Montana Creek (Packraft)

There are more hours in the drive to Talkeetna than miles of good rapids in Montana Creek’s South Fork. Yet Montana’s mile and-a-half of whitewater is choked with so many steep, complex drops that it’s one of the highlights of paddling in Southcentral Alaska. There are hundred yard zigzagging flumes, chock-a-block boulder piles with ten places to pin and one way through, and more horizon lines than you can count. This liquid chaos passes through a deep gorge punctuated by moss-draped crags that plummet down to the river.

Cody Landenburger in Big Sky

Confined by these walls, and descending at a terrifying gradient, Montana is no place to packraft at high water. Even at low flows of 350 cubic feet per second (cfs), the river is Class IV with at least one drop that is IV+. Navigating it safely requires precise boat control, in many cases down to the inch. Several rapids have angular rocks jutting into the current that could pin a boat or a body, and there are very narrow passages between the boulders. Other drops terminate on sharp, shallow outcrops, and still others have sticky holes. One is a small waterfall.

In addition to the requisite skills to paddle these rapids, one must also have patience to scout them. Scouting is necessary to ensure trees aren’t blocking any passages, and to identify which routes might look fine from the top but terminate in a nasty sieve. As of July 2016, all major drops were navigable and free of strainers, but Montana’s jumbled morphology and forested surroundings mean that new sieves or strainers could be brought on by a single storm or high flows. Fortunately, all rapids are scoutable at low, packraftable water levels.

To hike into Montana Creek, turn right on Yoder Road, which is three miles up the Talkeetna pur road. Follow Yoder across the main fork of Montana, which has a lovely truss bridge, and for a couple more miles to where a large ATV trail heads off to the left along the South Fork’s south bank. Driving with a GPS on a topo map is helpful to identify this spot, and you should print off or save on your phone the map Roman Dial produced of the route (packrafting.blogspot.com). After ditching the car, walk up this very well-established ATV trail for about 2.5 miles as it follows the canyon rim closely. Referencing both your GPS and Dial’s map, bushwhack down to the creek once you’re a quarter mile or so past the spot marked “Cody’s Hole.” This route of descent ensures you will get to the creek without having to descend a cliff. There are small gravel bars in this area to blow up boats. If there’s just enough water to float down, it’s probably a good water level for the canyon.

Before long, you’ll come to a horizon line where the river drops over a bedrock ledge and then careens wildly through jumbles of rocks before plowing into a massive boulder at the end of the rapid. At lower flows, there is a clear path off the center of the ledge, then down the left tongue, staying left all the way to the end to dodge a nasty pinning rock. This rapid is a good indication of what the river will be like: Steep, tight, and with lots places to get stuck. After another steep, fun drop that requires scouting, the river mellows out for a few hundred yards. Then you’ll see it drop into the abyss.

Big Sky rapid marks the beginning of Montana’s second canyon. Within about a hundred and fifty yards, the river narrows from a mellow gravel bar into a box canyon that terminates in a waterfall. There is a special kind of apprehension that paddlers feel when, after landing their boats to scout, they walk down and discover that the river not only enters such a canyon, but then drops off a cliff. If you were to flip in the box canyon, or in one of the ledges and holes above it, you’ll almost certain swim off the waterfall. Fortunately, the flume that leads up to the waterfall isn’t excessively difficult. It begins with a bedrock ledge into a diagonal hole, passes through two more holes in quick succession, then plunges through another, more violent diagonal hole before entering the box canyon. This gorge-within-a-gorge consists of orange rock that seems to glow in Montana canyon’s dim, filtered light--until the water drops over the falls into darkness.

The falls are quite small by bro-brah, gnar-gnar standards, perhaps eight to nine feet high. The right side is nasty, as the water lands on sharp, shallow rocks adjacent to a retentive hydraulic. The left side of the waterfall is much better, ideally the far left, where the water flows off a prow. By “boofing,” or taking a hard paddle stroke off the lip of the falls to propel yourself beyond the veil, it is possible to take this left line and have relatively little risk of getting sucked back into the waterfall’s hydraulic. The landing is gentle, thanks to the aerated water below the falls. In the event of a capsize, there is a short pool before the river drops into another boulder-choked rapid that would be very nasty to swim through but might catch errant packrafts and paddles.

The river’s intensity doesn’t let up much past the falls. There are at least a half-dozen more difficult, steep, congested rapids. Some of them make the drops at the top of the run seem tame. My favorite is one in which the right line swings under an overhanging cliff wall and the left line pounds down onto a shallow rock. At lower flows, you have to ride up on a rock like a half pipe and boof across the piton obstacle below. Unlike the drops higher up, from Big Sky on down several drops would be heinous to portage, requiring a climb up steep rock, debris, and devils club.

Fortunately, the devils club lets up in a vale below the canyon, right above a small island. This mossy glade should look sunny and welcoming after emerging from the darkness of the gorge, and it makes a fine takeout. Roll your boats up, take off drysuits, and then look for the path of least resistance through the brush. From this spot, it’s possible to hit a mini-ridge that leads back uphill to the ATV trail. This small ridge minimizes devils club-bashing, which persists in the ravines right up to the top of the canyon. Once you hit the ATV trail, hang a right and you’ll be back at the car in a few minutes.

Montana Creek is an exhilarating run for strong packrafters, with strong trip partners, at the right water level. It is definitely more difficult than Six Mile’s first and second canyons, and probably harder than low water runs (9.3) of Six Mile’s third canyon. The chunky, sharp, jumbled rocks mean that any swim is likely to be miserable if not dangerous. The relentless gradient means it’s probably a good idea to set safety for the harder drops. With the right skills and precautions, however, the South Fork of Montana is a whitewater classic that every avid paddler should attempt.