By Rachel Drinkard
Turnagain Times Correspondent
Three pack rafters survived a spill in Glacier Creek Sunday, July 6 after the weekend’s warm weather raised water levels with run-off from melting snow pack and glaciers.
All three rafters were wearing personal flotation devices, but none were equipped with dry suits in the frigid glacial water.
“I guess things could have been a lot worse,” said Anna Giampaoli, of Anchorage, who attempted the run with her father and Daniel Aasmundruz, a friend visiting from Norway.
“The water was a lot higher than we expected, but we decided to try it anyway,” said Giampoali. The three put in Alpaca rafts on loan from True North Expeditions near Glacier Creek after approaching from the Hotel Alyeska via the Winner Creek Trail. Giampoali runs tours for True North Expeditions, a non-profit adventure tour company.
Not long after they entered the creek, the group found themselves inundated with water.
“We got taken down the creek a ways,” said Giampoali, “but we made it out of the river and hiked down the road with just a lot of bruises from bumping along the rocks.”
They were picked up on Crow Creek Road around 8 p.m. by Andy Morrison, a local outfitter and owner of Alaska Backcountry Access, who was returning from Crow Creek Mine with clients after wrapping up a tour.
Morrison often runs rafting tours on the creek and is responsible for much of the accessibility of the area and its growing popularity with pack rafters due to his work cleaning out log jams and fallen trees from the upper portion of the creek.
Morrison suggested they check out the gravel bar near the airport to see if any of the rafts had been lodged there, but only managed to recover one paddle and spot a second across the river.
The rafters decided to arrange for a helicopter flight to locate the missing rafts, worth nearly $3,000, when they ran into Martin Hoessinger, a pilot for a GPS mapping service and Alpine Air, who was completing a 100-hour maintenance inspection on his R44 and needed to do a test flight. He offered to take the group to look for the rafts up river where they were able to spot one lodged in some brush and a second caught in the currents in a sharp bend in the creek.
After landing, they decided to return to the Alaska Backcountry summer home base at World Cup to suit up in dry suits and take one of Morrison’s rafts out for a recovery run around 10 p.m. They drove back up to Crow Creek Mine and hiked down to the hand tram to put in and paddle approximately two miles down river to what Morrison calls “the room of doom,” a very difficult section to navigate due to a V-notch turn in the creek surrounded by high cliffs. The area is prone to trapping logjams and other debris, such as renegade pack rafts, in the almost cave-like area.
They tried to right the pack raft swirling in the water and push it up onto the rocks, but the high water and strong current caused the raft to flip in the attempt; luckily everyone was able to pull back into the boat in time to recover another paddle and confirm the second raft they had spotted earlier from the air had dislodged and floated downstream. After considering floating the rest of the river to look for it and the final missing raft, they decided to call it a night and took out at the bridge.
Giampoali and Aasmundruz returned the following day and hiked the lower creek, successfully recovering one raft and the missing dry sack.
Monday evening Jason Jeffers, lead guide at True North Expeditions, the company that owned the rafts, came down with friends bringing climbing gear and dry suits to recover the raft caught in the bend in the upper creek. Equipped only with vague directions from Morrison who had never approached this section of the creek on foot, Jeffers had to swim the creek in order to obtain a better vantage point and locate the raft before scaling the 75 foot cliffs and ultimately hauling the raft up and hiking out around 11:30 p.m.
Jeffers returned Tuesday and was able to negotiate the logjams in lower Glacier Creek to find the final raft just above the railroad trestle.
“We felt super lucky nobody was hurt, first of all, since that potential always exists in this sort of thing,” said Jeffers, “and second of all that we were able to recover all the rafts.”