Backpacking the Ring of Fire – Aniakchak National Monument

Your trip begins today in Anchorage, Alaska. You’ll be staying at the Aloft Anchorage Hotel. You can arrive anytime and transfer to the hotel on their complimentary shuttle.  Depending on your arrival time, the remainder of the day is yours to relax after your flight or to explore some of the city’s notable sites including the Anchorage Museum of History & Art or the city Park Strip.  This evening, you’ll meet your guide at 5pm at the hotel for a pizza dinner with local craft brews and group orientation. The orientation will include a discussion of the route, an introduction to our unique style of Alaska wilderness travel, a familiarization of the principles of Leave No Trace, and a conversation about traveling safely in bear country.

After and early breakfast, you will be transferred to the airport for the 1+ hour flight to King Salmon, where you’ll next board a bush flight destined for the absolutely surreal and spectacular Surprise Lake, where we’ll set up camp for the next 3-nights. As we unload our gear and settle into camp, you’ll begin to feel the majesty of this incredible landscape and the eager anticipation associated with a big wilderness hiking and backpacking expedition in Alaska. If time allows, your guides will lead a short hike along the lake.

We’ll take the next three full days to explore the inner sanctum of the Caldera. With light packs containing only the essentials, we’ll strike out daily in search of adventure. Whether climbing to the caldera’s rim, scanning for wildlife along the lake’s edge, or climbing Vent Mountain, our days will be dictated by the serendipity of a flexible itinerary and the incomprehensible amount of perfect hiking terrain near Surprise Lake!

After breaking camp on the morning of day 6, we’ll head south toward the “Gates” of the Pacific-bound Aniakchak River. Aptly named, the Gates mark the sole cleft in the wall of the caldera where the lake that once partially filled it spontaneously drained in a catastrophic flood. Surprise Lake is the small remnant of a lake that once spanned the 6-mile breadth of crater floor, and now provides the headwaters of the 35-mile-long Aniakchak River. After crossing the river near the Gates, we’ll continue wrapping around the flanks of the volcano heading north toward the Bering Sea.

We’ll spend the next two days descending the north flank of the ancient volcano on our way toward the Bering Sea and the village of Port Heiden. We’ll hike through verdant tundra, camp along crystal clear creeks, and trek across ash flows from past eruptions, making our own path from the caldera rim to the village 3000 below.  By the afternoon of day 11 we’ll be enjoying our last campsite of the trip and celebrating miles past and adventures shared.

Breakfast and hot beverages will help us greet our final day in the wilderness of the Alaska Peninsula.  By noon we’ll be back at the airstrip and ready for the skilled bush pilots to whisk us back to King Salmon.  Again, Christopher Solomon sums it up best describing Aniakchak on the flight out. “I press my forehead to the window and stare for a long time as the ramp finally climbs higher and higher, until it vanishes in a smother of white clouds.  I look up.  Gabe and Dan are smiling. For a moment we grin like idiots at one another.  Then we press our foreheads against the cold of the Cessna’s tiny portholes. Seeing all this, some of our fellow passengers look out their windows, perplexed.  If you hadn’t been there, it would be easy to think there was nothing worth seeing at all.” From King Salmon, we’ll conclude our adventure with a flight back to Anchorage. Please make certain that you schedule all homebound flights from Anchorage for after 11:00pm.  Better still, we suggest staying in Anchorage this night.