Slowly the mountains that were in the distance become close. The river straightens, a little. The current quickens the sky turns bluer and you catch sight of a river otter playing on shore. The river has left the flats and entered a canyon, we've come over the top on the map and crossed the halfway point of the trip. Three hours later we see the Haul Road bridge and the Alyeska Pipeline crossing the river and pass underneath them between the second and third bridge supports, pulling into an eddy beside where Gerald James has tied up his barge.
I talked to Gerald back in April when I called the phone number on the website for his Native owned family barge business. I asked him about navigation in the Yukon Flats and GPS information and water depth. He happened to be on his cell phone in Fairbanks when I called but said that he would enter the GPS coordinates into his GPS unit and leave it for me at his friend's place in Circle. When I meet him in person he is just as nice and after a few minutes asks his grandson to bring us over a box of buttermilk doughnuts. We show his eighty year old friend around our boat and end up spending the night there tied up under the bridge beside the barge down an access road marked "Barge traffic only".
Jeff and I both get a shower at the Yukon River Camp there, $15 each, and I catch an hour of slow internet and then stop by Dorothy's homemade jewelry stand on the dusty side of the road. Dorothy lives down the river, has a canoe up on the bank. Tonight she will sleep in her curio shack beside the small woodstove and furs and bear claws and porcupine quills. She is waiting for her son to come by in the boat, it might be a couple days, who knows.
In the morning Gerald is sweeping up a bag of food that a raven tore apart overnight, I head up the hill for a tasty country breakfast in the cafe and we are off by 10. Gerald passes us a few hours later as we are tied up at a beautiful sandbar below a rock wall having lunch and blasts his horn. He is hauling a house building package down to someone in the village of Rampart, 60 miles away, and he unloads there and passes us again as we putt putt toward a campsite halfway to the next village of Tanana.