong and this may be somewhere else, but she has Kansas marked on our map so I’m pretty sure that’s where we had lunch.
Again it’s another late arrival to Sheep Creek Cabin. This was one of Bill Waugaman’s favorite places to hunt out of, and we were glad to get there and unpack and get some dinner.
The next/last day we’re going to be making some big river crossings on a rainy day, so we bundle up and lock the cabin up tight. The grizzlies have been awake for a few months and haven’t broken in yet (this year), but still will give it a try if we leave them the tiniest of opportunities. Even the littlest room for a claw to get between the board and window frame is an invitation for a nosy bear.
Debs knows the river is running high and the crossings are going to be tough, so we try to find a trail up high. We’re doing good on an animal trail, but suddenly find ourselves in the middle of a big bog. Debs and Vince go down between two huge tussocks, and we realize we have to turn around and head back down to the river. It’s just bizarre to be high up on a mountainside in basically a swamp. What we didn’t know is that her dad had cleared a trail a long way from Main Camp and we could have saved some of the upcoming crossings.
So we start crossing the river. We follow a sandbar as far as we can downriver, then when it ends by running into a steep bank, we find the safest place to cross. It’s best if the river is broken into multiple shallower channels, but sometimes you can’t find that great spot. We can’t go up into the woods above the river for the same reason we couldn’t back at Healy Creek. So we just keep crossing and finding the best spot. Debs always goes in first and makes sure it’s safe for me.
Sometimes the valley is really wide and there are stands of trees and trails we can take. Some of these persist year to year and Debs or the horses remember them. But the river freezes and changes course and things can be completely different from one year to the next.
And occasionally we’ll get onto a good path that will suddenly end. We hate bushwhacking and it’s hard with a pack horse who can get stuck between the willows. This apparently was one of those times when we were getting a little bit tired of it all.
Eventually we found the trail Bill had cut and had a veritable freeway into Snowy Gulch and up into camp. I remember him looking quite pleased that Debs’ choice of rider wasn’t as bad as he thought. Yes I was a very inexperienced rider, but this wasn’t about making a horse do what you want. These were truly exceptional horses who knew they had a job and were getting it done. For me, it was about taking the amazing adventure I was offered and making the absolute best of it.
I love this picture of me and Pete. He’s happy to be in camp for a few days’ rest. I’m sad this is about to be over.
This is the Wood River in front of camp. Some years you can cross it, when the rock in the middle is visible and above water. This year it is underwater. The only time I ever got across was in 2007 when we went up to that bluff for an amazing day ride.
And too soon they were loading our gear into the plane and I was headed back to Fairbanks and Prudhoe Bay to work. I’m happy to say this was only the beginning of decades of adventures with Debby and Wood River Camp. I’ll always be grateful to her for trusting that I was up to the challenge and opportunity. I would never be the Alaskan outdoorsman that she was, but apparently she knew I’d be tough enough for the adventure.
