By Craig Medred, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska
Jun. 18–Flushed mostly underwater for miles through the bedrock canyon on the East Fork of Sixmile Creek, Dan Baeten never saw the bridge that stands stark against the sky where it spans the bluffs near Gulch Creek.
This would cause some confusion later, but at the time it didn’t matter. At the time, all the Nikiski resident could think about was whether he had killed the older of his two teenage sons and whether he was about to die himself.
Already he had seen a Class III white-water section entering the first canyon on the Kenai Peninsula stream swallow the small canoe of 14-year-old son Brian, nearly taking the young man with it.
That had all happened within minutes of putting in on what seemed like little more than gurgling brook next to the scenic Seward Highway.
“We got downriver, and it got rough,” Dan said. “I realized at the point we were really in trouble. I heard, ‘Dad!’ I turned around, and Brian was into the water.”
At the start of this family float, Dan had talked to Brian and Ben, Brian’s 16-year-old brother, about what to do if their solo canoes flipped. Just hang onto the boat and float to the next shallow spot, he told them.
Brian grabbed fast to the canoe now, but this wasn’t the placid stream on which the trip had started. This was big, pounding, scary water.
“Brian was starting to panic,” Dan said. “I told him, ‘Calm down. It’s all right.’ “
Unfortunately, as the Baetens were about to learn, it was far from all right.
RIVER LIKE A WASHING MACHINE
With Brian clinging to his canoe, the craft shot toward what white-water rafters call a pour over — a big boulder with water streaming over the top. Such obstructions create miniature waterfalls with swirling undertows on the downstream side. When a boat goes over, it can be spun toward the bottom of the river.
Brian ended up caught in just this sort of washing machine.
“His canoe went underwater,” Dan said, “and he went underwater with it.”
The worried father was now near panic himself, his only salvation the thought that Brian had completed water-safety training weeks before.
“He had just attended the Safe Kids Program at Central Peninsula General Hospital,” Dan said. One of the benefits was a new Mustang personal flotation device and instruction on how to survive in fast water.
Both were about to pay dividends.
“When he went in and went under, he was floating really well,” Dan said.
All thoughts of the canoe were gone now. It was lost and nobody cared. All Dan wanted Brian to do was get to the side of the creek, grab the bank and haul himself out of the bone-numbingly cold water.
It wasn’t going to be easy.
Brian’s course toward the shore put him into the worst kind of sweeper — a log jam.
“I was so worried and scared for Brian,” Dan said. “I was worried he would get sucked under these logs. (But), he climbs up on the pile of logs, so my last view of Brian was him climbing out on this log jam.”
Brian was now safe, but Dan and 16-year-old Ben were being swept downstream into even bigger water in their 14 1/2-foot, one-man canoes.
“It was moving so fast that it was hard for us to react,” Dan said. “We couldn’t even help each other out.”
What began as a pleasant, Memorial Day weekend outing was about to turn into a near-death experience for father and son.
PEACEFUL LOOKS DECEIVE
Viewed from the Seward Highway below Turnagain Pass at Mile 59, the East Fork of Sixmile Creek doesn’t look like much. It is a 100-foot-wide stream through the forest gurgling over gravel. It moves fast but not dangerously so.
On a hot day, it looks inviting to wade across, although anyone who sticks a toe in quickly learns the water is chillingly cold.
Almost immediately downstream from the Mile 59 pullout, however, the creek’s character changes dramatically. Just out of sight of the highway, Sixmile becomes a raging torrent. Skilled and experienced white-water boaters know it as one of the best thrill rides in the state. For commercial rafting companies, it is a marketable, wet-and-wild roller coaster that must be approached with great caution:
— PFDs, helmets and drysuits are mandatory.
— Lessons in swimming white water are provided to customers.
— Trips are restricted to days when the flow in the creek is moderate.
Still, people have died on commercial tours. Well-known Anchorage physician and travel-industry innovator Gary Archer was among them. The 60-year-old fell out of a raft in Class IV rapid and was killed by the shock of cold-water immersion.
He wasn’t the first to perish.
In 1995, two 22-year-old men decided to try out a new canoe there in much the same manner as the Baetens. They, however, wore no PFDs. Both died.
In 1993, another 22-year-old in a paddle raft was wearing a low-flotation PFD when the raft flipped. Several people went in the water. The others survived. The 22-year-old in the marginal PFD died.
