The Flats

I gotta say these last five or so days through the 250 miles of the Yukon Flats from below Circle to the Dalton Highway bridge have been the toughest. The weather has been brutal, a relentless cold wind out of the north along with too much sun and an anxiety about finding the right channel have made for a welcome stop here in the relative civilization of a roadside gas station and cafe. We have only seen two other adventure seekers during this time and only a handful of boats have passed us on the river. We are both sunburned and windburned and weary and dirty. The boat is doing great though, we have plenty to eat, and the tent has turned into a needed sanctuary from heat, cold, wind, and mosquitoes. We camped on the back side of a small sandy island last night hoping to escape the persistent wind that was pushing us around the river. The island was beautiful and I scared up a goose that was sitting on five big eggs laid in a nest of feather down.  It was beautiful there buy was not out of the wind and the boat rocked all night like we were back on a halibut boat waiting out a storm from somewhere in the Shelikof Strait.  When we are travelling we are far from shore much of the time so wildlife viewing has been hard and the birds are holed up in the back channels that are too shallow for us to get into.
It is awesome though. Still so big and now so wide open and dynamic. We are watching so much shoreline erosion take place that today we made a short cut through the connecting parts of an oxbow bend that did not show up on the satellite images done last year. The USGS maps of this area are worthless. My GPS will tell me where I am but the river is not where it used to be so my track has me bisecting islands and heading inland when I am in the main channel. There are forests of trees falling into the river all up and down this area, most of them hang up on sand and gravel bars, a warning to the prudent mariner. The trees all end up root ball upstream and top downstream like dead soldiers after a battle. Some will rise and float with the upcoming high water and some get sanded in, break off and leave only a small part of the trunk showing, angling up and pointing downstream, a dangerous spear waiting for the imprudent mariner.
The sun has been circling us for days, I can't stay up late enough to watch a sunset or wake up early enough to catch the sunrise. We ourselves made a large arc right up to the Arctic Circle and now are on a southward and westward trajectory towards the sea. I think about the canoers that we met this last week that were also planning to get to the Bering Sea and I wonder if they will make it through this part. It would be brutal.



 

Fort Yukon

Cold in the morning, hot in the afternoon. Long john bottoms, thermal top with wool shirt, fleece, and puffy jacket with hat on top for coffee in the morning, still fingers and toes got cold then later down to shorts and tee shirt barefoot on deck. We had dinner on a sandbar at 8, napped until 9, ran for a couple more hours, and now are tied up in another back slough, it's midnight and the sun is streaming through the back of the tent. I put on the last round of sunblock at 9 this evening. I love it here.
All the villages seem to have a picnic table and a place to drive up to watch the boats come and go. There were about 6 people at the picnic table in Fort Yukon late this morning when we wheeled around the last bend, tried to cut across the sandbar, and got stuck enough that I had to put on the waders and get out and push back into deeper water. While we were struggling with our task the kind folks ashore were shouting advice and encouragement, of course. After we tied up and humbly walked up the gravel slope they were as nice as you could imagine and I immediately got a ride the half mile or so to the store/gas station, after a quick tour of town. Fort Yukon is the biggest of the Indian villages that we go through on the trip, with almost 300 families, a clinic, school, two stores, and cultural meeting house. I got my gas ($6.00 a gallon) and off we went in the truck back to the river. There is cell service here but neither Jeff nor I could connect with our phones, I think it is an Alaska thing. When I asked about a wifi hotspot from the girl in the store she looked either puzzled or confused, still the answer was no. Luckily my friendly driver Tony Carroll came to my rescue again.
Turns out that Tony is the manager of the power plant in town and the electrician and the lineman, for the 280 customers that are served by the giant diesel generators. First we went to the old generator building to his old office there and when we couldn't figure out what the password was we went to the new place. They have just completed a brand new five million dollar building with three new biofuel generators and a nice if not a little noisy office. Tony left me there for 45 minutes while he went back home to check on something. I was in his office at his desk hooked up to his wifi at the control center of electricity for the entire town, had just met him ten minutes ago (he watched us get onto and off of a sandbar) and he leaves me alone for almost an hour. Tony like most of the people in this town are Athabascan people, their name means "People of the Flat", they live largely subsistence lifestyles hunting geese and moose and bears and fishing for the king salmon that will arrive here in a few weeks. They are related to but speak a different language than the native people in most of the surrounding villages.
While we sat talking back at the picnic table, a couple of oddly well dressed and out of place missionaries, Jeff and Jeff, came by to invite us to church at the Arctic Circle Baptist Church, it was a Sunday after all. I gave Tony a couple of the salami beef logs that Truhn had brought up from Texas and I hope he considered it a fair trade, it was more than worth it for me. Truhn had been on the boat the whole time that I was in town (we heard from the village upstream to watch out for the bad people in Fort Yukon) talking to a semi-crazed semi-wise man who sat on shore and wore yellow shooting sunglasses. It was getting hot, we were ready to go, and so we untied about 3 hours after we pulled up. We got a wave goodbye and well wishes along with a caution to watch out for the next village downstream, Beaver, now those Indians are trouble. Right.





