The Goodpaster Run
By Nick Jans

This article scheduled to appear in Alaska Magazine in March 2007.

In a thunder of spray, the lead jetboat slewed around the bend, with the second close behind. The three of us in Craig’s boat leaned hard as we dodged up a riffle tight against a cut bank, ducking as the limbs of a sweeper spruce whooshed over the windshield. A tangle of stranded logs blurred past. Ahead lay a jumble of ice pans, plugging the river bank to bank, not a sliver of channel anywhere. By now, sixty-some miles into the trip, neither Steve nor I even blinked when Craig heeled the wheel, aimed for the middle of the mess, and shoved the throttle forward. He didn’t need to tell us to hold on.

Mid-May means two things on the Goodpaster River, 90 miles southeast of Fairbanks: the winter ice letting go, and Craig Compeau roaring upstream like some suicidal, mechanized salmon. What started out fifteen years ago as a sometime adventure has morphed into personal tradition. The basic idea is to rally a gang together, outfit two state-of-the-art jetboats, and ride the crest of high water immediately following breakup, upstream as far as you can get. A snowmobiler would call it high-marking, where you rocket straight up a mountain until you stall out. Doing the same in a jetboat, though, boils down to a recipe for mechanical mayhem. As a river becomes an ever-shrinking stream and upstream merges into uphill, thrashing and bashing your ride becomes an increasing given. The trick, of course, is knowing when to stop. There’s always that seductive, spin-the-wheel temptation to make it just one more bend.

Craig Compeau is determined to re-define that upward boundary. He’s got more than an ordinary, rational stake in the proposition of how far and skinny a boat can go. As Interior Alaska’s largest jetboat dealer, engineering and selling a better sled (as they’re known to the hard-cores) is his vocation. Over the next three days, he plans to push two brand-new, next-generation sleds to the upper limit of performance and see what shakes out. And at the same time, he’s throwing down a friendly gauntlet to his competitors, whose boats are hardly chopped liver. Rolled up in his boat he has a printed plastic banner which proclaims, “If you can read this, you’re probably in a Phantom SportJon from Compeau’s.” It’s a replacement for the winter-battered one they placed at their highmark the year before, far up the rock-studded north fork of the Goodpaster. There’s a standing $500 reward for whoever takes a picture of their own jetboat in front of that sign, and brings it back to Fairbanks. So far, through at least a few attempts, the money’s gone begging. All this makes for good theater. Anyone who’s seen Craig’s flashy, boat-jumping commercials on local TV will agree he’s got a natural showman’s instinct.

But all this talk of product testing and promotion isn’t fooling anyone. Craig’s a kid who’s never grown up, and his annual Goodpaster run is just an excuse for some unapologetic gearhead Alaska homeboy fun. Packed along with the tools, camping gear, and video camera are accessories Hunter S. Thompson would have approved: a portable Margarita blender that runs off a weed whacker engine, a boom box, and a generous array of both refreshments and firearms. That’s for camp, not the river, Craig assures me. Be that as it may, this is less a business trip than a portable party. All that seems to be missing are the yard flamingos.

A glance at Craig’s posse confirms my suspicions. Sure, his business partner, boat builder Steve Stajkowski is along, and I’m the invited journalist guy. But the other four are here for the hey of it: Craig’s childhood friends Andy Miscovich and Jeff Gregory and mining engineer Norman Sather (all third-generation Alaskans) and Bryce Weaver, who’s worked as a boat rigger for Craig. All of us are putting our lives on full pause for three days; the Goodpaster run is a world all its own.

No accident that Craig’s in this line of work. Jetboating—specifically, Alaska jetboating--is quite literally in his blood. In 1938 his grandfather, Bob Compeau Senior, moved to Fairbanks, and by the mid 40’s had set up an outboard repair shop. Shallow Interior streams, the highways for homesteaders, hunters, prospectors, and trappers, exacted a toll on those early Evinrudes. All the shattered lower units and tortured props kept Bob pondering and puttering. By 1947, he’d invented a transom lift that allowed the driver to raise his motor vertically to draw less than a foot in brief spurts. But though the wear and tear decreased, traditional outboards and thin water mixed about as well as oil and molasses. Bob kept tinkering. By the late 50’s, he’d engineered a working jet-drive prototype—no prop or moving parts hanging down--that could skim through four inches of water. But when he discovered a California inventor was further along on the same idea, Bob abandoned his plan and gave the man his first order: 100 bolt-on units. Those red, snail-shaped Specialty Manufacturing outboard jet pumps, little changed from the original, are still the standard worldwide; without Bob, who knows if they would’ve even gone into production? Bob’s son, Bob Junior, bought the business and inherited the passion for pushing the frontiers of mechanized wilderness travel, not only by boat but ATV and snowmobile—neither of which existed when Bob Senior first came into the country, back in the days when dogs, horses, and a strong back defined the limits of where a man could go.

Fast-forward a half century to Craig, blasting up the Goodpaster, past the cabins his grandfather and father built. The Phantom SportJon he drives is something Bob Senior would have scarcely dreamed of: a 200-horsepower beast capable of sprinting at nearly 50 miles an hour, skimming through riffles that would scarcely get your ankles wet, while carrying a one-ton payload. Though there are competing rigs out there, what sets this boat apart is the sum of its parts—bits of proven technology and ongoing innovations borrowed wherever they could be found, honed by constant tinkering and testing, combined in ways no one else had done yet with one end in mind: creating the ultimate Alaska jet sled, period.

