Anchorage Daily News

65 degrees, 22 minutes, North; 142 degrees, 30 minutes, West -- Almost no one comes to this spot in the Alaska Interior anymore, and it is the same for miles and miles and miles and miles upriver and down.

From Eagle, near the Canadian border, more than 150 miles north and west to Circle at the eastern end of the Steese Highway, the Yukon River -- once the main artery pumping commerce through the golden heart of the Far North -- now flows through a vast nothingness.

Along the banks, you'll see an occasional cabin, fish camp or remnant of the mining days that once filled the surrounding country with the sound and ground-churning fury of commerce. But most of what was has largely gone to rust and rot and dust.

River banks once denuded to fuel the boilers of sternwheelers that churned up and down the river from Dawson to the Bering Sea have grown back thick with birch and spruce, at least where fires haven't forced their own environmental changes on the country. Interior forests were not meant to grow into that "old-growth'' timber that has become an environmental catchphrase these days.

Either man mows the trees down for lumber, or nature burns them down in an age-old cycle of death and rebirth. Even the National Park Service, which owns a good part of the land along this stretch of the river, has come to accept that.

Like the state of Alaska, the Park Service's policy is in large part to "let burn'' unless occupied structures or important historic ruins are threatened. There really aren't many of either.

All in all, people today might have a smaller footprint along the river than the camps the Han Athabascans occupied at the time of white contact in the late 1800s.

To float the Yukon today is to float back to a time before the now-familiar and constant din of American traffic, television, boom boxes and clicking computer keys.

Aside from June heat that reminds travelers that parts of Alaska get hot and sweaty in the summer, the overwhelming impression is of silence. It is almost exactly how poet Robert Service described it 100 years ago:

"It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,

"It's the forests where silence has lease;

"It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,

"It's the stillness that fills me with peace."

It is a stillness that must be heard to be believed, a stillness so vast and empty that natural sounds can startle a man.

The hissing of the river's glacial silt sliding across the bottom of an aluminum canoe is loud enough to lead some to think, if only for a moment, that they are in an inflatable boat that has suddenly sprung a leak.

The gurgle of fast water along a shoreline echoing off the steep, ragged, walls of the valley comes with enough intensity to cause momentary wonder if there is serious white water ahead, though there is none anywhere on this stretch of river.

This is a world where each breeze comes with a whisper, each mid-river whirlpool sounds with a boil, each wave cracks with a quiet slap, and each stroke of the paddle makes an audible gurgle.

Hard to believe this was once the throbbing economic heart and soul of Alaska.

The Alaska everyone knows today really started here 100 years ago. The commodity driving the state and the location of its riches might have changed, but much remains the same.

Gold powered the Alaska economy then as oil powers it now. Oil brought the roar and hum of commerce to the Arctic Slope. The demise of gold brought an end to the roar and hum along the Yukon River.

When the dredge owned by the Walter W. Johnson Co. was eating its way up Coal Creek and surrounding Yukon tributaries in the 1930s, a whole valley thundered beneath its might. Today, it sits vacant and silent in the last pond it dug, a relic to be viewed by the occasional river floater who grabs a Park Service brochure at Slaven's Cabin along the river and decides to walk a mile back in the woods for a self-guided tour.

Once inside this boat made to float and eat its way across dry land, foot-high numbers on placards are the only "guide." Silent as the valley outside, they sit on shelves amid the rusting metal. The only sound is the loud buzz of a mosquito near your ear.

Outdoors editor Craig Medred is an opinion columnist. Find him online at adn.com/contact/cmedred.com or call 257-4588.

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