Tanana River

About

Tanana River, Alaska — Nenana Ice Classic, Tetlin NWR, Yukon Confluence. Hydrologically, the Tanana is a big, forgiving river. USGS streamgage 15515500 logs an average flow around 33,000 cubic feet per second, with a historic reference figure of 29,700, and paddlers generally find the best water between 10,000 and 80,000 cfs. Rated Class I–II, it is more a highway than an obstacle course — a working river rather than a whitewater run. That character reflects its scale: the Tanana drains about 44,000 square miles of interior Alaska on its 584-mile course from the Nabesna–Chisana confluence to the Yukon.

The river divides naturally into three reaches. The Upper Tanana, from Tok to Delta, covers roughly 150 miles of pike and burbot water. The Middle Tanana runs about 100 miles from Delta to Fairbanks through mixed water. Below Fairbanks, the Lower Tanana stretches some 200 miles to the Yukon, holding sheefish and salmon — the reach that has long supported both subsistence and commercial harvest. The river's Chinook run is the second-largest in the entire Yukon drainage, trailing only the main Yukon itself.

Human history here runs deep. The Tanana is the ancestral homeland of the Tanana Athabascan peoples, whose name for the river gave the region its modern name, and archaeological evidence points to settlement for at least 6,000 years. Fish camps along the banks were central to summer subsistence, and in winter the frozen river became a travel route by dog sled between interior villages. Beginning in the 1830s and continuing into the 1920s, the watershed was logged to feed a regional timber industry and railroad expansion, until the exhaustion of old-growth stands and the rise of state forestry brought large-scale cutting to a close.

Euro-American commerce arrived in 1880, when the Alaska Commercial Company established Harper's Station, a trading post sited 13 miles downriver from the present location of Tanana. The gold rushes of the 1880s brought sustained outside contact, and infrastructure followed the traffic. The Alaska Railroad's final bridge crossed the Tanana at Nenana in 1922, and Fairbanks gained the Sgt. John A. Vance Bridge in 1969. The river's floodplain southeast of Fairbanks also holds the Dyke Range Impact Area, a 15-mile land withdrawal used for military training.

The modern river is shaped by land-claims history and enduring tradition. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 resolved land claims in the Tanana basin and created Doyon, Limited, the interior's Alaska Native regional corporation and now one of the largest private landowners in the United States, managing extensive lands along the river for subsistence, timber, and minerals. Since the 1960s, the Tanana-Yukon Historical Society has worked to preserve the history of Fairbanks and Interior Alaska. And the Nenana Ice Classic endures as the state's most persistent guessing game, drawing wagers on breakup each spring since 1917. Today the Tanana carries an ADF&G sheefish fishery and subsistence-priority status, sustaining commercial fishing at its mouth, Tanana Athabascan village harvests, and a sport fishery along the Fairbanks reach.