 

Circle City

I got us stuck the night before we hit Circle. I took a side channel, a small slough (rhymes with stew, not stroganoff) that runs along the base of some dark brown cliffs, the water was shallow but not too much so and then the channel split and split again and we came up on a rocky shore with fallen trees marking shoal water all downstream of us. It was a windy night, and late so we tied to shore and went to sleep.  In the morning I put on the waders and tried to push out into the deep water a quarter mile away. It wasn't enough so Jeff stripped down to his shorts and joined me as we struggled for a couple hours lifting and pushing through the gravel, finally getting to deep water about 10 AM.
Just ten miles later the mountains to our east drifted northward and the range to our west moved to the south. Just like that we were out of the mountains and into the flats and the tiny town of Circle. A dozen aluminum flat bottom skiffs sat tied to the bank in the mud and sand at the bottom of a wide gravel boat ramp. A large steel sheet pile wall had been built all along the riverbank in town to contain the erosion that the river brings but was obviously damaged by the battering of ice and overtopping of the river water. A large wooden building stands prominently on the riverbank shuttered, a hotel deal gone bad years ago. Wooden boats and fishwheels lie among the sprouting grass that surrounds a picnic table that serves as a community gathering place. There we met Steven, a local guy in a Toyota pickup, and Jormah, the interpretive ranger for Yukon-Charlie Preserve, and Gary Bessett, recently back from Fairbanks where he is getting all his teeth done and whose 80 year old mother Margaret lives just down the way, and Hunter Workman from the UK, an ironman paddling solo the entire watershed, source to the sea.
Jormah was there with his wife and kids and said that the Park asked him to sign on as a ranger due to his knowledge of the area, he is nice guy, well spoken, and a subsistence hunter and salmon fisherman. He has a deal worked out with his employer that allows him to hunt moose and caribou and bear and fish for king salmon all up and down the river on his off time. He travels in his own boat so that he can do as he pleases while commuting the 70 miles or so back and forth to work on the river.
Hunter, we had been tracking for the last two days, we had seen him sign in at one of the public use cabins and had heard of him from other canoers. He is a big guy, ex semi professional rugby player and a great friend to meet out here on the river. He started out a couple weeks ahead of us on a lake upstream of Whitehorse and on his way across Lake Lebarge got stuck in a large pack of floating ice halfway through. To hear him tell the story was to understand the danger of being in a canoe in a lake surrounded by large chunks of colliding ice. He will make it to the end I am sure even though the days of solitude and exertion seem to take a toll on him.
Of course there is no cell service in Circle and the store opens at 12. I bought a calling card for $6.25 and tried to call home from a phonebooth made out of logs on the side of the road. I heard that if you ask nicely that the store owners would let you log on to their internet but I suppose I am losing my touch because I was turned down and turned away. Next stop is Fort Yukon though, a hundred miles away and I am sure that they have cell service so with luck I will be able to connect there.
We were ready to leave, said goodbye to Gary and what was left of his six pack and shoved off again to run a couple miles and tie up to make some lunch. Twenty minutes later Hunter pulls along in his white canoe and kevlar paddle to join us for some of Jeff's famous potato black bean cabbage soup. We all sat in the tent laughing and telling stories (he had some good ones) for an hour or so, exchanged email addresses, took photos, and had a group hug before untieing from shore and moving downstream. We probably won't see him again this trip because although he is a strong paddler we will make better time against this wind that has been blowing the last couple days and he will not be able to catch up through the braided maze of channels in the Yukon Flats.