If all this sounds like a shameless infomercial, you’re right—for the technology, so uniquely suited to the Alaska bush, where rivers still answer for roads. I’ve spent a good deal of the last 25 years jonesing for jetboats and where they can take you, back up tributary creeks across the northwest arctic where the mountains lean overhead and your only company is wolves and the wind. I set up my first plywood hulled, 35-horse jet rig on the Noatak River in 1982, and have been messing with jet juju ever since, learning what you can and can’t do the hard way. Sure, jets go shallow, but at a cost. Most handle like a bald-tired Studebaker on a skating rink, and are about as fuel efficient. I’m currently on my tenth rig, and over tens of thousands of braided, rushing, rock-strewn miles, I’ve left piles of mangled gear and flapping dollar signs in my wake. Not to mention a profound belief that if I had a blank check and the time, I could build that better, river-running mouse trap. Craig had both those assets, and over the years I watched him home in on the grail. Like other jet-heads, I participated in the process by talking shop and trading ideas whenever I passed through, and voting with my bank account.

Eight years ago, Craig found the perfect collaborator in Idaho jetboat builder Steve Stajkowski, and the Phantom Sportjon is their still-evolving love child. This latest sled of theirs is practically a grocery list of most features I ever wanted: silly power to weight ratio, miserly fuel economy, rugged construction, and the handling of a water-borne Porsche. Add on some bells and whistles--a high-tech ultra-slippery plastic skid plate, a swivel jack and removable wheels for escaping stuckathons, and a stomp grate for clearing rocks from your intake, just for starts--and you have a rig that’s practically redefined thin-water jetboating. Think 8-tracks to cassettes to CDs to Ipods, and you have an idea of how far jetboating’s come in 20 years. Water that was once damn near impossible has become accessible, and that’s the bottom line.

So here we are, seven guys in two new-from-the-box SportJons. It’s one of those magic Interior spring days when the air glows and winter’s spell is almost impossible to recall. The mosquitoes aren’t out yet, and the last grimy patches of snow hunker in the shadows. As the afternoon warms, convection-driven thunderheads rise, and a blue-black pall sweeps over us, pelting rain before breaking into a double rainbow and golden, glowing light. Banks draped with black spruce and birch blur past. Onward around lazy, looping bends past scattered cabins, until finally we stop for the night at one built by Craig’s father. Barbeque and beer are the order of the evening. A few .357 rounds spatter into the river, and out comes the boom box. The complete play list consists of a countrified CD of Weird-Al-like parody tunes penned by Craig. Mommas, don’t let yer babies grow up to be greenies…twangs into the silent landscape. I get into a wrangle with I forget who about shooting wolves from airplanes. No big news flash, but politically speaking, I’m in a decided minority here. While everyone else packs into the cabin’s bunks, I lay a tarp and sleeping bag in on a mossy bank under an outsized black spruce, and fall asleep gazing up at the pale, ever-bright sky of almost-summer.

The morning brings a late, fuzzy-headed start, and a narrowing, steeper river as we bear left up the Goodpaster’s North Fork, past the homestead and grave of pioneer Lawrence Johnson, a longtime friend of Bob Senior. The driving ratchets up a notch or two—more sweepers and tighter turns, but nothing worthy of a real test. Bryce, who’s piloting the second boat, takes up the slack by driving fast and seeing how close he can shave sand bars, until he finally drives it dry and has to be muscled back in. Two dozen miles later we round a bend, and suddenly the occasional shards of drift ice we’ve passed thicken and clot. Next thing we’re dodging entire sheets of the stuff, then blasting our way across it, skidding 20 or 30 yards at a time right over the pans as they cleave beneath our weight. Right-angle turns and the first unavoidable sweepers lively up the ride. Ridges crowned by surreal rock formations shoulder in as the gradient continues to steepen. More and bigger ice as we blur past an incongruous mirage of steel buildings, a bridge, and power lines--the Pogo gold mine, a world-class lode discovered and developed just a dozen years ago, now into full production. The siren melody that brought the first prospectors up the Goodpaster in the early 1900’s still echoes in these hills. A few miles later, we jump a big male grizzly off a gravel bar, his disappearance so quick that he seems unreal as the mine.

The Goodpaster definitely has our attention now. We shuck and jive, passengers and driver leaning with the boat and holding on as we carve past obstacles and tick the bottom and occasionally hit harder. Now and then a boat or the bodies inside it catch some air. I whack my knee purple, gash my palm and patch it with duct tape. Jetboating at the edge is always a full-contact sport, visceral as a runaway rollercoaster. More ice, a full-fledged jam this time, heaped across a split in the channel. While Bryce’s crew waits, Craig, Steve, and I make a reconnaissance run through a narrow, brush-lined flume, and are rewarded by taking out two of the windshield’s three panes—whack-thump--in a matter of seconds, then beaching out. Ahead, an expanse of ice stretches up around the bend. Craig and Steve try to vault it and shake the jam free, to no avail. Craig shakes his head and shrugs. We’re never going to reach the sign. The upper river is still breaking up; we’re two, maybe three days too early. No big deal, he says. Mother Nature gets the high-mark this time.

We set up an early camp, build a too-large fire, and out comes the blender—margaritas made with Goodpaster ice, followed by great steaks and more cheap beer, and endless stories about bears, women, boats, and gold. Andy gets crazy and jumps in the river, face-down in 33-degree rapids. Bryce wants to shoot at something. Norman’s had enough of Craig’s music and tells him so. Standing on the bank gazing out over the twilit river, Andy whoops what we all feel, each in our own way, into the subarctic night, “I love Alaska! I LOVE ALASKA! I LOVE IT!” A hundred miles and more downriver, the details of our lives wait, arms akimbo and foot-tapping. But tonight we’re on the upper Goodpaster, transported and transformed by magic carpets made of metal, back to a simpler time. We’ll deal with gravity tomorrow.

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