Middle Fork Fortymile River

About

Middle Fork Fortymile River, Alaska — 1980 Wild Scenic, 1900s Frontier, 1840s-1880s Gold, 1990s-2010s M Fork Fortymile Trail 100-mi Chicken. The Middle Fork belongs to a larger clear-water system: the Fortymile is a stream whose six main forks and their tributaries flow out of the Yukon-Tanana Uplands, east of the Mertie Mountains, braiding across some of the most rugged country in the interior. There is no active USGS gauge reporting real-time discharge here — streamgage 15331000 carries no available flow record — so the river's rhythms are read from the country itself rather than a number on a screen. Rated Class IV, it is a demanding run through protected wilderness.

Long before the miners arrived, the river flowed through the ancestral territory of the Athabascan peoples of the interior — among them the Gwich'in, Koyukon, Tanana, Ingalik, and Deg Hit'an. It served as a travel corridor, a fishing ground, and a gathering place, especially critical for the salmon, whitefish, and sheefish runs that sustained entire communities. The modern legal framework for that relationship was built in stages: the 1867 Alaska Purchase from Russia, and later the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), the largest aboriginal land claims settlement in U.S. history.

The river's defining chapter, though, turns on gold. The 1886 rush drew prospectors deep into the territory and forever altered the region. Compared with rivers of the Lower 48, the Fortymile country saw only modest logging from the 1900s through the 1950s — the short growing season, the difficulty of access, and the lack of rail transport limited Alaska's commercial timber industry, sparing the watershed the large-scale clear-cutting seen elsewhere.

Protection came in 1980. On December 2 of that year the Middle Fork was designated a National Wild and Scenic River, joining a system that in Alaska includes the Alagnak, the Andreafsky, the Charley, the John, the Ivishak, the Nowitna, the Selawik, the Sheenjek, the Tinayguk, the Tlikakila, the Unalakleet, the Wind, and the Noatak, among others. The same year, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) protected more than 100 million acres of federal land, including 13.5 million acres of national park and wildlife refuge land — a conservation framework that holds the channel much as the Athabascans and the first miners knew it.

The present chapter is one of recovery. Since 2010, the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, in partnership with the Tanana Chiefs Conference and other Alaska Native tribal governments, has worked to address more than a century of mining, military, and industrial impacts. Recent efforts include streambank stabilization, native fish restocking — particularly for king (chinook) and coho salmon, which have been in crisis since 2010 — and the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim Sustainable Salmon Initiative. On the Middle Fork today, the 1886 rush and the quiet permanence of protected country run together in the same cold, clear current.