There is no hint of any of this history at the convenient pullout along the highway above the unseen rapids. Dan wishes there had been. He wishes he had known the history before he and his boys started down the river.
“A lot of people I’ve talked to have said, ‘How long have you been in Alaska?’ ” Dan said, as if knowledge is somehow transmitted by some sort of osmosis linked to longevity.
“Well, we’ve been here about nine years,” he said. “We have no TV. I’ve never seen any articles in the paper. We had no clue. We were totally clueless.
“If there had been a sign at that point, saying ‘These are Class V rapids,’ we definitely wouldn’t have put in.
“We were in a place we definitely shouldn’t have been. I was picturing a family canoe trip on a river like (Class I) Swanson River. We’d done Swanson River.
“You look upstream (on Sixmile), it doesn’t look bad. The part you see looks like it’s really nice. There’s some ripples there. The river is moving fast, but it looks fine for a canoe.”
So it was that the Baetens stumbled toward tragedy on the Sixmile.
“It was Memorial weekend, and it was Saturday. We just thought, ‘You know what, it’s such a nice day. Let’s go up in the mountains, and maybe we’ll go for a canoe ride,’ ” Dan said.
The family — Dan, the two boys, wife and mother, Lisa, and two younger daughters — drove north. The weekend before, they had been to the confluence of Canyon and Sixmile creeks below the Seward Highway near the Hope Junction for some gold panning. They decided it would be a good place to return.
As they drove north along the Kenai River, Dan said, they looked at floating the Kenai’s Class II and Class III waters, but he thought, “Oh, there’s quite a bit of water running through there.”
East Fork Sixmile Creek looked more inviting: shallower, narrow, slower. There was a nice pulloff and a gravel ramp that looked like a place where other people had been launching boats.
And though the Baetens had just driven past the wild water between the Hope Cutoff and the put-in, they hadn’t seen it.
“There was no point between the (Canyon Creek) bridge and where we put in where you can look down and see this is a canyon and Class V rapids,” Dan said. “One area, you can see down in. You can see some fast water, but nothing scary.”
As far as the Baetens knew, there was only the rippling water at the start and the rippling water where they planned to take out near Boston Bar, a place near where they had panned for gold the weekend before.
It looked so friendly, Dan thought about taking the whole family.
“All of the kids got their life jackets on,” he said. “There were six of us that were going to go down the river. (But) at the last second my wife said, ‘Are you sure you want to bring the younger ones?’ And I said, ‘What’s the worst that could happen? They could get a little wet.’
“I was thinking the worst it could get was a few little bumps.”
Then Dan took a hard look at the river and could tell the flow was a little high.
“There was a lot of water moving through there,” he said. “The river was moving pretty fast, but at that point, there wasn’t any kind of rapid.”
Still he did decide to leave the girls and Lisa behind. He and the boys would make the first run to check conditions. If it was clear, everyone could go on a second run. The family laughed about taking such precautions.
“You know the kind of jokes,” Dan said. ‘Now don’t tip over and get wet.’ Those kind of jokes.”
It was all in good fun. Lisa shot some video of the gang heading downstream in what Dan called their “cheap, plastic canoes … meant for lakes.”
Off they went onto a creek running so high that commercial rafters had stayed home, judging conditions too dangerous.
IT TAKES A MIRACLE
East Fork Sixmile Creek and Sixmile Creek itself squeeze through three canyons on the way from the Kenai Mountains to Turnagain Arm. The worst of these is the third canyon near Sunrise, where a Class V rapid can become virtually unrunnable at high water.
The two canyons above, including the canyon between Mile 59 and the bridge over Canyon Creek, are rated a less-challenging Class IV, but at high water that can change. They can swell to a Class V status that makes going down the East Fork feel like getting flushed down a toilet.
This was the maelstrom into which Dan and Ben paddled as Brian scrambled up the canyon wall to safety.
“It started getting pretty rough,” Dan said, “and I came around a corner before Gulch Creek, and my eyes just got wide. All I could think was how do I get out of here?”
He was, at that point, looking at a drop of about six feet down a pour over. He learned later this particular obstacle is called 13 Ender because, Dan said, “some kayaker had rolled that many times before he got out.”
Dan went over the top of this pour over not knowing what was about to happen next.
“I got sucked into it,” he said.
