Fortymile River

About

Fortymile River, Alaska — 1980 Wild Scenic, 1886 Gold Rush, 1900s Frontier, 1990s-2010s Fortymile Trail 392-mi Fortymile. The Fortymile's human story predates the prospectors. In pre-contact times the watershed was the ancestral homeland of the Hän and Gwich'in peoples, and the river later served as a key transportation route through the 1880–1898 Gold Rush era. When gold turned up at Franklin's Bar in 1886, and at the confluence of the North and South Forks that same year, it touched off Alaska's first major gold rush and drew miners deep into country that had seen little outside traffic. The rush here preceded the 1896–1903 Klondike strike downstream, and the mining district it created outlasted the initial frenzy, carrying through a 1903–1910s Fortymile mining era.

The forests paid for the mines. From the 1880s through the 1940s the Fortymile watershed was logged to feed the 1890–1930 Yukon-Charley mining industry, the 1898–1910s White Pass & Yukon Route Railroad expansion, and the fuel needs of the Fortymile mining camps. The 1890–1925 Fortymile and Eagle sawmills, the Yukon River mining-fuel industry, and the 1920s–1940s camp operations were the major players. Large-scale cutting wound down as the white-spruce stands were exhausted around 1925, forestry conservation began in 1930, and the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act closed the era for good.

The river had been studied long before it was protected. In 1898 a USGS survey led by E.C. Barnard produced the first comprehensive hydrological study of the watershed, documenting streamflow records back to 1886 and the high-flow events of 1897–1898. That early survey later became part of the basis for the 1980 ANILCA designation, which named the Fortymile as one of the first eight rivers protected in Alaska. The numbers behind the designation are substantial: 392 total miles, broken into 179 miles of Wild River, 203 miles of Recreational River, and 10 miles of Scenic River.

The river surrenders to the Yukon as a major tributary, joining that river roughly forty miles below the old trading post at Fort Reliance — the source of the name. The history of the country is still legible in the cabins and mine workings scattered along the stream, and the modern towns of Fortymile, Eagle, and Chicken still lean on it economically.

Recent work has focused on repair. In 2024 the Fortymile River Restoration Program — a joint effort of the National Park Service's Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, the Tanana Chiefs Conference, and others — removed four fish-passage barriers and restored six miles of riparian buffer. That work supported a 2018–2024 Alaska Department of Fish and Game salmon recovery effort that documented a 92% recovery of native Chinook salmon populations. The Preserve marked the river's 44th anniversary under ANILCA in 2024 and logged 1,800 user-days that year, a 38% increase over 2018. For anglers, the draw is the fishery it sustains: Arctic grayling, round whitefish, and burbot, in backcountry that still asks something of the people who reach it.