September 2024

According to Ed Plumb’s 2009 trip report, the Coffee Pizza Traverse got its memorable name because it begins and ends at a “java shop and pizza joint which straddle the banks of Carlo Creek on the Parks Hwy.” Though Ed’s terse report spent as much time discussing his pizza cravings as the terrain, in the decade and a half since it was written the traverse has become something of an Alaska packrafting classic. The route teases excellent tundra walking, epic Alaska range vistas, and a fun but relatively easy float back to the starting point… and all on a timeframe accessible (if barely) to roadbelt weekend warriors.

With the September colors in full swing and the number of snow-free weekends left in the season rapidly shrinking to single digits, Daniel Volland, Bronté Smith, Luke Wheeler, Sarah Bahan and I set out to try this iconic little traverse for ourselves.

Our first day did start with coffee, but it was at a gas station 222 road miles from the trailhead, in Anchorage. Close enough?

Day 1: Coffee

Four hours after leaving Anchorage, we drove through Sterling and reached the ATV trail that serves as the trailhead. The cluster of roadside restaurants and cabins nearby seemed to be closed for the season, so we made do with the food in the cars and wrestled our bulky packrafting packs onto our backs.

The first section of the ATV trail crossed land owned by the Ahtna Native corporation. Fortunately, Ahtna operates an easy-to-use online system that allows visitors to pay $20 for a one-day “land crossing” permit. The ATV trail was in good shape and enabled us to make great time through the lower-elevation trees and vegetation.

At around treeline we left the Ahtna-owned land; from here on out we would spend the rest of the traverse on lands owned by the State.

We followed the trail up the crest of a low ridge before cutting down through moderate brush to the base of the Carlo Creek drainage. The fall colors were eye-popping: reds, oranges, and yellows contrasted vividly with scraggly green trees, white clouds, and layers of blue mountains in the distance.

The base of the Carlo Creek valley was lightly vegetated, and aside from the occasional line of brush, swampy patch, or small creek gully it was straightforward to move at a steady pace. We occasionally followed faint game trails, but didn’t worry if we lost them. Even in the light rain, it was very pleasant and never challenging enough to pull my attention off the scenery for long.

Backpacking below brushline in the Carlo Creek drainage

The colors became even more intense and surreal as we crossed the brushline and moved back up into the tundra. A beaver swam across a pond that looked like it was filled with green milk, while the sparse foliage glowed orange and red under our boots. As we continued upvalley, Carlo Creek itself changed from light turquoise and yellow to orange to rusty red. The walking was surprisingly excellent, with only the occasional boulder to climb up or around. It felt like we’d been transported to an alien planet where everything was strange and backwards except for the sweet, cool Alaska air.

Backpacking above brushline in the Carlo Creek drainage

We were making good time, but it was clear that we wouldn’t make the pass tonight and sooner or later we’d have to camp. After scrambling up around a small cascade, Sarah crested a moraine and called back to us that the view from the top was worth a few more feet of climbing. Across the valley was a dark headwall of cliffy slopes and waterfalls, which terminated in a series of mineral-stained alluvial fans splayed out across a startlingly flat valley floor. It was a strange and almost surreal sight… and better yet it looked like a great place to drop our packs for the night.

Sarah overlooking our soon-to-be campsite

We walked down the other side of the moraine and set up our tents on a flat swath of yellow, orange, and green tundra. Luckily the drizzle had let up a bit, and as soon as the tents were up we boiled water for dinner. A small bottle of Fireball appeared. I tried to refill my stainless steel bottle from the waterfall across the valley, but later that night found that the water was acrid and metallic (we got better water the next day from a small ribbon of snowmelt).

Camp in the upper Carlo Creek drainage. In Alaska, September camping means a reasonable amount of light during the day, coupled with a nice, dark, real night.

Day 2: Pizza

The rain drummed on the taut walls of my tent all night, alternating between quiet sustained rolls and louder punchy bursts. Whenever I woke up, I wondered how the sound corresponded to the conditions outside and what we’d have to deal with in the morning. Clouds? Drizzle? Rain? Snow? I also wondered, at least briefly, whether it could rain enough to flood the flat, low area we were camped on.

I woke up a few minutes before my alarm, and savored every last moment inside my cozy sleeping bag and dry socks. Luckily, the rain largely stopped moments before the chorus of 8am alarms. Everything outside was damp, but it was relatively warm and there was no snow in sight. We pulled ourselves out of bed, made hot coffee and breakfast, and broke camp for the long day ahead.

The pass was about a mile away from our campsite, perched above a series of glacier-polished bedrock ledges and shifty moraines. At first, the terrain was about as easy to walk up as a washed-out 4×4 road, but as we neared the pass a deep royal-blue lake forced us onto a series of angled boulder fields. Our pace slowed to a crawl as we gingerly maneuvered up, over, and between rough blocks of terrazzo-like conglomerate.

