Happy River Pack Raft ⛰ Alaska

Happy River, Alaska. Never heard of it? Neither had we!

About 6 months ago I started to bounce around online looking for a remote Alaskan river with good scenery and manageable water. Not too intense as this was our first multi-day pack raft trip, but not too placid either. The Happy River appeared to check all those boxes, aaaand it absolutely did!

Starting from Puntilla Lake, floated the river in 2 and a half days, but we had great weather and had two marathon days on the Skwentna River to the town of Skwentna. Here's the full scoop.

There is a lodge on Puntilla Lake. They run hunting cabins there and higher up on Sheep Lake. We would have liked to fly into Sheep Lake to extend our float of the Happy River... but come to find out, Regal Air (who we chartered with) does a lot of business with the lodge. The lodge had a high-end client staying on Sheep Lake whom they didn't want to disturb, so Regal Air refused to take us there.

So if you'd like to fly into Sheep Lake, pick a different charter service and make sure they are willing to take you there. Or go before the sheep hunt in August. We were under the impression the lodge had a legal right to keep us from Sheep Lake, but it was just their relationship with Regal Air. We missed about 1/3 of our float of the Happy and had a longer hike to the river. But we got to the water and the fun began!

We floated the river Aug 16-18. It had been a wet summer so the water was probably high for this time of year, but you could see that the river could probably flow twice what we floated in the Spring. Pack rafts were the way to go as navigating a raft through the rocks would have been pretty tedious.

The river never really lets up. You go from rapid section to section pretty constantly which is exactly what we were after. There were a few sections where salmon congregated and lots of bear sign. There were no major rapids or obstacles but it appeared that another group, probably on bigger rafts, had cut some sweepers out of the river ahead of us.

Like I said the Happy checked the boxes for our remote Alaskan adventure. After about 1 full day of floating, we made it to the Skwentna River. We had arranged for a wheeled plane to pick us up at the town (not really a town) of Skwentna so we had a long float. About 57 miles according to Alaska.org

The Skwentna is relaxed unless you try to split the monoliths. We were on the lookout for bears, saw one about 200 yards away and I’m sure we missed a bunch more! We had great weather so we put in long days and flew out about two days sooner than we expected.

My cousins were hoping to get another adventure out of this Alaska trip so when we returned to Anchorage the wheels were in motion. We found a Turo, set up camp off the side of the road near Turn Lake, and made our way to Cooper Landing for adventure number 2!

Mike at Bike Cooper Landing was super accommodating. They hooked us up with great bikes, some equipment, and gave us a shuttle to the trailhead. I’m not much of a biker, and Alaska in August gets a bit overgrown 😅 but we managed to get another 30 hours of Alaskan backcountry to ourselves.

In 5 days we logged more than 100 backcountry miles. Let’s talk about some of the gear we brought along!

We used Alpaca Pack Rafts that we rented from https://backcountrypackrafts.com/rent/. We probably could have found gear in Alaska but we didn’t want to scramble when we got there. They shipped to our home in Utah and we brought them with us.

Not that we know what we’re doing, but Reyr Gear telescoping fly rods have become a favorite for our adventures. https://reyrgear.com/ we saw a bunch of people at the airport with the long fly-rod tubes. Not an option for us on this float!

New for this trip, I bought a holster from https://www.craftholsters.com/ I wanted a cross-draw holster as I also carry bear spray you can’t really have both on your right hip. This holster was super comfortable and really well made. Each order is actually custom-made.

Grayl water filters have been our go-to for a while now. They are quick and incorporate the water bottle right into the filter. I initially planned to reduce weight with a Nalgene and Steripen but when I put them on the scale... the Grayl weighed the same, is more reliable, and purified water tastes better than UV filtered water in my opinion. https://grayl.com/

Now the sleep!! 😉 I have NEVER slept so well camping. We traveled hard but slept even harder. Check out https://www.HavenTents.com for more information.

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