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Stupid American Question: Which parts are those?

We put in near Dalton Post (named after Jack Dalton, 19th-century adventurer and scam artist), a tiny settlement near Kluane National Park on the RV route to Haines, Alaska--last chance for tabloids, telephones, or toothpaste until our disgorgement at Dry Bay, Alaska, 160 miles distant. There can be nothing tentative about entering the swift and muscular Tatshenshini; a case of beer carelessly let slip is swept out of sight in a moment. Launching our boats into the chalk-green waters, we give chase.

"We" are 17 adults, two hyperactive adolescents, and five good-natured guides, all of us floating briskly now through scrubby boreal forests of alder and spruce, snow-streaked mountains to the north and east, mighty river down the middle. Before it meets the Alsek River and pours through the St. Elias Range into the Pacific, the Tat will be joined by scores of tributaries adding runoff from the last Ice Age. What we see now is only a whisper of its power.

That full force is first unveiled in the Canyon, a narrow basalt defile that contorts the river into the liveliest whitewater of the entire journey. After a safety talk by bald-pated trip leader Jock Richardson that would have prepared us to raft the Grand Canyon in a bathtub, we enter an appropriately dizzying succession of holes, rapids, and "reversals," where walls of water flow upstream after bouncing off subsurface boulders. We fall to with the paddles in well-intentioned but largely ineffectual attempts to aid our oarsmen, emerging at last safe if soaked. Despite the finest water-repellent raingear, a wave over the top will always find its way in.

Drying out around a driftwood fire, we start to get acquainted. There is A1,

a tax lawyer from Chicago who has never spent a night outdoors in his life; Jay and Earl, adventurous retirees from North Carolina; a Montessori teacher from New Jersey; a couple of foresters from .; two Canadian lawyers in love. Special guest stars are Ric Careless and Dona Reel, the nucleus of Tatshenshini International, a coalition of 50 North American environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club, dedicated to preserving the river. This trip is supposed to be a family holiday for them and Ric's daughter Sheena, but no sooner is the name "Windy Craggy" mentioned than Dona digs out the flyers and Ric unrolls the maps, pointing out where the mine tailings would be dumped on the glaciers, where the highway would bisect the most bountiful grizzly-bear denning ground in the world, where the slurry lines would cross salmon-rich streams, where the top of a mountain would vanish to reappear in Asian smelters.

We glide easily into the comfortable rhythms of a long river trip, the developed world receding as far psychically as it has physically. By the third day we cross the Yukon border, entering into far northwestern British Columbia, wherein lies the bulk of the Tatshen-shini-Alsek river system. This obscure corner of Canada, shoe horned into the Alaska panhandle, is difficult to locate on many maps, even for not-so-stupid Americans. There's not much to show up on a map; just million acres of roadless, townless, unlogged, unmined wilderness. Also unprotected: this is Crown Land (equivalent to BLM land in the United States), ripe for development and preserved thus far largely by grace of its extreme inaccessibility. The only road is the Haines Highway through Dalton Post, and Haines is the nearest port. (Canada could claim an outlet on the Gulf of Alaska, if only the Grand Pacific Glacier on Glacier Bay would grow instead of shrink. Canadian engineers have actually studied the possibility of establishing a port there, but the Ice Age cycle is working against them.)

The area's lack of protection seems almost an oversight--although a fortuitous one from Geddes' point of view. ("This isn't pristine wilderness," former Geddes president Gerald Harper once famously asserted. "It's barren land.") Bordering it on three sides are major national parks: Canada's Kluane to the north, and Alaska's Wrangell-St. Elias to the west and Glacier Bay to the south. If conservationists can defeat Geddes, the next step will be to protect the entire area as a wilderness preserve. Together with the neighboring national parks, it would form the largest protected area on Earth: 23 million acres.