 

All the people we met in the last five days

First there were the First Nation men who were working on the historic site of Forty Mile. The Yukon's first town ever, founded around 1886 was called Forty Mile and is on the Yukon River. Back then the only way into this area was up the river from the coast via San Francisco on a steamship paddlewheeler. The First Nation men were rebuilding many cabins and structures in the old town of Forty Mile, they had built some new log buildings with the help of the Provincial government and were trying to stabilize the remaining 15 or so structures left of the town in the middle of nowhere. We didn't say much to each other, they were planing some rough sawn spruce boards down to use as flooring and we walked the half mile to tour the site.
There were the people we talked to in Eagle. The smoking man, the youngster watering still bare dirt flower boxes nearby, the welder who told the story of the cell tower, and the voice on the other end of the yellow phone who works for Homeland Security.
There was the solo guy in the canoe with the twin Airdale dogs who we later found out was Dave Metz, an anventure writer. It was late afternoon he was setting up his tent, we were bored and looking for a chat so we pulled up on the beach below his camp. It was an awkward conversation there at first, us on one side of a little creek, him on another, but then he warmed to our ways and soon we gave a short tour of the boat before saying farewell and casting off. The whole interaction lasted ten minutes.
Last but not least of the people who we have not just met but seen in the last five days are our new friends from Giessen Germany, Stefan and Melanie. I first saw them on the short trail to see an old gold dredge abandoned along a creek and then two hours later we passed them in their canoe, paddling close to the bank on an outside bend. We pulled up close and grabbed hold of their canoe, both of us drifting slowly through the magic landscapes, we offered them a beer and talked for a half hour or more before casting them off to find their own campsite for the night. It was a fun and unexpected encounter with fellow adventurous folks.
That was all the people that we met or saw in the last five days. Maybe the next part of the river will be different but I am not counting on it.

The Yukon-Charley National Preserve

Every day of the trip so far we have seen ice in some form along the shore. There have been pieces of lake ice that shatter into crystal like formations when broken and leftover patches of stream ice that sit bright white in a northern exposed hollow of a mountain side and there are the large and increasingly frequent stranded grey river ice slabs that push up on the upstream side of islands and shallow bars. When the frozen river finally breaks up in the early summer it is because of the warming temperatures but also the increasing pressure from the water that flows below that cause the once solid sheet of fracture into pieces that slowly at first begin to flow downstream. It is like a river of icebergs. Often when the entire river starts moving again there are ice jams and also areas where the ice rams up on shore tearing up huge swaths of earth and trees along it's way sometimes eventually finding the head of an island or a sand bar and with the momentum of all the ice behind it, it grinds it's way 100's of feet up on shore. It will sit there covered with silt and sand, sometimes stacked up to twenty feet high in giant stretches along the river that last for a mile or more.
The ice jams are worse. In the town of Eagle that we just past through a few days ago there was a jam of ice in 2009 right in the bend of the river where town is. In just three days the water and ice rose and then fell around most of the towns in the town and village up to a height of 50 feet above normal level and floated many buildings and cars away. Thankfully things look pretty much back to normal in Eagle right now, normal for Eagle that is.
Eagle is a town of 85 residents from the last census data available. Those fine people live down a dead end spur road off of a highway that, although is an international border., closes every day in summer between 9:00 AM and 9:00 PM and in the winter just shuts down completely. They are also a town that apparently refused to allow a cell phone tower to be erected on the hill above it because of the harmful rays that could harm the folks that live there. It is also the town that is the American/Alaskan point of entry to all who come from Canada of the river. When we asked the kind gentleman who was having a roll-your-own-smoke and a cup of joe where the customs office was he said to look for a phone booth next to the closed down laundry-mat. The phone was yellow and had no keypad and it was under a plywood half roof that could have hardly been called a booth. All you have to do is pick up the phone and you are connected to a federal employee working out of the Alaska Highway border crossing about 500 miles away. A few jokes are traded, some numbers read off a passport, wait a little while for their dial up to connect, and we were back in the USA.
Right out of Eagle we entered the Yukon-Charley National Preserve, a stretch of river that is just as remote as any we have come through and arguably more beautiful. Tall rocky cliffs on both sides of the river, angled veins of quartz running up immense rock faces that run straight down to the river, and hardly any trace of human activity. We saw our first brown bear, then another family of wolverines, eagles, falcons, geese, and ducks, a moose woke us up one morning walking heavily through the slough that we were camped in, and the weather was hot. It has been a great run with only a couple of hang ups. A run across a gravel bar chewed up the propeller pretty good, the mosquitoes are hellish once you get into the woods just a little bit, and the Calico Bluff Incident.
I was driving, Jeff was kinda navigating and I thought it would be a good idea to get up close to the sheer cliffs of rock that jutted out into the current. Into and out of trouble fast is what I say and when the propeller locked up on a floating log and the eddy caught us with the wind and we slid five feet from the rock wall before Jeff cleared the log free and lowered the engine and I started it back up and in a moment it was just a memory. The way the river lulls you into feeling that everything passes slowly can quickly get shattered when your boat is spinning in wind and current that close to shore.
This stretch is also notable for all the fantastic cabins along the way. We have stopped at dozens of falling down historic roadhouses and telegraph offices and cabins so far but along this part of the river are some real nice old log cabins that are left open and are there for the taking. It is an Alaska tradition that remote cabins are left unlocked with dry firewood and provisions available to all who need it. All that is asked is that the cabins are left clean and locked back up with the bear protection shutters closed. (usually plywood with nails protruding every 6 inches) We never slept in one of these cabins (yet) but always enjoy pulling up and resting and looking around a perfectly sited log cabin with a view along the river.
Tomorrow we hit the town of Circle, Alaska, population 116. I hope there is a cell tower or internet there. Who knows.

