The Kuskokwim River or Kusko River (Kusquqvak in Central Yup'ik) is a river, 702 miles (1,130 km) long, in Southwest Alaska in the United States. It is the ninth largest river in the United States by average discharge volume at its mouth and seventeenth largest by basin drainage area.
The river provides the principal drainage for an area of the remote Alaska Interior on the north and west side of the Alaska Range, flowing southwest into Kuskokwim Bay on the Bering Sea. Except for its headwaters in the mountains, the river is broad and flat for its entire course, making it a useful transportation route for many types of watercraft. It is the longest free flowing river in the United States.
Kuskokwim is a loose transliteration of a Yupik language word. It is a compound word meaning big slow moving thing.
Famous quotes containing the word river:
“Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)