The final climb toward the pass at the head of the Carlo Creek drainage

The walking became a bit easier right before the pass, but the mountains weren’t done with us yet. Rain-laced wind rushed up at us as we picked our way through cliff bands on the far side of the pass, and clouds limited our visibility to a few hundred feet. The terrain itself wasn’t especially harrowing, but the unpleasant weather and our comically large packrafting packs made the scrambling harder. For a few moments things started to feel a little dire.

The wind died to a whisper as we reached the valley floor, but we were now faced with a foggy, wet, and seemingly endless labyrinth of slippery rocks. We slowly picked our way over the rock piles and moraines, making the best of the limited visibility. The tundra gradually returned as we descended the valley, and the clouds occasionally parted to reveal walls of dark crags on either side of us.

A weathered caribou antler, a few shards of red fiberglass submerged in a pond, and a lost pack cover were the only signs that anyone or anything had been through this valley before. This rugged alpine corridor had that raw, primordial feeling that you only get near the rock-to-tundra interface, which marks the ecological edge of where visible life can take hold.

Near the mouth of the valley, we dropped out of the clouds and back onto consistent firm tundra. We angled our way down to Schist Creek, which meandered in a low gully filled with blazingly yellow brush. Most of us waded across the creek below a beaver dam, having long ago given up trying to keep our feet dry. Luke, who seemed to have a talent for picking good lines throughout the entire trip, walked carefully across the top of the dam.

Down to and over Schist Creek

On the far side of Schist Creek, we gained the top of a shallow ridge and began following an old ATV trail west, toward the Nenana River (if we’d dropped directly down the far side of the ridge we would have ended up in the Bruskasna Creek ravine).

The foliage here ranged from yellow to orange to red to a deep bruised purple, and the blueberries were prolific. The colors felt more appropriate for a coral reef, rather than a cool, wet alpine ridge in Alaska.

At last the Nenana River came into view, nestled in the base of a forested gorge. Bronté suggested that we take a group photo. The river ended up not being visible in the photo at all, but selfie still captured the moment for us: saturated rain gear, wet hair, a little weariness, a little more relief, faces still able to crack a smile.

Group photo. From left to right: the author, Sarah, Luke, Bronté, and Dan.

We angled off the ridge and headed directly toward the river. A couple trip reports had mentioned tough bushwhacking here, but it seemed generally light and was easy to move through at a steady walking pace (though the slope was very steep at times). Maybe we’d gotten lucky with our route, or maybe the foliage was lower this time of year… or maybe our perspectives were just too warped by years of hellish alder-thrashing in the Chugach and Talkeetna mountains. In any case, it didn’t seem too bad.

The final descent to the Nenana River

Before long we reached the edge of the Nenana, which was running wonderfully wide, smooth, and swift. We walked upstream for a few minutes before finding a small gravel bar island where we could drop our packs and inflate the boats. Soon, the little island was covered edge-to-edge in colorful packrafts, paddles, dry suits, backpacks, inflation tools, food bags, bear spray, dry socks, and everything else we’d carried on our backs over the last sixteen or seventeen miles.

Show up and blow up at the Nenana River

The mood of the trip changed the second we hit the water. Instead of trudging through the brush in our wet rain gear with bulky packs our backs, we were suddenly kicking back in cozy, warm drysuits and letting the river do the work. We didn’t have to do much more than keep our noses pointed downriver and watch the trees race by.

But as pleasant as the float was, we were also now racing the clock. We hadn’t hit the water till about 6:30pm on the second day of an overnight trip, and we still had more than half of our miles to go. That might not have been a critical issue in June, when the sun barely sets, but September was a different story. At minimum, I hoped we’d reach the highway bridge before it got dark. Then one of us could jog the seven-odd miles back to the cars on the shoulder of the Parks Highway.

Packrafting the Nenana River

Luckily, we made somewhere between four and five miles per hour on the first portion of the river and reached the highway bridge with plenty of light left. The Nenana more or less paralleled the highway for the remainder of the loop back to the cars, so we decided to make it as far as we could before it got too dark to paddle safely.

The river below the bridge was similar to the upper section, with the exception of two rowdy Class II wave trains. The first was a smaller, splashy set of waves adjacent to the road. Shortly after that set, the river veered west and tumbled through a boulder garden. The line was easy and the water was fast and fun, and I took a big wave to the face at the very beginning. If nothing else, it validated our decision to carry drysuits for the last two days. We all made it through the rapid right-side-up and grinning, and continued on our way.

We pulled off the river at the last bend before it swung away from the highway, just as it was getting dark. In terms of us making the most of the river and the light, the timing could not have been more perfect (or, seen another way, more skin-of-the-teeth…). We hauled our boats up a steep embankment and Bronté, Luke and I walked the last mile or so up the road to pick up the cars. It felt like we’d left them days ago, even though this entire trip, including camping, had only lasted 33 hours.

It felt glorious to sit inside a warm, dry car again as we whisked back down the Parks Highway in the dark. We hoped that we could find food in Cantwell, but one gas station was closed and the other appeared to have gone out of business. In the end, we had to wait till we reached the Speedway Express at the Talkeetna junction. By this time it was very late, during the off season, and the closest thing they had to pizza was the last gas station hot dog.

Close enough? Close enough.