Dawson city

Dawson City grew up in 1895 as a gold rush boomtown, a place where hopeful miners and prospectors would stop off on their way to becoming rich and stop back by on their way out to lose whatever fortune they could gather. In just a matter of 6 short years the boom was over and Dawson's big time city days were over. Still it is a place with the feel of possibility and celebration and heartbreak. We pulled ashore there about 3 in the afternoon to have a look around and resupply. We quickly met Josh from Fairbanks, a drummer and environmental scientist who was on a 100 mile bicycle ride on his way to play with his band "Dead Calm" in a music festival in Chicken, Alaska. We also talked to Claire from Toronto via Brooklyn who is a visual artist in residence at the Klondike Institute of Arts and Culture and had just arrived in town and was walking down the beach. After a Jeff took a few trips to the gas station about 5 blocks away I took my turn walking the wooden sidewalks and dirt streets of town.
Dawson is a small town now with only about 1200 residents. It also has 9 bars in town. I stopped in at Bombay Peggys Pub and ordered a cold beer and took a seat at the bar between a couple younger locals and some "Holland Americans" on tour from God knows where. Before too long we had tied up the boat at a real dock behind the replica paddle wheeler that takes tourists for the trip of a lifetime down a couple miles of the Yukon River and were heading up to the locally recommended dive bar "The Pit" The bar was a classic with an old birch bark canoe hanging from the ceiling (not for sale), pictures of Dawson back in the day, and brass eagle topped supports holding up an unfinished wooden bar. There was also a large bell attached to a rope dangling overhead. In Alaska to "ring the bell" in a bar is to buy the house a round of drinks and feeling good about our fortune up to that point I pulled the rope and instantly made about a dozen new friends. After a while I stepped outside to sit on the sidewalk and had a talk with Vince and Cera only to look back inside the bar to see that Jeff was dancing with a woman who called herself "Dance Hall Sue". Soon the good times overcame us and we said our goodbyes to Dawson City and untied the boat to find a camping spot across the river. If Dawson City could ever feel refined and formal all you need to do is take a short ferry ride across the river to West Dawson, that is where the good times roll these days.
We pulled up and tied up at a place called Shipwrecks or the Paddlewheelers Graveyard where half a dozen old wooden steamships sit along the beach and in the woods sinking back into history. There was a group of ten of Canada's finest youth enjoying a campfire there and as I tried to walk among the slippery rocks of the shore to tie up the boat I slipped and fell into the river in my sportcoat, tie, and top hat. Quite the entrance. As I came into the tent to change out of my soaking clothes Jeff invited the whole group aboard for a little West Dawson fun. I never did change out of my wet Carharts as we all sat shoulder to shoulder in this little tent telling stories and laughing until the sun came up. We had a Neo Gold Rush Poetry Slam as someone got up and recited the entirety of Robert Service's "The cremation of Sam Mcgee". They were drinking wine and Jameson's Irish whiskey mixed with homemade cranberry tonic water.  We heard stories from Kiki, a member of the League of Lady Wrestlers and who apparently while wrestling under the name Bob Loblaw sits on her opponent eating ice cream until they submit. At one point I stepped out on the back deck and noticed that both the pontoons were completely underwater, got a chill and had no other recourse than to change out of my wet clothes there beside our new best friends. It was a great and memorable night and I have Jeff to thank for finally tucking me in and putting up my bug net as I curled up in my down sleeping bag while the sun streamed in the tent.
In the morning Josh stopped by for coffee and a chat before hopping back on his bike for Chicken and I explored the steamships on shore. My phone sat in a bag of rice (I hope it dries out), my still soaking clothes hung from a hook in the back of the tent, I untied the boat and pushed off the rocky shore, and we floated away. The low buildings of Dawson City rounded the next bend and I was thankful that at least I had not lost all of my fortune in that wild frontier town.


