Our plan for Memorial Day weekend was to float the Gulkana River from Paxson Lake to Sourdough in our packrafts. The Gulkana is in the upper left of this map.

When we arrived at Paxson Lake on Friday morning, the lake was still frozen, as we expected. We knew that Memorial Day was a little earlier for the Gulkana trip, but we also knew of people who had done it (by pushing their rafts across the frozen lake to

Once we arrived in the Glenallen area, everyone we talked to tried to talk us out of the trip. The BLM office said that there would "definitely" be dangerous ice shelves on the river. But they hadn't actually seen that part of the river to kno

We decided to follow the locals advice and not do the "wild & scenic" part of the river from Paxson Lake to Sourdough. Instead we put in at Sourdough and did a one night trip down to Gulkana (in red on the map).

Linda heads out down the Gulkana.

We floated for three hours on Friday evening before stopping to set up camp on this gravel bar. The Sourdough locals told us to make sure we camped below the high-water mark to avoid trespassing on Ahtna native land. Since the river was extremely high

This section of river is never far from the Richardson Highway. We could hear the road in a few places, but for the most part it felt secluded and we saw plenty of wildlife (moose, eagles, birds, beaver).

Its hard to take action photos in the rafts, so instead you get a lot of pictures of camp.

Packing up the rafts to start day two on the river. We learned that these rafts can haul a lot of gear. The gear limit on packrafting trips is not how much the rafts can hold, but how much you can carry during the hiking sections.

We didn't have a map for this section of the river, so we didn't know exactly where we were camped. The guidebooks said that the float from Sourdough to Gulkana usually takes 12 hours and the record (as of 1994) was 7 hours. So with the high, fast water

So we were extremely surprised to come around a bend after only 2 hours and 45 minutes, and see the takeout bridge! The whole float only took 6 hours. A new world record! (yeah, right.)

So as we packed up the car in the Saturday afternoon sun, we thought, "What do we do now?" We still had two and a half days of weekend left.

After looking at maps for a while, we decided to head all the way back to Anchorage and down to the Kenai River. The Kenai is closed to fishermen until June 11, so we figured we might as well float it before it gets crowded.

The Kenai was a fun afternoon float. Very mellow at the beginning, but eventually we found some whitewater. Even class I & II stuff can be exciting in a tiny packraft!

Sunday night we camped at Quartz Creek campground on Kenai Lake. Its a beautiful spot and we had this loon swim right by our campsite a few times.