We have no need of maps, however. For us there is only one direction as we are flushed like smolt to the sea, our progress attended by merlins, golden and bald eagles, mergansers with their punkish crests, arctic terns helicoptering over suspected fish. Gnawed stumps are everywhere, but it is a foolish beaver that dreams of damming this river. Beaching our boats for lunch, we send an enormous moose gallumphing away; on the mountains beyond our camp at Sediments Creek are sex-segregated mountain goats, nannies and kids on one slope, billies on the other. Garbo-like, mountain goats only want to be alone, spending three-quarters of their lives above the angle of repose, the point above which loose stones (and less-sure-looted predators) will simply tumble.

Even so, we follow after, 3,000 vertical feet up a well-worn bear trail. (The concept of "switchback" is evidently unfamiliar to Canadian grizzlies.) Aspens along the way are scarred to an alarming height by climbing claws, inspiring vigorous admonitory hoots and shouts. "Yo bear!" is the standard exclamation, "Yo-gi!" and "Boo-Boo!" popular alternatives. As a Cal graduate, I find use for our old football cheer: "Roll on, you Bears!" Jay bays like a North Carolina hound dog. All of these methods, happily, are equally effective.

From the high ridgetop we can see as far back as the Canyon, and as far downstream as the O'Connor River Valley, where what appears to be a cloudbank proves instead to be the unexplored Tkope Glacier, our first hint of the iceworld to come. Closer at hand up Sediments Creek is a knife-edged horn mountain, circled by three eagles. (The romantic Germans, had they made it this far, would have envisioned a painting called "Das Aerie.") Scrambling back down through the heat and dust, we each drink rather more than our daily allotment of beers, and assume our own angle of repose.

On slower days the guides can be talked into surrendering the oars for a piloting lesson. There is rather more to guiding an oarboat than might appear; far from simply drifting down the lazy river, it is a constant exercise in disaster avoidance, of identifying which rock, half-submerged snag, or sheer cliff-face the current is propelling you toward, and then rowing like hell to alter the apparent course of history. The trick is learning which hazard to worry about--not the boulder directly before you, as common sense might suggest, but the sandbar a hundred yards away. It's no wonder that, when need be, river rafters can adapt so readily to politics.

The Tatshenshini served for centuries as a trade route for the Tuchone Indians. Apart from a hair-raising ride by British explorer Edward James Glave (accompanied by Jack Dalton) in 1890, it was not run by European-Americans until 1976. The much rougher Alsek (Class IV-VI to the Tat's Class III) was first attempted by kayaker Walt Blackadar in 1971. "I'm not coming back," he wrote midway through, after an involuntary excursion upside-down under a glacier. "Not for $50,000. Not for all the tea in China. Read my words well and don't be a fool. It's unpaddleable." Despite Blackadar's admonition, the Alsek is now regularly run save for narrow "Turnback Canyon," where the Tweedsmuir Glacier presses to the water's edge, and a helicopter portage is necessary.

While romantic rafters and conservationists got their first inkling of the area in the 1970s, the mining engineers were already several steps ahead. They hit paydirt at Windy Craggy way back in 1958, initially with a gold strike (later deemed uneconomical), then with a fabulously rich field of copper ore--an estimated 300 million tons, or 1 percent of the world's total reserves. If 600 miners work around the clock 365 days a year, as Geddes plans, they will take 30 years to scrape it clean.

It's hard to talk about "clean," though, when the topic is copper. Exposed to air and water, copper sulfide oxidizes into sulfuric acid, which strips out poisonous heavy metals from surrounding rocks and acidities whatever body of water it flows into. This process, called acid mine drainage, can poison watercourses for centuries; it has already killed 4,000 miles of rivers and streams in the United States alone, and costs the . mining industry a million dollars a day to try to control. The potential dangers at Windy Craggy are compounded by the fact that its ore is six times more sulfurous than normal. Acid pollution of the Tatshenshini would devastate the salmon fishery at Dry Bay, as well as the bears, eagles, and other creatures whose lives depend on a living river.

