A river runs through it

Up here there are rivers and lakes galore, enough to satisfy even the pickiest of beavers. One of the major rivers of course is the mighty Yukon flowing for 1,900 miles from its source to the sea.

I'm told that the Yukon begins its life only 25 miles from the Pacific way down south in the coastal mountains near Skagway. It then flows north and west until exiting the land near a small coastal village on the Bering Sea called St. Thomas.

One of my wife Sophie's aspirations for this trip was to set the hull of her kayak into this great northern river. In Whitehorse we coordinated a drop-off with a company called the Kanoe People and true to their word they indeed drove us about 20 minutes up river to a put-in below a dam in what felt like the middle of nowhere. Wishing us bon voyage Julie, who had driven us, was off in a cloud of that infamous dust that is so plentiful up here. Maybe that's why the Yukon River is a dark brown as it too chokes on the aftermath of all the road construction.

Anyway, we head downstream and the first thing you notice is this river has quite a current to it and the river is wide enough that there are multiple currents and eddys swirling every which way. Signs in town warned not to swim due to strong eddys and undertows which is reassuring since we are currently dependent on about an eighth inch of polyethylene to keep our body parts safely out of harm's way.

The hours drift quietly by until way too soon we're at the take out where we had parked our car on the way up.

There are folks here, just like in Colorado, who are in Colorado, who can take things to extremes and in a couple of days some of the best canoeists in the world will be racing their boats from Whitehorse  to Dawson City. Granted that's just a short jaunt of around 400 river miles which they'll cover in about 3 days time. And if that's not enough I hear tell of another canoe race out of Fairbanks in July that's 800 measly miles. Ah, what fun they think of up here. Nice thing is they'll have 24 hours of daylight to do it in.

For Sophie and I our little trip was a good introduction to this mighty river. Not sure where next our kayak hulls will get wet but any time on a river is good time.