 

turd goes for a swim

Actually, she fell in.  I was sitting up on the front bench and I guess with the bulky life vest she couldn't make the jump and scratched her way down and backwards over the front deck while we were motoring the day before Dawson.  As we quickly put the boat into neutral she popped up again astern of us having made the trip between the pontoons.  In a couple seconds she was 50 feet behind us and paddling fast to catch up.  A couple seconds later I had her scooped up with the boat pole hooked into her life jacket and she was shivering on deck.  You would think she would be more careful after that but no, she does whatever she wants to, comes when called when convenient and has no tolerance for the beavers that taunt her from a few feet away.  I think she is glad to be here, who knows.

The river to Dawson

Before we even started this stretch of the river we needed to get up to town in Carmacks and get some fuel. Not knowing where the store was in town we drifted by slowly to try to catch a look at it. Not seeing anything we pulled up to a woman walking 2 Labradors and hailed out to her, she pointed out the way. Not knowing exactly where the sandbar was, we ran up on it. Not too bad, with Jeff pushing with the pole I put on the waders and got out and pushed us across to the landing spot. I called home and checked my email but soon several people stopped by and wanted to talk and look over the boat, we didn't stay long in town, shoving off into a very cold rain. It was a good day for a nap so we had to stop and make some soup and lay down for a little while. The run down five fingers rapids was nothing really, the low water made for an easy ride. We see some fish camps on the shore here and there and pass by three women paddling kayaks.
The day passes slowly in the rain until late afternoon in a break from the cold the sun comes out for a while. We are pulled up among the Hootchikoo Rocks, a 300 foot cliff of Basalt, there is a small campsite above the river and as Jeff cooks I light a small fire. It is a beautiful view as we eat by the fire then lay down for a couple minutes and nap in the sun among the spruce needles. We'll run until 11 that night, stopping after scaring up 16 trumpeter swans and watch as they circle overhead then fly upstream. Our camp for the night is across the river from McCabe creek where Tom's barge is hauled up on shore for the winter.
The next day seems a lot like the last except for it was sunnier and warmer. We pass mile after mile of wild land, the scale of it is exhausting. High ridges and more basalt cliffs, gently sloping grassy mountains and no one in sight, all day we pass one couple camped ashore with a Grumman canoe then in the evening we camp near a couple with a small child. Oh, and Cowboy.
Cowboy has a small cabin with a broken picture window in the abandoned town of Fort Selkirk. He ran river barges for years and judging from his lifestyle is perfectly at home in this land. In the trailer he tows behind his four wheeler is a freshly skinned beaver carcass, a rifle, and a bottle of propane. He is not a guy who talks too much so I never got the whole story behind the beaver but I did see him throw the carcass into a bag in his skiff so, while he kept the pelt, the meat was most likely for a friend. His one room cabin is simple and we have to knock hard on the door for him to hear us. I have a shell stuck in the shotgun back on the boat and can't get it out, could he help out? "Bring it up", is all he says. He gets the shell unstuck quickly and needs to get on his way to check on a barge, we give him a box of shotgun shells for his trouble and he is off in his skiff to head up the Pelly River then to check on his barge.
The next couple days are river days, hot river days. The sun is up well before we are and is setting after 11. At nine last night I was putting on one last dollop of sunblock for the day as we putt down the increasingly wide river. We are joined by two pretty major rivers, the White from the west and the Stewart from the east. The Stewart brings a brown muddy water to the mix and the White brings grey silt and trees. Thousands of full size trees, some still green and all with their root balls attached begin to hang up on every sandbar. The river turns wide, about three fourths of a mile wide with multiple long sandbars and as we drift in the hot afternoon a wind picks up the silt from them and makes a dust devil that spins across the river. The mountains are getting lower and farther from shore and the river is winding it's way between them.
Day five we see a boat ashore ahead through the binoculars. A man is cutting a tree with a chainsaw and a woman drives a four wheeler with supplies from their boat to the cabin. A teenage girl is poking a stick into a giant log jam at the rivers edge, she is wearing tennis shoes and says hello as we coast by her, about 25 feet away, at 5 miles an hour. They are the only people and that is the only conversation we will have that day. Drifting by someone on shore at 5 miles an hour you only have about 30 seconds of time to talk, a little more if you don't mind yelling.
There are lots of moose and beavers and ducks and geese and swallows and eagles. A few black bears but no brown bears yet. As we wander the sites where camps and roadhouses and telegraph offices used to be, crashing through underbrush looking for fallen down log structures and artifacts we are both always aware of bear sign and habitat.  We see 100 mountain goats up on a high rocky mountain and an endangered interior peregrine falcon circles us. As it turns 11 PM the sunset persists in the northern sky, three Canada geese land then take off from the slough beside us, and another angry beaver slaps his tail on the water and dives. It is remarkable to be out in this enormous wild land so far from civilization. It is remarkable to watch as the scenery changes in front of your eyes as the boat spins in the current. So far so good. Remarkable.

