Ed Shanley
“Taku was definitely my dad’s most favorite spot in the whole world. He first got taken up Taku by some old-timers that are no longer around. They showed him the area, and he fell in love with it. We started using the Forest Service cabin that was up there when we weren’t staying with friends up there.
I’ve been going up and spending time on the Taku as long as I’ve been around. And when I was three, my dad bought the property we built our cabin on. My dad got the property and had some friends help him with the build. I pounded a couple nails in myself as a three year old, so I helped, too.
I grew up spending my summers on the Taku. My dad would spend any opportunity to be up there. It really was his most favorite place. And when he passed away, I spread his ashes on the back of our property there, because I think that’s where he’d want to be.”
— Ed Shanley: lifelong Juneau resident, heli-ski guide & Alaska Powder Descents co-owner, Taku cabin owner, Renaissance man
“It’s interesting seeing the ways the Taku River has changed over the years. There are old black and white photos from the ‘20s of cruise ships right in front of the face of the Taku Glacier. But it went through this period of advance and pushed up a big sandbar, and all the sediment coming off the Taku. Now you have a much shallower sandbar you have to deal with, and that’s not going away. If anything, it’s extending farther out in Taku Inlet.
So the Taku can be a shallow, tricky river to navigate. When my dad first started going up there, he had a skiff with a prop, and managed to get it stuck really good. I’ve spent many a night sleeping on the Taku River bar down at the mouth of the river, waiting for high tide.
One time I had just watched Karate Kid with my mom, and we were replaying the movie play by play, right in front of Hole in the Wall glacier. I was probably four at the time. Talking shop about Karate Kid, grounded on the sandbar.
I’ve kept up the family tradition. When I was dating my wife, Bonnie, I was driving the boat, and my dad and stepmom were on board. It was late at night, and I didn’t see a sandbar and planted it.
That was the first serious Taku quality time my wife spent — grounded on the bar, drinking a bottle of whiskey, and figuring out what it all means. You’ve got to have a sense of humor. I don’t know anyone going upriver who hasn’t gotten stuck once or twice. So I try to stay humble. Because the Taku River can humble you very quickly.”
— Ed Shanley: lifelong Juneau resident, heli-ski guide & Alaska Powder Descents co-owner, Taku cabin owner, Renaissance man
“My property is the farthest upriver private property on the U.S. side of the Taku. It’s on Canyon Island, at kind of a choke point for the river. I believe the deepest point in all of the Taku, at least on the U.S. side, is just upstream of my cabin, where it pushes through the canyon that Canyon Island gets its name from.
It’s pretty deep and pretty swift right in front of my cabin. We have a little bit of an eddy right below that canyon so it’s not a bad spot to land at. But it’s pretty turbulent right there. The river gets funneled through a spot that might be 100 yards, at that. I’ve seen a lot of incidents over the years, as far as boats getting into trouble right there, while netting, or even the barge program, when they were trying to barge for reopening the Tulsequah Chief Mine.
One of their shallow draft tugboats, while under tow with a barge, got caught by a whirlpool and got tipped on its side. And the pilot, or one of the crew on board, broke his collarbone.
They had a big barge that was anchored out in the inlet. Besides tipping over that tug, they ran aground a bunch of times.
Could barging be done? Yes. It’s not a gimme, though. You would need a pretty hotshot, dialed crew. And a lot of folks on the river are on a floodplain and pretty sensitive to bank erosion, and to waves too close to their bank.
When they first started talking about reopening the Tulsequah Chief Mine when I was a kid, there had been some road options floated. And I want to say it was 100 kilometers long, cutting through pretty much pristine wilderness, for a mine with a limited lifespan.
I’m not necessarily anti-mine. I have an iPhone. But there’s a proper place for a mine, and I’m definitely opposed to a tailings dam that could fail, or a mine punching through potentially hundreds of miles of wilderness.”
— Ed Shanley: lifelong Juneau resident, heli-ski guide & Alaska Powder Descents co-owner, Taku cabin owner, Renaissance man
“I’ve always been a big skier and grew up just staring at the big boundary peaks just all over the place running through there. So it was really cool for me when my partners and I, with the heliskiing we do here in Juneau, when we got permitted for the area around the Taku for heliskiing, to start guiding people and being able to show people the mountains around Taku that I grew up looking at.
On the back side of the property is a nice sandy area where my son Callahan likes to run around and make sandcastles. A couple years ago me and some friends, we had a helicopter back there and we skied this run that is the biggest peak we could see from the sandbox. So we named the run Callahan’s Sandbox. I have photos from the top of that. We pretty much skied all the way back down to the river, 6,000 feet. And from the top, you’re looking straight down on my property — straight down on the Taku.
Every time I get back there in the mountains I get a little sentimental about how cool it is I get to be taking people out into these mountains I grew up staring at. That was back at the start of COVID, and the world was shut down. I felt pretty darn lucky not to be locked down in a city, and skiing this peak I had stared at my whole life. I’m trying to get up there more in the wintertime, and to get more Taku time. You can never get too much Taku time.
Pretty much any time I am down there heliskiing it’s pretty special for me. I don’t take it lightly. I feel very lucky that I get to share that with people."
— Ed Shanley: lifelong Juneau resident, heli-ski guide & Alaska Powder Descents co-owner, Taku cabin owner, Renaissance man
"I think in general, having guided a bunch of different kinds of trips over the years, Alaska has a lot of mystique to it. People are really intrigued by it. A lot of people want to come to Alaska and see these wild places, and it’s just kind of difficult and for some people might be outside of their financial realm. For me, I’ve always really appreciated the excitement that I see in people that finally made it up to Alaska, and they’re seeing these places they’ve seen in photos and read about, and it’s really happening. That excitement is infectious and it’s something I really appreciate. I don't know how many people I've taken out that they wanted to come to Alaska their whole life. There’s a lot of desire from people all over the world to come and see these wild places."
— Ed Shanley: lifelong Juneau resident, heli-ski guide & Alaska Powder Descents co-owner, Taku cabin owner, Renaissance man
“It’s amazing how different Taku is from Juneau even though it’s so close. I feel really lucky that I get to spend as much time up there doing as many different things as I do. I grew up fishing up there, hunting up there, and it’s great to be able to fill my freezer from the bounty that is part of the ecosystem up there in the Taku.
Around cabins and around jet boats and just around a bunch of people, I think people don’t tend to see as much wildlife as there actually is around. I think for me, the thing I’ve appreciated the most about hunting up Taku is just being out, being quiet in the wilderness, and having the opportunity to see the wildlife that is around. Bears, and moose, and wolves, and otters. Just wildlife doing their thing. Not avoiding humans in the area. Just watching wildlife being wild.
And I have a lot of good memories over the years of family time. Taku is a special place.”
— Ed Shanley: lifelong Juneau resident, heli-ski guide & Alaska Powder Descents co-owner, Taku cabin owner, Renaissance man
“I would like to see the resources in the Taku managed in a responsible way so that my son and my niece and nephew are able to appreciate the Taku as a pristine wilderness, and to be able to appreciate the riches that come with that wilderness. Hopefully my son is having fun, making memories around Taku when I'm long gone. Hopefully there’s still salmon and moose to feed his kids with.
There’s a lot of concern from a lot of different user groups as to the health of the salmon stock, so it’s good to be having this conversation.”
— Ed Shanley: lifelong Juneau resident, heli-ski guide & Alaska Powder Descents co-owner, Taku cabin owner, Renaissance man