Ruben Henry will never forget the day the river ran red along the banks of Arctic Village on the south slope of Alaska's Brooks Range Mountains.
It was his birthday, and the red waters of the east fork of the Chandalar River were the talk of everyone in the isolated and tight-knit community of 150 in the shadow of one of the most remote mountain ranges in North America.
"Nobody had ever seen anything like that," Henry said. "It was an organish kind of red. I had to close the store to go check it out."
Henry, 26, is the cashier at the Midnight Sun Native Store -- the only store in the subsistence-oriented community almost 500 miles north of Anchorage. The Gwich'in Indians are believed to have lived in the area for 4,500 years, but the village itself didn't spring up until the 1950s when the advantages of modern life lured people away from their traditional nomadic lifestyle. No one now living in Arctic Village remembered the Chandalar ever running red, nor did anyone who predated the village.
That caused some a little concern, Henry added. The local tribal administration told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner residents were "alarmed" on Monday when the red water flowed.
Henry apparently wasn't among them. He said the river appeared murky and discolored with what "looked like a mountain kind of clay."
That assessment fits well with the observations of Kirk Sweetsir, a pilot and owner of Yukon Air Service to the south of Arctic Village.
Sweetsir told the News-Miner he flew from his base of operations in Fork Yukon past Nichenthraw Mountain upriver from Arctic Village on Sunday while it was being bombarded by a thunderstorm. Torrential rains associated with the storm cell appeared to be washing away a part of the mountain.
"Those mountains have sort of red mineralized soil," Sweetsir told the newspaper. "That soil was drained into a couple of medium lakes at the base of the mountain and overflowed into the river. It was a very dramatic color, a dense brick red."
The Brooks Range contains significant deposits of red and orange limestone, and Nichenthraw Mountain in particular has deposits of rusty sandstone described by geologists as maroon in color. Sandstone in particular is prone to erosion by heavy rains or flooding. Antelope Canyon in northern Arizona near the Utah border is famous for its water-carved, red sandstone.
Most everyone in Arctic Village was accepting the erosion hypothesis by Wednesday, Henry said. "I think it was a mountain slide, but I'm not 100 percent sure,'' he said.
The river, he added, is still turbid. Henry described it as "murky."
And though the red tinge has washed away, he expects the memories will remain forever.
"I'll probably never forget it,'' he said, and the date will be always easy to recall. The river ran red the day he turned 26.
Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com