A Splendid, Dangerous Place

The Tustumena Lake area is spectacularly beautiful. Its eponymous glacier flows from its Kenai Mountain and Harding Icefield origins to the braided glacial stream that pumps silt into the head of the 26-mile-long lake and provides a major source of its turquoise-gray hue.

Around the circumference of the lake, the terrain varies from hills and mountains draped with birch, aspen, spruce and cottonwood to dense swamps, inland lakes and meandering streams, a wide swath of glacial gravel, a long peninsula that during high water becomes Caribou Island, and finally, at the lake’s northwestern extremity, its outlet, the Kasilof River, which drains into Cook Inlet.

Animal life abounds in and around the lake. It is a final destination for spawning salmon and a banquet for the bears that feed upon those spawners. Its banks are trod by moose, its hills by caribou, its woods and stream banks by myriad fur-bearers, including wolves, coyotes, lynx and snowshoe hares. Swans and other waterfowl ply its waters. Raptors and scavenger birds nest in its high trees.

To newcomers, residents and longtime users, this place can seem like a paradise. But make no mistake: Tustumena Lake is a place also fraught with peril. Over the years, many people have lost their lives there — or come close — even when they respected the dangers and may even have tried to protect themselves against them.

Most of the Tustumena travelers who have perished have drowned in the lake or crashed airplanes into the water and the surrounding high country. At least one died of an accidental gunshot. At least two died by falling through lake ice in the winter. One man may even have been murdered.

People have been mauled by bears, suffered from exposure, succumbed to medical emergencies far the nearest doctor, become lost in the immensity of the wilderness, and been the victims of myriad accidents. The vast majority of visitors survive; an unfortunate few do not.

Historically, human beings have been coming to the lake since at least the 1880s. Prehistorically, those human visits stretch back uncounted generations — for hunting and for use as a travel corridor. In more modern times, people have come to the lake in search of big game, to seek gold, to trap, to find solitude. They have established trails into the high country. They have flown in, boated in, hiked in, even wandered aimlessly in.

A handful of these people have established inholdings in what is now a wilderness area in the massive Kenai National Wildlife Refuge.

For myself, I have what I consider an understandable and healthy fear of the lake. My very first experience on Tustumena occurred in July 1970, when a calm day turned suddenly, unexpectedly turbulent.

My father had hired local guide Phil Ames to take him, my mother and sister and me out onto the lake. Accompanying us, all in the same, wide-bottomed boat, were five members of a visiting family from Indiana. What began as a pleasant tour of the lower lake changed drastically when a sudden storm interrupted changed our plans.

In the subsequent high winds, the five children were placed on the floorboards, huddled together and covered with a tarp, while Phil pounded his craft through the chop and the whitecaps in an attempt to find a decent place to land and seek shelter. We beached at Nikolai Creek just as the storm began to ease and then ceased.

The pouring rained stopped. The sun broke from behind the clouds, and we shed our raingear and spent the next hour picnicking and watching salmon navigate the creek. The rest of the day was so nice that it seemed impossible that it had so recently been treacherous.

But that is the way of things on Tustumena. Amazing one moment, terrifying the next.

Close Calls and Misfortune

This series of articles will explore what research indicates were the deadliest two years on Tustumena Lake: 1965 and 1975. At least four people died on the lake in 1965 — all in a single accident — and a fifth individual, if not for an impressive self-rescue, might easily have joined them. At least seven people died on or in the vicinity of the lake in 1975 — in four separate incidents.

Most of these incidents will be covered in some depth in the chapters to come, but at this time I want to acknowledge some of the other Tustumena tragedies and close calls that have occurred over the years.

The earliest Tustumena Lake death for which a record has thus far been found occurred in December 1902. The victim was an employee of the Northwestern Mining & Development Company, which was developing a large-scale placer-mining operation on Indian Creek, which flows into the upper end of the lake.

Although it was nearing mid-December, Tustumena Lake had not yet frozen over, and two men, James Gorden Chase and A.L. Weaver, were paddling a Peterborough canoe up the lake from its river outlet to the mining camp. They had been in Kasilof, preparing a load of freight to be sledded to the mine once conditions were right.

As they neared the camp, according to an account in the Alaska Prospector (Valdez), the stiff breeze into which they been paddling became a sudden squall and the two men found themselves capsized into the frigid water. They reached the canoe and tried to climb onto it, but the wind and waves made it nearly impossible to hang on.

Finally, Chase succumbed to the cold and slid beneath the surface of the lake. Weaver then managed to reach the shore somehow, losing consciousness in the process; he awoke to the ministrations of men who had raced to his rescue. It is unknown whether Chase’s body was ever recovered.

About a year later, friends of Chase erected a wooden sign memorializing him. He had been a 34-year-old bachelor, a Freemason, a former resident of Denver, and he had joined the mining company because of the lucrative pay it offered. The memorial sign stood for several decades and was protected by longtime hunting guide Andrew Berg, whose home on the lake was nearby.

In 1914, another drowning occurred, also in winter. When Gust Ness’s trapping partner, Roy Ericson (of Seward) failed to return to camp, Ness (of Kenai) went looking for him. Ericson had been out ice-skating, alone, and Ness, on foot, followed his tracks out onto the lake. Eventually, the tracks ended at a hole in the ice.

When Robert Huttle spent the winter of 1933-34 on Tustumena Lake, he traveled widely, documented his treks carefully with camera and journal, and listened attentively to the stories told by the locals around the lake. One of those stories had originated a decade earlier when a man known as Dr. John A. Flanders had spent a winter on the lake.

Flanders, who, it was later learned, was actually a German immigrant named Rudolph Gries, told lake residents that he would be living with his nephew, a man named Jack Harney (or possibly Barney), at a cabin called the Cliff House, at the head of the lake, and the two of them would be constructing a fancy lodge there for future hunting parties.

Harney disappeared at some point, and rumor had it that “Flanders” — who was arrested in Kenai, tried in Cordova and imprisoned in Washington, all on unrelated charges — had had a dispute with Harney and had killed him, either disposing of the body in the lake somewhere near the Cliff House or burying the body somewhere behind the cabin. These rumors were never substantiated, and the whereabouts of Harney after 1924 are unknown.

In subsequent years, there was a bear attack on two men in 1928, resulting in no injuries; an airplane wreck in 1949, resulting in a badly damaged plane but no injuries; a bear mauling in 1958 that led to a hospital stay for a Kentucky hunter, and many other close calls for people in boats and planes or on foot.

There were also — outside of 1965 and 1975 — a number of other fatalities: Tustumena resident Joseph Secora and pilot Wayne Bishop, flying in an Aeronca Champion, crashed in the mountains above the lake on Feb. 23, 1972. Both men died.

Seward resident Wes Kielczewski drowned in Tustumena Lake when his snowmobile broke through the lake ice near the mouth of Indian Creek in 1974. His trapping partner, Joe Megargel, wandered out onto the ice, following Kielczewski’s tracks, and discovered the hole; he then walked all night, about 30 miles, to reach a telephone in Kasilof and report the incident to Alaska State Troopers.

In early June 2011, Kenai residents Ashley Udelhoven and Katarina Anderson suffered hypothermia and drowned during a boating accident in stormy conditions on the lake. Three others from the same boat managed to make it to shore.

NEXT TIME: The Cordova Airlines crash of 1965….

Photo courtesy of the Secora Collection This 1939 Joe Secora photograph shows the wooden marker on the grave of James Chase, who drowned in Tustumena Lake in 1902.