Copper River Jetboating

Visiting the famous Miles and Childs Glaciers

This is one adventure where flying your own plane makes so much sense. It starts in Cordova which you can’t reach except for a plane or boat. You can take a scheduled flight there, but you’d probably have to stay the night before or after the adventure to make the scheduling fit. 

The adventure? An under-the-radar tour via jet boat up the Copper River. There is only one guy, Luke, doing the tour, but he’s been doing the tour for decades and knows the area extremely well (he also has a lodge in the area). 

Luke’s jet boat heads up the Copper River to the Million Dollar bridge and a close up of Miles and Childs glaciers. The road to the bridge washed out decades ago so a jet boat is the only way. The Million Dollar Bridge has some fascinating history as it was the route into the Copper mine of Kennicott. At the time they built the bridge the glaciers were right there next to the bridge and they put immense effort in fighting the glaciers and building the bridge. If you go, and especially if you also visit McCarthy and Kennicott, you may enjoy the books, “Copper Spike” and /or “Iron Trail”. 

The tour is very Alaskan. First a jet boat up a massive and heavily braided river with Luke. We did this tour a few years ago and saw a grizzly mom and cubs on the road. This time we saw a grizzly on the shore of the river, though quite a ways away.

A heavy snow crushed Luke’s van so once you get to the Million Dollar bridge (long closed from an Alaskan earthquake) he takes you across the bridge on a home-made wagon pulled by a lawn tractor. He has a replacement for the van but it’s stuck halfway there and he needs to wait for freeze-up to move it again.

Once across the bridge Luke lights up a campfire and you get to picnic and enjoy the glacier, one of the most active around. You are not guaranteed to see calving, but it is pretty common. We saw a big one!

Bets and I visited here in the 1980s on our honeymoon. The road was still intact and the glacier hadn’t receded much yet from the bridge. We saw dozens of calvings from the glacier! Later that day we met a guy distraught that he had run over his dog with a fishing boat. Betsy was a 2nd year student at Veterinary school but had yet to actually touch an animal. The local doctor had been called but didn’t want to treat the dog, which had bad lacerations from the propeller. The doctor offered to give Bets the equipment so she got to work and ended doing a great job suturing up the dog. The guy had a float plane and although Bets wasn’t too excited about it (at all), he took us up for an aerial tour of the area. Nice memories.