Lyon Creek

May 28 - 29 2012

Since the weather was beautiful and sunny on Monday after a weekend of getting rained on up at Willow,  Pat and I decided to head a little south and do an overnight paddle on Lyon/Bertha/Granite Creeks. The skies became cloudy and the air cool by the time we reached the top of the pass and it started to rain as I put up the tent and it was still raining as we drove away on Tuesday.

Lyon Creek is just beyond the line of trees.

We were lucky with the shuttle and Pat had hitched a ride back up to where we were putting in shortly after  I finished dragging the boat, filled with our gear, across about 100 yards of snow! Normally you can drive right down to the edge of the creek but we had a LOT of snow this year and it hasn't quite melted yet.

Lyon Creek is always narrow with tight corners and on this trip the water level was a little low. We scraped the bottom and brushed across a few rocks on the way down but nothing too bad. We camped just upstream from the Bertha Creek Campground (still closed) and on the far side of the creek. We did a little hiking in the evening up the mountain a bit then retreated into the tent to get out of the rain. The next morning Pat went back up the mountain and I explored the shoreline along which we were camped. From camp we could see one of the new footbridges for the Historic Iditarod Trail and I wanted to go take a look at it, except it bridged Bertha Creek before it meets up with Lyon  Creek so I was on the wrong side.

Looking for wildlife.

The confluence of Lyon Creek with Bertha Creek helped a ton with having enough depth to not scrape the bottom but it brought new hazards. Lots of trees fallen all the way across or most of the way across the creek and in one spot there are downed trees just upstream of three log jams that between them completely block the river. It is quite a nasty spot. We ended up dragging around the first log jam, doing a ferry to the center log jam, using the boat as a bridge from the center jam to the one just behind it, dragging the boat over that log jam, hopping into the boat from a floating log sticking out of the jam and paddling away downstream. It took us about 40 minutes to scout and figure out how we were going to get through here. There were a couple more downed trees that we dragged around further downstream and several more that we did a quick scout on and paddle around or through. An exciting day for a small class 1, class 2 creek!

Old avalanche debris field.