For more than forty years, Steve Mahay has operated commercial jet boats in the Talkeetna area. He is also the first person to navigate a powered boat through the notorious Devil’s Canyon section of the Susitna River. KTNA’s Phillip Manning recently took a tour with Mahay’s Jetboat Adventures to Devil’s Canyon, and has this story:
On a cool morning last week, I boarded the Talkeetna Queen, a jet boat more than forty feet long, and with more than a thousand horsepower. I and about twenty-five other passengers were about to embark on a trip upriver to Devil’s Canyon.
Once we got underway, the Susitna River and surrounding landscape offered up amazing views, and some wildlife. Denali even peeked through the clouds at one point, much to the delight of the visitors from Outside.
When we neared Devil’s Canyon, our captain, Eli Hoffman, told the story of the kayakers and jet boat captains who have tried and failed to navigate the canyon, and of the handful who have succeeded. He says the first person to drive a boat through all twelve miles of the canyon was Steve Mahay, owner and operator of Mahay’s Jetboat Adventures.
“He ran a 27-foot, single engine boat all the way up the canyon. He actually boarded up the front windows…and then he strapped foam board in the back of his boat, filling his entire boat, thinking that if he actually capsized his boat, he might be able to salvage it as it came out the bottom end of the canyon.”
Mahay’s boat didn’t capsize, however, and he made it through Devil’s Canyon. Once I saw the raw
power of the river in the canyon, I realized I had to talk to Mahay himself about the trip.
Steve Mahay’s trip through Devil’s Canyon took place in 1985. While he was the first to succeed in navigating the canyon in a powered vessel, he was not the first to try.
“The Army had a group of special-forces type people, and they tried to navigate it. They sunk their boat, and there was a big rescue…but they all lived. It was attempted by a number of other jetboaters, and they sunk.”
As someone who spent virtually every day on the Susitna River, Steve Mahay thought he might be able to succeed where others had failed.
“I always would tell people that you don’t drive a jetboat; you have to wear the jetboat. You have to have a total awareness of everything around you and the capability of the boat at all times. When you live on the river every day, you get to that point. I didn’t know if I could to make it or not, but I said I could give it a try.”
Even armed with years of experience on the river and the ability to “wear” his jet boat, Mahay took precautions before setting off.
“I had a dry suit on and a helmet, and of course a life vest, too. I had a helicopter overhead with whitewater rescue people on board who could be lowered down to me if I needed help. I went in with the idea that I was either going to make it, or I was going to sink the boat, and thank God, fortunately, I did make it through there without sinking the boat.”
Making it through involved navigating three different spots classified as extremely dangerous and potentially un-navigable. Mahay says going upstream in a powered vessel meant being able to take time to pick the path he took. Ultimately, after a slow crawl up the final, nearly vertical class-6 rapids, Mahay made it through.
Taking visitors to the lower reaches of Devil’s Canyon, just downstream of the first class-6 rapids,
didn’t occur to Mahay until years later, when mechanical issues forced him to use a larger boat than normal for a tour. Instead of going through the Talkeetna Canyon, Steve Mahay decided to show his guests the Devil’s Horn, an area of rapids surrounding a boulder the size of a small house.
“So I took it out…and brought the people back, and they were ecstatic. They said, ‘Whoa! We don’t believe we just did what we did.’ Then we said, ‘Wow, we might have something here that would be very interesting for the public, the tourists.’ We take a lot of Alaskans on that…because you can’t see or do something like that any place else that I know of in Alaska.”
The raw power of the river on display in Devil’s Canyon is impressive to say the least. In recent years, however, a proposed megaproject, the Susitna-Watana Dam, threatened the potential of future tours to the canyon. Steve Mahay says his boats only make the trip when the river is flowing at more than 13,000 cubic feet per second (CFS), and Susitna-Watana would have cut that number significantly.
“It averages out to about 8,000 CFS. Well, 8,000 CFS is not enough water for us to go—not even close. So we wouldn’t be able to do that.”
For now, the Susitna-Watana Project has stopped. State funding dried up, and Governor Bill Walker pulled the plug on the proposed hydroelectric dam last year. For Steve Mahay and his staff, that means continuing to be able to bring people to a unique and beautiful locale in the Susitna Valley.
