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High water and Kotz
Posted by Wapiti57 on Oct 18 2005
I too was on a hunt out of Kotz close to this time frame, and the weather was a huge issue. We arrived in Kotz on 9/17 a.m. Could not get out to the bush until 9/19 p.m. We saw a lot of hunters come in during those two days who had been stranded, some as many as six days. We heard a lot of horror stories about high water and being stranded and bears and all kinds of interesting tales that you really want to hear just before you're first-ever trip into the AK wilderness. Fortunately, we had one person in our group who had done fly-out camps several times in AK, and it made a huge difference for us. But we did have weather issues and high water issues that came out of nowhere. From our gravel bar dropoff, we had to hump across three channels of the river to find higher ground for camp. We chose to use the closest gravel bar to the shore as our meat/antler/cape cache. About four days into the trip (overcast, drizzle, wet all day) the river came up dramatically. We had our meat covered and in the shade of the willows along the gravel bar bank. When we arose that morning, the water was up to the meat level. We could get to the first gravel bar pretty easily, although the water level was high and the river was really cooking. We moved all the meat higher up the bar and hoped for the best. That was supposed to be our fly-out day. We could not negotiate the other channels as they were swift and deep, and we nearly lost one of our party who tried to make it across with a packload of meat. Plus, our gravel bar was now too small for the planes to land, so we had to wait it out a couple more days until the river went down and we could once again cross all the channels. We did not lose any meat or supplies, but it was pretty hairy for a day or two. If we had made camp any closer to the riverbank, we would have been a bunch of wet rats. As it was, we camped about 150 yards above the riverbank, and water still backed up nearly to camp. It was amazing because we never had any real storms where we were - just overcast and drizzle and a short shower now and again. Obviously there were some serious storms to our north.
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