The back tow on the other side made it feel like his little canoe had landed on an upstream conveyor belt. As the canoe backed up, the water rushing over the pour over started filling the craft up from the stern.
“With that added weight being pulled to the back,” he said. “It just sucked the canoe to the bottom.”
Dan rolled out. He tried to swim for the surface. He couldn’t.
Behind him, seconds later, the same thing would happen to Ben. Both of them were now in the water, and it was ugly.
“I got sucked to the bottom,” Dan said. “We had some garage-sale life jackets.”
He wished he’d bought something better.
“I remember too vividly what it was like getting sucked to the bottom of the river,” he said, “being dragged along the bottom, trying to inhale and taking it into my lungs.”
The force was such that the clothes he had tied around his waist because the weather was warm were quickly ripped off. He was scared. He remembers telling himself:
“I’ve got to calm down, or I’m going to die.”
The next time the current rolled him to the surface, he managed a couple quick, shallow breaths before he was pulled under again. Unfortunately, he also got a glimpse of where he was headed — into a slot between bedrock walls barely wide enough to pass a raft, a sort of nature-made nozzle on the stream.
“It was boiling, and it was shooting up in the air,” Dan said.
He was shot through underwater. He never saw the bridge that spans this gap. How he didn’t hit his head on the rock walls on either side is, he believes, a miracle. He says the same for Ben, who was behind his father enduring the same experiences.
“We were so lucky,” Dan said. “Probably 90 percent of the time we were underwater — even with life jackets on. There’s so much undertow. You fight it first, but you’re bounced off the walls and the bottom and pretty soon you don’t know what’s up and what’s down.”
Somewhere in the canyon, he came up near shore, saw a small birch tree, reached out and grabbed it.
“I was so exhausted,” he said. “I hauled myself out and laid on the bank for just like three second to gasp for breath. I looked upriver, and here comes Ben. He was just out of reach. Maybe I could have reached him. I don’t know. I was so exhausted I couldn’t move.”
Ben floated past, and then Dan did something only a father could do.
“I couldn’t see my son just going back downriver,” Dan said, “So I jumped back in.”
Ben saw him then, Dan said, and yelled, “Dad, I love you.” He thought those were going to be his last words.
“He was right next to me when that happened, and then he got sucked under. I got sucked under in the same spot. That was the last I saw of Ben.”
Father and son were now little more than rag dolls washing down the creek.
“There was one point I was underwater so long that I thought, ‘OK, this is it, this is the end,’ ” Dan said. “I remember feeling just a real deep depression that I had just killed my son. I was thinking I’m supposed to be there for my family to provide for them, and take care of them, and now I’m going to die here in the river.
“I was so certain it was the end, I just opened my eyes underwater and noticed this dark brown murkiness.
“I don’t know why I did it. I guess I just wanted to see the end.”
A devote Christian, Dan believes what happened next was a miracle.
“I honestly believe an angel grabbed hold of my life jacket and pulled me up, because I was at the end,” he said. “I can hold my breath for a long time, probably a minute and a half, but I was under for a long time.”
He came up just long enough to replenish the oxygen in his lungs. Then he went under again.
“I can’t adequately describe what power that river had,” he said.
He thought it would never let him go and then, just like that, it spit him out. He popped up in slower water, looked up, saw a small birch tree, grabbed it and pulled himself ashore.
“I hadn’t seen Ben anymore, so when I grabbed onto that I pulled myself out and grabbed two quick breaths and started scrambling,” he said.
He tried to run downriver to see if his son had washed out, too, but cliffs prevented that. Numb, exhausted, panicky, he shimmied along a narrow ledge to at least try to get a look downriver.
“I got around this point,” he said, “and I looked downriver, and I could not see my son. I yelled his name. I got no answer. After what I went through, I’m positive he died in that river.”
TRAPPED ON SHORE
Still, Dan was driven to do what he could. He figured if he got on top of the canyon wall maybe he could run downstream to search, so he started climbing. He ended up trapped.
“I got into a spot where I couldn’t go up. I couldn’t go down. I couldn’t go sideways,” he said. “It was about an 80-foot drop straight into the river. I didn’t know what to do. I’m panicky. I’m yelling my son’s name.”
And suddenly Ben is there, peering over the cliff.
“He’d gone farther downriver,” Dan said. “He had about given up. He said he had no strength left whatsoever when he actually kind of washed up right next to shore. He laid his arm up and laid it on some brush and just grabbed hold of it.”