Acknowledging that "the sensitivity of the local environment requires superior environmental management," Geddes promises "the latest and best technology" to control acid mine drainage. This technology will consist of dumping 124 million tons of tailings with the highest sulfur content in an artificial lake in a nearby valley, between earthen dams 150 feet and 300 feet high, draining into the Alsek and Tatshenshini respectively. Putatively non-acid-generating rock would be dumped on the N Cirque and Marie glaciers. If someone makes a mistake and dumps the wrong kind of rock on the glaciers, or ira dam fails, or if the enormous open pit doesn't drain properly, it's adieu Alsek, goodbye Tatshenshini.

Five days out, the weather turns dank. Rather than swelling the river with runoff, the cooling puts the brakes on glacial melt, causing the water level to drop two feet overnight. Sandy river-banks turn thixotropic: Jumping on the super-saturated soil sends it quivering like a waterbed, until the surface tension breaks and the quicksand sucks you in--not so quickly, however, that the merits of rescuing pesky children cannot be debated.

Still strong, the current rushes us along at 10 mph past Carmine Mountain, a massif of iron ore red as a new sore. As at Windy Craggy, the earth's wealth is close to the surface here. We enter a series of twisting narrows and major waves, with bald eagles perched on snags around each bend, one flying off with a salmon in its talons (headfirst, as always, for superior aerodynamics). The deeper we cut toward the coast the more imposing grows the landscape--mountains starker, trees taller, river fuller. The boreal forest yields to lusher coastal growth, and soon we are surprised by the resolute passage of herring gulls flapping upriver.

Where the O'Connor River sweeps in from the east we pause to admire a negative: had it not been for the hazard-spotting ability of Ric Careless and a small number of rafters like Ken Madsen and Johnny Mikes of Canadian River Expeditions, a 700-foot bridge and slurry pipeline would now span this confluence. The road--"the proposed road," insists Careless, "the road that's not going to happen"--would hug the river valley for 12 miles, crossing 11 additional bridges before turning up Tats Creek to Windy Craggy. It would bisect the only winter range of Dall sheep in British Columbia, and what may be the highest concentration of grizzly-bear dens anywhere. Even if the Windy Craggy proposal were to fail, the road would still literally pave the way for more; Geddes exec Gerald Harper prophesied that the project "will open up an entire mining district to development." Geddes originally planned to truck its ore 150 miles to Haines--one truck every 12 minutes around the clock When the Alaskans objected, Geddes proposed instead delivering the ore to port via slurry pipeline-- which would pass over our heads where we now stand.

"You could share this view with your children and grand-children," says Jock as we survey the scene. "But if you don't do anything about it, this memory is for you and you alone."

We camp just past Henshi Creek in a tiny clearing wedged between river and forest, whose alleged impenetrability we test by trying to take a walk, comically guarded by young guide Colin Bunge self-consciously toting a canister of bear mace and a shotgun. We can get no more than 50 yards in any direction before being stopped by dense brush and latent common sense. To the east we pull up short at a well-worn bear scratching tree, where tawny hair is stuck to the sap. To the west are tracks of a large grizzly in the mud, indicating that it had recently strolled through what is now our campsite. To the south is a fresh pile of bear scat and the most obvious bear den there ever was, a neat little cubby dug into a bank under a tree's sheltering roots. Even though it is obvious that Boo-Boo is not present (although the light doesn't reach quite all the way back in the hole), a warning buzz in the medulla oblongata nonetheless makes everyone keep a respectful distance, and, one by one, remember pressing tasks back at the camp. That night 11-year-old Matthew Robinson makes the mistake of taking Stephen Herrero's classic Bear Attacks to bed with him, and lies awake until dawn.

As it happened, Herrero himself was in the neighborhood, conducting the first detailed bear survey of the Tats Creek area. While he dissected bear scat far up the mountain, another team, led by Heather Hamilton of the Sierra Club of Eastern Canada, was conducting baseline biological research at the mouth of Tats Creek--another first. "In the 1950s, Glen Canyon was 'The Place No One Knew."' says Careless. "We lost it. If we don't discover what's here, we'll lose it too."

