Canoeing

No matter your group size, you will need an extra car to shuttle. To get to the start of this fun adventure, drive about 45 min west along the Alaska highway from Whitehorse towards Haines junction. Exit onto the Kusawa lake road. Almost immediately on this road there is a pullout on your left, next to the Takhini river this is where you will exit the river after you are done. This is also where you will need to drop one car off.

There are two places you can start the river: either at the Takhini River campground (which is closer to the highway) or at Kusawa lake (don’t go all the way to the Kusawa lake campground though). Both places have pullouts that are rather intuitive. Other than the distance, the main difference is that it is a little bit harder to get gear down at the Kusawa pullout and the start of the river there has several light rapid sections. If you start at the Takhini river campground you will bypass the first set off rapids and if you want, you can even bypass the next major rapid section, which is the Jaws of Death. From either put-in, the Jaws of death is about 2-3 hours away. We recommend finding a nice place to camp before you tackle the Jaws of Death.

The length of this trip is pretty short, but we really recommend taking a weekend so that you can spend a night camping. There are some amazing camp sites after the put in’s and they almost ever having anyone nearby. There is a pretty distinct island about 1.5 hours of paddling from the Takhini river campground. On the right side of this island, there is a sandy bank with amazing campsites, plenty of wood, and scenic vistas to gaze at before you go to bed (N 60.689356, W -136.042783). Bring a fishing rod, because the grayling fishing is always good along the banks.

The Jaws of Death is one big rapid section the includes some class 2 rapids. The rapid section is a big righthand bend in the river. There is a great eddy to pullout ahead of time, as well as scouting/portage trail you can use to carry gear to the other side of the rapids. In total the portage is only about a 200 m. You should notice the rapids with enough time to eddy out, but you can also put the coordinates N 60.705205; W -136.034814 into your GPS, which will take you right to the eddy. Once you get to the eddy, you can decide to run the rapids or not. The rapids are generally pretty safe and there aren’t too many sweepers or rocks to worry about. We would suggest doing the rapids without your camping gear and only doing them if you hav some experience with white water paddling. Otherwise you can just enjoy the scenery and portage your canoes as well. After the Jaws of Death there is only a short paddle back to your shuttle car. The river becomes very slow and simple to paddle after the Jaws of death as well.