Because fewer than 6,000 miles of certified public roads and highways probe Alaska's 570,374 square miles, rivers are especially important. Alaskans' dependence on rivers for in-state travel is critical, particularly for rural residents whose road systems are at best localized and short.
The Yukon is grande dame of Alaska's rivers, the North's own long, broad, brown Mississippi. Rich in Native Indian history, passageway for early Russian fur traders and Gold Rush stampeders, she flows 400 miles through Canada before transecting 1,875 miles of Alaska, along the way draining 330,000 square miles of raw, virtually trackless country. Still, she is but one river among many. Some 3,000 others flow across Alaska, fed by untold thousands of lesser streams, brooks and rills. Indeed, this wilderness state is in large part defined by its rivers, along with its mountain ranges and ice fields.
Like rivers everywhere, Alaska rivers are metronomes, conductors of water, measurers of time. Too, they are conveyors, offering passage to destinations near and far.
To greater or lesser extents, Alaskans depend upon rivers to lead us to our homes, livelihoods, recreation and food sources as surely as citizens of Seattle, Los Angeles, Memphis or Pittsburgh rely upon freeways to access the same things. River travel here occurs year round, except for the brief periods of freeze-up in fall and breakup in spring, when ice forming or thawing makes for treacherous going. In summer we use riverboats, rafts, canoes, kayaks -- even tugboats towing barges -- to navigate the Kuskokwim, Copper, Tanana, Chena, Kobuk, Koyukuk, Wood and hundreds of others. In winter these rivers and others like the Susitna, Gulkana, Sagavanirktok and Yukon freeze and are transformed into highways for snowmobiles, dogsleds, ATVs and even cars and trucks. The famous 1,000-mile-long Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and the Iron Dog snowmobile race, each retracing historic travel routes, follow hundreds of miles of frozen river channels.
This coziness with rivers is to be expected in a frontier state where many still rely on game and fish as dietary staples, where log cabins hewn from local spruces remain unremarkably common, and where the presence of wilderness looms large on the edge of every port, city and mind.
READ MORE: Alaska, where rivers reign
Alaska Dispatch Publishing