We've brought an extra crate of food with which to reprovision the researchers--none too soon, it turns out, as their dinner the night before had consisted of nothing more than noodles with ranch dressing. Excited by their work, however, they scarcely seem to notice. "We'll probably know ten times as much as we did before alter just three weeks here," says George Douglas, a botanist with the Conservation Data Center who has been working in the region for 20 years. (In contrast, the wildlife survey conducted by Geddes consisted of one naturalist surveying the area for a day and a half from a plane.) "You won't find any place in North America wilder than this one," Douglas says. (On my return toWhitehorse, I finally encountered Herrero, a lank, rangy man with the distant air of someone who spends more time outdoors than in. He hypothesized that the Tatshenshini Valley, "the green line connecting the coast to the interior," serves as an important migration route for bears traveling between Glacier Bay and Kluane. If so, their most likely path would take them up Tats Creek past the Windy Craggy Mine. Herrero's most sensational discovery, however, was the state of Geddes' preliminary development at the minesite. He found that six of seven major buildings, including the portal to the exploratory mineshaft itself, had collapsed over the winter due to the accumulation of snow. "Some of the Quonset huts looked like a great big bear had stood on them and squashed them," he said. Not a very comforting demonstration of the engineering abilities of a company that must guarantee the integrity of its impoundment pond essentially forever.)

"Does this river come out where it started?" To their own great amusement, the guides are back onto Stupid American Questions-as asked on the Vancouver ferry ("What altitude are we at?") and on the river ("Why are we always going downhill?"). The Tat is now a churning monster of gray-green lava; sediment crackles on the bottoms of our boats like popcorn. Behind us, a moose and her calf attempt to cross the torrent. The calf flounders and seems likely to be swept away until mom returns to swim alongside, breaking the current with her body.

Nearing the confluence with the Alsek, we are enveloped in a thick, frigid river fog. Occasional holes in the curtain reveal rocky peaks looming high over us on either side, glaciers curling like scarves around their shoulders. Otherwise we can scarcely see to the next raft. There is no sound save the rhythmic plash of oars, and I half expect a familiar voice to tell me that I have just entered the Twilight Zone. Occasional raggedy eagles flap by, then three herring gulls in pursuit of a warbler. Ten feet off our bow, the lead gull snatches the tiny bird in its .mouth and flies off to make its meal.

By the time the fog clears several hours later, we have been joined by the Alsek, the Tatshenshini's wilder, less-hospitable sister. Visibility, however, does little to help us comprehend the scene. The redoubled river seems to be pouring into a box canyon, ringed on every side by sheer walls of snowy peaks. Just when it seems we must dive beneath the rock wall, the mystery is solved: the river hits the Icefield Range and takes a 90-degree turn to the south, the first in a series of major jogs following the lines of earthquake fault systems. This is the most seismically active zone in Canada; in 1899, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America ( on the Richter scale) thrust mountains up 47 feet and caused glaciers to surge halfa mile in five minutes. In 1958 a quake triggered massive rockslides, raised up miles of land at Glacier Bay, and sent a 1,800-foot tidal wave sweeping over Lituya Bay. These are the forces Windy Craggy's toxic tailings pond must be proof against for thousands of years.

We cross the international border (no customs post in sight) and into the upper reaches of Glacier Bay National Park. We can tell we're in Alaska by our greeting that evening when we stroll down from our campsite to visit a neighboring party of rafters. A burly Colorado contractor glances disdainfully at the cayenne-spray canister on Jock's belt: "So that's your bear mace? This here's mine ..." Whereupon he pulls out a .454 magnum (a massive appliance subsequently known at our camp as "the hogleg") and offers all comers the opportunity to take a shot at defenseless Walker Glacier.

