The Yukon – Part I
By Broc. Filed in Canada |
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We’d pulled over for the night in a wayside overlooking the Five Finger Rapids on the Yukon River, and Angus and I’d gotten up to get some early morning photos. We got chatting to a young German guy who happened to be there, and he told me the story of how last summer, he and a friend had built a raft out of recycled pallets, some plywood, an old sofa and a sail, and floated for 16 days down the Yukon river from Whitehorse to Dawson. They could hardly steer the thing, so just floated with the currents and had come within feet of smashing against the walls of these rapids – but had obviously lived to tell the tale.
Now we don’t have 15 spare days or an old sofa, but by the time we’d made it back to the RV, Angus and I did have a glint of a crazy idea in our eyes… We got to Whitehorse by lunchtime, and dropped into Kanoe People to see if we could turn the vague notion of spending a few days floating down the Yukon river into some sort of feasible plan. Now the Yukon really must be one of the world’s great paddling rivers, navigable for over fifteen hundred miles, right across the Yukon and Alaska to the Bering sea, meeting roads or small towns at only a half dozen points along its entire journey. From Whitehorse, there is the obstacle of the 50km long Lake Laberge – a long slow paddle, unpleasant and dangerous when the wind picks up, but then the river is all a scenic, easy class1 river till the next time you meet civilisation – another 240k downstream at Carmacks. We dropped into Alpine aviation, and yep, they could fly us along with a canoe to the far end of Laberge on a floatplane (meaning we could bypass the lake altogether) – but we would have to fly tomorrow morning. It was time to get packing. Ideally, you’d have more than a few hours to think through all the things five people might require to spend five days in a canoe a long way from the nearest 7-11, but we did the best we could, and were ready on the floatplane dock at 9 the next morning (Porridge, marshmallows, fishing rods, mosquito and bear repellant, 3 kids – check – what more could we need?) We’d had some dubious looks at the suggestion we could fit 5 people and all our gear into a single canoe, but the kids are small, light, and flexible, so (having had a bit of a test-run on a lake outside Fairbanks in a 16’9), we reckoned a 18’6 would be fine for the trip. And that’s about as big a canoe as you’re likely to strap onto the outside of a little Beaver anyway. If you close your eyes and think of Canada, then try and imagine a floatplane, you’re probably picturing a Beaver. The one we were flying was a 1953 model, actually built before the last of the paddlewheelers stopped running this river (the road didn’t reach Dawson till the mid 50′s), so in its own way, providing a great line of historical continuity. With the luggage stowed and the canoe strapped on, we all climbed aboard (along with Megan, our 6-year-old stewardess), put on our headsets and took to the sky. The Beaver has a remarkably short take-off, which I guess is what still makes it the ideal plane for this kind of work. In the bright sunny morning light, the flight out and around Whitehorse, over the winding river and blue lake below, had even the kids gasping at the scenery – and then down, landing on the head of the river at the end of the lake. A couple of campers on the bank emerged bleary-eyed from their tent to figure out what on earth had nearly landed on them. The kids clambered ashore and went exploring the ruins of the old telegraph office while we unloaded, waved goodbye as the Beaver took off, and set to the task of figuring out how to fit everything and everyone into the canoe for the next 5 days – paddling the Yukon river. |
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Tags: canoeing with kids, Yukon