Hungry Hollow

From a trip participant:

This was my first trip with Alaska Dream Adventures. I was expecting this Hungry Hollow excursion to be the best trip I’ve ever experienced, and I still underestimated it!

The weather was a little chilly when we first started, but not cold enough to be unpleasant. On day two, it warmed up, and for the rest of the trip, the weather couldn’t have been better! The water level was a little too low to start where we had planned, so we put in at Paxson Lake instead of Hungry Hollow. The water was clear, and the fishing was good. When we got tired of fishing, we had fun tossing a Frisbee around for a while as well. A moose and her baby were splashing around in the water by the shore. They looked like they were having fun too.

The first night, two trout made a great dinner for the five of us on the trip. The guides were excellent teachers as well as being helpful and knowledgeable. They happily taught me tricks to paddling and fishing, taught me how to filet a fish, gave me the guidance I needed to start a campfire on my own, and even showed me some animal tracks.

We portaged around the falls and enjoyed several consecutive miles of Class II Plus rapids, which was really fun and exciting! With instruction from the guides, I felt like I quickly got the hang of what to avoid and where to be. Splashing into the biggest waves was one of my favorite parts of the whole trip! Not a single person tipped over, although we stopped a couple times to bail water out of boats.

The exciting, faster-moving sections of water were broken up perfectly with long stretches of calm, peaceful floating. We saw quite a bit of wildlife, including a few more moose, a couple beavers, and several bald eagles. Two of the bald eagles were sitting on branches hanging fairly low over the water, and they casually watched as we floated almost directly underneath them. It was entertaining watching a seagull harass a hawk until the hawk flew away in irritation. Watching a tern fishing was a spectacular sight as well.

I’ve been to much of Europe and most of the US, and I can honestly say that I’ve never been to a place that is as unbelievably spectacular as the wilds of Alaska. I can’t imagine how this trip could have been better!