The glacier is not so called after an eminent bear hunter or copper prospector, but because you can easily walk on it. This we do the next morning, peering into crevasses, listening to rumbling streams at the bottoms of moulins, and marveling at clumps of moss stubbornly clinging to the ice. ("Wherever life has not died out," wrote Brecht, "it staggers to its feet again.") Ric finds a boulder wedged at the top of a crevasse, and persuades Dona to sit on it while he takes pictures, until a sudden gust of wind sends her hat spinning into the turquoise depths. Perhaps in 20,000 years, Icom' fort, the hat on the Tat will come back.

THE SHAREHOLDERS Of Geddes Resources have little to celebrate this new year. A change of government in British Columbia has brought to power the considerably more environment-minded New Democratic Party, which scathingly rejected Geddes' original mining plan, and has now announced that it will consider a range of options for the area--including, for the first time, complete preservation. In a rare turnabout, resource-extraction interests are on the defensive. "Killing the project sends an extremely negative message to the mining industry about British Columbia," noted Toronto's Financial Past, "But not killing it will totally alienate the NDP's environmental supporters. Compared to them, the Tatshenshini grizzlies are puppy dogs."

The Windy Craggy proposal's weakest point, however, is its necessary reliance on the cooperation of the United States. The slurry pipeline to Haines would have to cross the Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve, where a spill into the river would be catastrophic. Haines' own $41-million salmon fishery would be put at risk by the daily discharge of 360,000 gallons of slurry effluent into the Lynn Canal--all for the sake of the 12 jobs the ore terminal would provide.

Consequently, Tatshenshini International has been diligent in working the . side of the border as well, making the Tatshenshini, according to Careless, "the first Canadian wilderness issue ever formally addressed by the . Congress." Last year Senator Albert Gore (D-Tenn.) and Representative Wayne Owens (D-Utah) introduced a resolution calling for the entire area to be made a World Heritage Site, and for the Windy Craggy project to be reviewed by the International Joint Commission, the body that adjudicates .-Canada border disputes.

Geddes may now be looking for a way to bail out, suggesting hopefully that $1 billion would be fair compensation for relinquishing its claim. (The company has spent $47 million on its development so far, with the bulk of the money coming from a now-discontinued tax-shelter program.) "If I were in their position, I'd want to be bought out too," says Careless. "They're just another mining company that made a gamble that didn't pay off. Their claim has no value, unless they're into mining ice cubes."

EACH DAY OF OUR DOZEN the landscape has grown in grandeur. Now, as we slice through the heart of the St. Elias Range, the river has grown so wide that at times it feels like the sea. Ice is everywhere: the Sapphire Glacier on our left, the giant Novatak, 5 miles wide and 60 long, on our right. This is the most heavily glaciated non-polar region in the world; everything is frozen except for this green river, and it's pretty cold too. (The only known remedy for washing one's hair in its waters is Johnnie Walker.)

Another mountain-glacier-mountain barrier, the Brabazon Range, sends us careening hard left again toward Alsek Lake, from which we are separated by a narrow promontory known as the Spit. We camp in what seems a stranger's garden, a blazing palette of Indian paintbrush in an astonishing array of hybridized hues, as well as fireweed, grass-of-Parnassus, river beauty, and goldenrod. The spot is also favored by grizzlies, and we are warned to take extra precautions. Off on a hike at dawn without a hogleg, I don't want to waken my snoozing companions, and so compromise by plowing through the brush calling out

"Yo bear! Yo bear!" in a loud stage whisper. The mercy reserved for fools protects me.

Our voyage's end is nigh. We sail around the Spit and into Alsek Lake, a mile-wide reflecting pond of turquoise statuary, drifting icebergs ranging in form and size from hulking slabs and towers to whimsical "bergie bits" and icechest-size "growlers." Dwarfing all is the horizon-filling sweep of the Alsek Glacier, whose two great arms plunge directly into the lake on either side of a nunatak, a central dividing mountain that has managed to with-stand the press of eons. Thunder signals the calving of a new iceberg from the distant glacier, a painful birth that leaves the face with a glorious scar of deepest cobalt, the distillation of ten thousand years.

Stupid Question: If this isn't worth saving, what is?

PAUL RAUBER is an associate editor of Sierra.