HaveKidsWillTravel

But here, while no-one would give us a forecast, today the sun was shining, and we faced the ’30 mile’ section of the Yukon, apparently the prettiest stretch of the whole river. Fiona navigated from the bow and I steered from the stern, with Digby sitting on a soft dry-bag between my knees, chirping and chattering away. Gus and Evie sat amidships, sitting up straight and conscientiously paddling for the first couple of hundred meters – before retiring to the reading lounge (nestled down in amongst the luggage, with Angus reading the first Harry Potter aloud to Evie).

The water was a clear, glacial blue, and wound between pine forest and gravel cliff banks and we made good, easy progress in the swift current. We spotted a couple of Bald Eagles along the way, and stopped for lunch on a small island. Discovering that we’d managed to forget to bring the bacon and sausages we’d planned for our first few meals, Evie and I cast a few hopeful lines at the Grayling we could see in the water.

We made good progress in the afternoon, and still hadn’t seen another human being when we pulled up at an empty, open forested campsite on the left bank a few hours later. Surrounded by blueberry bushes – the staple autumn diet of local bears – we were glad that it was a still a bit early for them to be ripe. Fiona and the kids played hopscotch while I explored the fishing prospects downstream. The five of us fit pretty well into our four man tent, although not leaving a lot of room for rolling over in the middle of the night, and would have had a good night sleep but for the persistant twilight.

Next morning was another sunny day, something we hadn’t expected – and we realised one thing we hadn’t packed enough of was sunscreen. But I’d brought a big golfing umbrella – the pilot had chuckled at it, but it made a perfect little suntent for the kids in the middle of the boat. Or at least it did for about half an hour – until a sudden gust of wind blew it out, where it floated upside down for a second before sinking dramatically to the river depths – Digby was inconsolable.

By midmorning, we’d made it to the end of the thirty mile and the remains of the town of Hootalinqua, and the paddlesteamer ‘Evelyn’ at the junction with the Tetlin river. Once a bustling little village where hundreds might have lived, servicing the prospectors and paddlesteamers going up and down the river, just the remains of a few old log cabins and the old telegraph office are still visible. The ‘Evelyn’ was brought ashore downstream at the docks, and is slowly decaying back into the forest, a remarkable and eerie sight.

As we got underway again, we spotted a Moose with its calf on the waters edge, and as the day wore on, we could see a rainshower ahead, and a large storm building behind. You really do feel exposed to the elements out in a canoe – partly because you have such good visibility of the whole sky, partly because you’ve got no-where to hide. We picked up the pace and pulled up at the next campsite – already occupied by a group of Japanese kayakers, and shortly thereafter joined by a Czech couple, a real bustling campsite after 2 days of solitude.

After all the drama, the storm ended up going around us and we had a golden twilight, so I went for a fish in the back-eddies of the bend in front of the campsite – and caught a good sized Grayling with the first cast of a little trout lure. While I spent the rest of the night failing to repeat the achievement, it was at least a moment of glory – and made for a great little midnight snack grilled over the fire. Rations were getting a bit dire, but fortunately for me, everyone else is a bit over eating fish so I didn’t have to share. Angus, faced with yet another freeze-dried dinner protested melodramatically ‘All I want is some PROTEIN!”. I thought about leaving the mosquitoes landing in the saucepan in his portion…

Next morning, the Czech couple asked where we were planning to camp that night – and given the noise that three children make in the wilderness, we assumed it was so they could keep well clear, so we were very apologetic. No, it turned out they wanted to camp with us again, because all that noise was sure to keep the bears away at night – I guess I’d never thought of it that way…

Back on the water, Fiona was voicing growing doubts about my navigation through the bends – what I thought of as racing turns, cleverly optimising use of current against distance covered, she claimed was just zig-zagging all over the place. Then we ended up out in a broad delta of the river, I misread the map and we ended up scraping over a gravel bar and all four of us furiously paddling upriver to get across to the channel we wanted. By that stage, I think she was ready to have me walk the plank.

That afternoon, we spotted a small black bear with two tiny little cubs – just like a pair of teddybears, curiously and calmly watching us from the riverbank as we drifted past. We pulled up a few hours later at a densely forested campsite (lots of mosquitos), and were joined by our new Czech friends. Just before midnight, a German couple pulled up, they’d been camped about half a kilometer upstream, but had spotted what they thought might be a grizzly circling their camp in the trees – completely unperturbed by their presence. So they’d quickly packed up and set off. Looking at the map and weighing our options, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of getting the kids out of bed, packing our stuff and paddling 10k to the next good campsite – so we agreed it might be safest if we all just camped together (the kids make a lot of noise, after all…) We slept with the bearspray close to hand that night, but had an undisturbed (if restless) night’s sleep.

Fourth day of paddling, I adjusted our line into the corners in the interests of marital harmony, Harry Potter was just getting to the exciting bit, and Digby was still chattering away to a handful of sticks. We stopped at the ruins of the Big Salmon trading post, and saw spirit houses in the overgrown cemetery, part of the Athabascan village once there. While the real hey-day of the river was a brief period during the gold rush, there were people living along it, cutting timber to fuel the paddle-steamers until the road to Dawson was complete in the 50′s.

The weather closed in, and eventually it caught up with us just a few bends from the evening’s camp – thunder and rain hammering so hard we could hardly make out the far bank of the river. Evie hunkered down under her raincoat, Angus grabbed a paddle to help get us home, and Digby fell asleep. The skies cleared as we made it to our final camp, a pretty spot high on the bank overlooking the river, and we dried out and warmed up quickly by the fire, as our Czech friends arrived again.

Next morning was just a short paddle down to Carmacks where we were to be picked up, so we had time to take some little side-channels, small streams off the main flow of the river. We spotted grebes, common loon, and even disturbed a pair of great gray owls as we drifted past.

And then Carmacks floated into view, and we’d made it – 240km in 5 days, with the same number of kids in the canoe as we’d set out with, and despite all the trepidations we’d had going into it, in hindsight, it’d almost seemed easy. We might have to think of a real challenge for the next adventure…