Augustine Volcano

August 2024 – Climbing Augustine Volcano had for a long time been on my bucket list. In August 2024 I returned to Alaska, this time with my travel buddy Frode. We had five days in Alaska with mainly bad weather, but for one day, Tuesday August 20th, the forecast looked very promising with clear skies and very little wind during the day. Early morning the day before our climb of the volcano, still in somewhat bad weather, and still not certain that the weather would be ok to fly south towards Saint Augustine Island, we flew out of Talkeetna in my Super Cub on Alaskan tundra wheels. The weather forecast for the island predicted storms around the island throughout the day and the night, but got better and better throughout the day and late in the afternoon we landed on Augustine Island in clear sky and strong but not far from stormy winds (15 to 20 knots). We found a huge area of uneven gravel in the southwestern part of the island and the wind made for a very short landing.

Our flight to Augustine Island

We flew out from Talkeetna where we had stayed for two days in tents under the wings on the village strip. Our route to Augustine Island took us around Talkeetna Mountains for sightseeing with landings at Lake Louise (Z55), a private strip very close to Tazlina (Z14), Picnic Strip close to the Knik river and glacier and Lake Hood in central Anchorage (PALH) for refueling. From Lake Hood it was a three hour flight along the western cost of Cook Inlet before we reached the island. The island is 6 nautical miles from mainland Alaska, so we had to fly at a high altitude of 6,000 feet to avoid the cold water in case of an engine problem.

Our camp

Upon landing on Augustine Island we celebrated our wonderful day of flying before setting up our tents under the wings. We parked my Super Cub between some scrubs where we could tie down the wing in case the wind would pick up during the night.

Our climb of Augustine Volcano

We started our climb of the volcano just after sunrise. From our tents we had a distance of 3 nautical miles / 4.5 miles / 5.5 kilometres to the summit. And as we had our camp close to the sea, we had to climb almost 4.134 feet, the height of the volcano, to reach the summit. The climb took four hours and the descend two hours. We had a long rest on the top so we spent almost 8 hours on the mountain.

The track to the summit

There are no marked trails on the island towards to summit and the volcano is climbed rather seldom. Our approximate track can be seen on the following map.