The Grand Canyon of the Stikine River draws whitewater paddlers seeking a wild and remote river expedition. Plans to dam the canyon for hydropower generation are on hold. Photo © Gary Fiegehen.

By Mark Blaine
Forest Magazine, September/October 2001

Running more than 400 miles from the high plateau of northern British Columbia to its braided delta in Southeast Alaska, the Stikine River drains 20,000 square miles—an area about the size of Switzerland—of some of the most remote country in North America.

The sheer ruggedness and remoteness of northern British Columbia has kept the place mostly wild and unfettered. Stikine is the coastal Tlingit people’s name meaning “great river.”The Tahltan people of the interior call the upper watershed of the Stikine Spatsizi, “land of the red goat.”It is a place of shifting perspectives—from the tiny, a single goat perched on an impossible cliff face, to the mighty, the great river flushing through the cataracts of its Grand Canyon.

One road crosses the river, the Cassiar Highway, and this is the only road access to the region. Traffic is mostly logging trucks and recreational vehicles headed for Alaska via the scenic (and bumpy—much of the Cassiar Highway is unpaved) route, but mining and hydropower interests have been eyeing the region for decades. A complex of five dams proposed by British Columbia Hydro in the 1980s has been shelved, but mining companies are pushing to extract the rich resources of the plateau, including a large coal deposit that would threaten the watershed with acid runoff if it were tapped. The upstream, Canadian part of the river is largely unprotected, and several environmental groups have worked for years to keep development out.

The Tlingit people of the coast made early contact with white explorers when Russian fur traders scouted the mouth of the Stikine in the late 1700s. Shortly after those early explorations, Robert Campbell of the Hudson’s Bay Company arrived in 1838 at the end of his transcontinental canoe journey through the Arctic. The fur trade came next to the Stikine, followed by prospectors. The region was quickly charted and surveyed as another gateway to the interior and the promise of the Stikine, Cassiar and Klondike gold rushes. Telegraph Creek became an outpost for the development of the Alaska-Canada Highway in World War II, but the Stikine’s watershed didn’t catch the eye of developers until about a generation ago. With the completion of two bridges across the river in the early 1970s, the highway became an overland link to the vast undeveloped wilds of northern British Columbia.

In its lower reach, the river runs through the Coast Mountains and its massive glaciers. Amid these high volcanic peaks, some reaching 9,000 feet, the river narrows to the Grand Canyon, a sixty-mile-long inaccessible gorge of powerful whitewater. The Grand Canyon of the Stikine is treasured as one of the great wilderness whitewater expeditions in North America, impassable to all but the most experienced river adventurers. The hydropower project proposed two dams for the Grand Canyon and three others on the Iskut, the Stikine’s powerful tributary. After the Grand Canyon, the river mellows considerably for its last 100 miles or so to the ocean. This is as far as the salmon run on the river reaches, being blocked from spawning in the interior by the Grand Canyon. This is also where human activity has long been focused, first Tlingit settlement then European development. The big boom was a century ago, and there was even a steamboat running supplies to Telegraph Creek, the outpost at the lower end of the canyon.

Downstream from Telegraph Creek, the river crosses into the United States and flows out in Southeast Alaska through the Stikine-LeConte Wilderness of the Tongass National Forest. This lower reach is also protected as a wild and scenic river.

Gary Fiegehen, the Vancouver, B.C.–based photographer who spent five years shooting the pictures that accompany this article (NOTE: pictures may be seen in the September/October 2001 issue of Forest Magazine), is among those who are trying to tell the world about the value, and the threats, to the Stikine. He wrote in his journal during the project that he sees the Stikine as a “watershed of absolute integrity.” He was drawn to the Stikine because it remained in its original condition, “unimpaired.” The book of photography that he published following his years of shooting the Stikine is sparse with words, and he uses no captions with the photos. Pictures of the place allow the imagination to take hold, Fiegehen says. From imagination, preservation can grow.

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