He scrambled onto land and headed upriver looking for his dad. Now they were both alive and ashore, but Dan had to find a way off the cliff. Improvising tools, he found a stick, carved some foot holes and climbed to the top.
“Ben just sort of fell to the ground then and started shaking uncontrollably when I got there,” Dan said. “I didn’t notice how cold the water was until then. When you get into Class V rapids like that, there’s no swimming. You’re just moving on what little adrenaline you have left.”
Out of adrenaline now, Ben was shaking from a delayed reaction to the cold and the fright. Dan dropped to the ground and put his arms around his son.
“I let him sit there for a couple minutes,” Dan said. “Then I told him we needed to move, to get downriver to tell Mom we were OK.”
There was only one problem. They had washed out on the opposite side of the river from where the rest of the family had gone to wait to pick them up near Boston Bar.
“As far as we knew,” Dan added, “there was no bridge going across Six Mile River. We were underwater all the time. We never saw bridge.”
Now, thinking there was no bridge, they decided the only thing they could do was hike back upstream to where the trip had started and swim across. They feared getting in the river below the confluence with Canyon Creek where the stream only got bigger.
They were surprised when the hike upstream brought them to the bridge near Gulch Creek.
“It looked so good I can’t even explain it,’ Dan said. “(But) when we crossed it, we were like, ‘Where are we?’ “
They weren’t sure where to go next and split up to follow different trails toward the sound of the nearby highway.
The family, meanwhile, was in its own little panic. Brian, after getting out of the water, had managed to run downstream to the shore of Canyon Creek where he waved and screamed at his mother and the girls waiting on the far shore for the arrival of the canoes.
Lisa couldn’t hear what he was saying over the rush of water but knew immediately something was wrong.
“(Brian) got there probably 20 minutes before Ben and I got to that point,” Dan said. “Brian was pretty upset at that point.”
Lisa would quickly come to share his fears.
She loaded the family in their Suburban and quickly drove back around Canyon Creek to a parking lot above the stream on Brian’s side. What she heard from him when they met was unnerving. The family immediately started searching for Dan and Ben. They ran into others who joined the search. One of them told Lisa she’d better notify Alaska State Troopers to get a raft to look for Dan and Ben across the river. Others started to fill in the history about how many people had died in Sixmile.
“It was pretty scary,” she said.
And then, Dan and Ben stumbled into view. It wouldn’t take long for the whole family to concluded they had witnessed a miracle.
“I didn’t realize how fortunate we were until we started talking to other people,” Dan said. “It seems like everybody has a story about someone who has gone down the river and died.”
When Dan went back and hiked the canyon, he could see why.
“I went over some spillways and stuff,” he said. “Looking at that, I couldn’t believe we actually lived through it.”
NO SYMPATHY, JUST SIGNS
Dan is now lobbying the U.S. Forest Service to put up a sign at the Mile 59 pullout to warn others of the danger downstream. The federal agency, which manages Sixmile Creek as part of Chugach National Forest, has so far refused to do that.
Dan said a Forest Service employee explained the agency can’t starting signing every possible danger in the Chugach, and added that what happened was really Dan’s fault.
“He has a point,” Dan said. “It was our fault. But if I’d had any idea at all it was going to be like that, we would have walked away from the river.”
Dan said he did get the Forest Service to agree to leave in place laminated signs the Baeten family made and posted at the pullout. They also put one upstream from there on the creek warning anyone who happens to float down from the Forest Service campground at Granite Creek that the highway represents the last, safe takeout before the canyon.
The Baetens know now how lucky they were to have survived to tell this tale.
“The fact we didn’t hit our heads underwater is a miracle in itself,” Dan said. “I totally believe the garage-sale life jackets saved our lives, but by the same token, we’re going to get some better life jackets.
“I was tortured for a good week with the ‘what-ifs,’ ” he added. “What if I’d brought the younger ones? What if we hadn’t been wearing life jackets? What if Ben had been washed under those logs?
“It was so traumatic. That first week, there was so much going on in my mind. I was just struggling (emotionally). I almost took a 5-year-old into that.
“(But) I don’t want anybody’s sympathy or empathy. I’m just interested in saving somebody else’s life. There has got to be a warning sign put up, or somebody else is going to die there.”
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Copyright (c) 2006, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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