Frosty Carcross

A beautiful day in Carcross Yukon, as the community’s bright colours are covered with spiky frost.

Dawson City: View from the dome

A view of Dawson City from the ‘dome’ which is a high lookout point. The Yukon river is seen in the distance.

Paddling the Yukon River: Carmacks to Dawson city

Some friends and I recently paddled from Carmacks to Dawson City. The journey takes about 6 days.

It’s a very easy section to do as the current is strong. The river pushes you along at around 6km/hour without even paddling. With some paddling you can push to about a 10 km/hour average speed.

The distance of about 400 kilometres means about 40 hours of sustained paddling at this speed.

Rental places allow you to be dropped off in Carmacks then drop off the canoe and supplies in Dawson City before taking a bus back to Whitehorse.

Wildlife on the way to Carcross

The most useful thing I’ve learned over the years about photography is to keep your equipment ready.

When driving I test settings first, then keep the camera and zoom lens equipped on the passenger seat. The result is that I can react quickly when wildlife appears.

A trip to Carcross this week was very scenic and provided some great opportunities — no less than one bear, three moose (a mother and two yearlings) as well as a porcupine.

Big Salmon River: 12-day canoe trip

Yukon tour companies offer guided camping trips. You bring clothing and other small things but they handle the food, tents, canoes and mapping. Most clients for guided tours are from Germany. Companies even offer bilingual and German-language tours.

I recently took such a trip — amazingly after my wife won a random draw at the Yukon Visitors’ Centre last year and gave me the winning one-seat ticket with Ruby Range Adventures.

We were a group of 8 people with most from Germany. This included our guide who is now a Canadian citizen but immigrated here to pursue his dream of living in wild spaces.

Martin, the guide handled all the cooking. He directed the camp with endless patience despite working 14-hour days.

He also kept a can of bear spray clipped on his belt all the time.

The Big Salmon River is accessible by road through the Canol road (an old dirt road left over from WW2) which branches off the Alaska Highway.

For this trip you set off on canoes through Quiet Lake, Sandy Lake and Big Salmon Lake before reaching the river itself: From then it’s many days of paddling through a winding and narrow river with strong current. This year the water levels were low, and often there were often a few inches of water above the river stones.

The Big Salmon isn’t busy. Canoeing takes a commitment because the current is too strong to easily go back. Therefore once you enter you commit to at least a week of paddling to reach the larger Yukon River and go towards Carmacks.

The river is designated as Crown Land and completely pristine. People have made small campspaces (ie: flat ground) but these are not marked other than appearing on maps.

The river is out of cell-phone range. If something goes wrong it is possible to get Medevaced out but this requires a satellite phone to call for help. This happened on our trip. One person, who was nearly 70, experienced an infection in a wound. After several days of worsening, a satellite call reached EMTs who arrived in a helicopter within an hour. (I don’t know whether insurance will cover associated costs as the person was foreign.)

In 12 days our group saw only two other teams, brief encounters and waving from a distance.

The trip as a whole was about 300km.

We saw a black bear, countless bald eagles also saw Chinook salmon swimming upriver, returning all the way back from the Bering Sea to lay eggs.

One thing learned on this trip: Food keeps up morale. We had four canoes loaded with barrels, coolers, propane tanks for a BBQ, even things like jams and sauces in glass jars. We ate porridge, french toast, endless coffee, chili, ribs, spaghetti, burritos and plenty of sandwiches with sausage and cheese and chocolate for dessert. It was an entire pantry and kitchen to set up daily but this level of eating made it sustainable to stay outside all the time. People arrived after 12 days still happy and strong. Thankfully there were no portages with all these hundreds of pounds of gear and supplies.

Everyone had a good time despite a few days of rain and some cold nights, which at one point included frost on the tents in the morning. I was thankful to have brought a rubber hot-water bottle which provided needed heat in my sleeping bag.

The Germans were especially delighted to see a black bear and the trip was even capped with faint northern lights.

Rainy day in Carcross

A raven flies along the waters where Bennett Lake meets Nares Lake in Carcross. It’s been a rainy summer in Yukon with far more misty and wet conditions than usual.

Yukon Horse & Rider Association

There are ranches in Yukon including a few outside Whitehorse.

The Yukon Horse & Rider Association had a horse show this weekend to show off some local kids’ equestrian skills.

Yukon River Quest 2016

The Yukon River Quest starts in Whitehorse and ends in Dawson City. People use canoes, kayaks and even stand-up paddle boards.

The total distance is more than 700 kilometres. There are enforced breaks along the way but teams and solo paddlers continue through the nights.

This year there were 94 teams from 14 countries. The #1 team (this year, two people in a canoe) finished after about 46 hours in the water.

 

Big moose along the Yukon River

Rainy days are better for seeing wildlife along the Yukon River. This big moose and calf noticed our canoe then walked into the shallow river.

Yukon River: Birds along the water

The Yukon River has a variety of bird species including falcons, geese, ducks, eagles and more. These are a few spotted during the paddle from Carmacks to Dawson City.