Departing Juneau, Alaska
Duration of trip: 9 days
Spanning sprucelands of British Columbia and rainforests of Alaska

Flowing wild, scenic and free, the Taku River drains some 4.5 million acres of wilderness as it courses through northern British Columbia’s flat interior plateaus and jagged

Coast Mountains to the glaciated fjords of the Alaska panhandle. It is the largest pristine and unprotected wilderness remaining on North America’s Pacific shores.

Mountain goats, grizzly bears and salmon thrive here along with moose, wolves, wolverine, caribou and sheep. The Taku attracts bald eagles by the thousands, and is a major nesting ground of songbirds, geese and falcons.

We get an overview to this vast country with an hour long charter flight to the headwaters of the Sheslay tributary. Below us are miles and miles of blue valley upon green valley, and ancient cracked ice sheets giving way to silvery creeks. On the ground and left on our own for 11 days in this wilderness the size of Massachusetts, we trace our way westward again, along the rivers, amid emerald aspen, past moose marshes, between brick-red bluffs. Our route is fed by a dozen major tributaries, by waterfalls cascading 1600 ft from alpine cradles, and by the blue glaciers of the Juneau Icefield.