waterfall

Cowboy, Jeff, and Turd

On to Carmacks

The first stretch of the river is as crystal clear as the flats of Biscayne Bay and in the morning our little faithful dog alerted us to a giant lynx on the shore about 100 feet away. It lingered for longer than we thought it would with Buddy yapping at it as it passed behind a picnic table and returned to the forest. Their were old bear tracks in the mud of the bank but no recent sign and no sightings of any bear throughout the next few days. We got on the move at 3 PM and drifted on down the current along the stretch of river that is called "The 30 Mile"
The views are grand and tall and spectacular, like slow motion driving through a national park. Large imposing rocky outcrops, giant sand and gravel slopes interrupted by low treed benches and numerous islands and gravel bars visible below the boat., Always along the shore was ice, remnants of the frozen river clinging to the shore. Olga said that we were two weeks early and we are coming to believe in the wisdom of that. We see no other people for the first two days and then on the next we pass 4 groups of canoers. A visit with one couple on the shore, a slow drift by a solo Japanese man mid river and a couple that we just drift by and wave. No one seems to share our enthusiasm and style.
At one point a male trumpeter swan leads us away from something by giving a distress call, we follow behind for half a mile then a young bald eagle swoops down to try to take advantage of an easy meal only to find the swan turn and defend himself. The days go warm and cold, sunny and raining and Jeff changes into and out of his raingear more often than he wants to. We find a shed of a moose antler, explore several wrecked steamboats and old log cabins, and soon the Teslin River joins on river right mudding the water. We camp one night at the old settlement of Hootalinqua, tying up in an eddy where countless folks before us have done before, still the feeling is of being the first to come through this country.
A beaver slaps his tail in anger at us, we stop to take pictures of First Nation spirit houses, and pass through an enormous forest burn that persists for over two hours. This part of the river is fast and the feeling is of being alone in a vast wilderness until a few miles out of town and the road comes into view. It is late and we have been travelling all day so we stop to make camp. We have tied up on a sand island just around the bend from town, we can hear the few cars pass over the steel bridge, Jeff cooks spaghetti, there is thunder and a front coming from downriver, it starts to rain.

100 year old roadhouse

Leaving the beginning

Three AM was pretty dark, the small patch of glow in the northern sky could have been either the last of the sunset or the start of the sunrise, still it was pretty dark. It had just started raining and the wind switched decidedly from northeast to south along with what may have been storm clouds and it was getting colder. I put on my shorts and sandals and grabbed the last of the loads to take to the boat and waded out through the mud and rocks in knee deep water to where we were anchored in slightly deeper water. Jeff stripped to his underwear for the slog and we both changed clothes in the darkness of the tent under our headlights while the motor idled in warmup. Kooney and Lois untied the stern line that held us back and as 2:59 turned to 3:00 we pulled the anchor and headed into the darkness towards the middle of Lake Lebarge.
In full raingear, wool caps, and gloves we started celebrating as the rain and wind got stronger and our homemade shanty boat plowed through the waves towards the dark mountains on the other side. In the middle we took a fair amount of water on deck but it quickly ran aft and overboard, we were heading across the waves out in what Rob Geisler calls the "big water". Jeff was at the helm and did a fine job of piloting while I stood aft to trim the boat and keep the outboard from cavitating. By 4 in the morning we were on the other side and turned north to head up the eastern shore with what was now a tailwind and following sea. Gradually the waves got smaller, the rain turned to sleet and a misty fog hung along our route towards the outlet of the lake and the start of the Yukon River. Through an unreal land and sea scape of mist, rock, lake, and trees we coasted along at 6 miles an hour drinking beer and freezing in the rain as the sky lightened and the shallows of Lower Lebarge appeared. Unable to find a channel marker we poked our way through the crystal clear shoals avoiding gravel bars and boulders and by 7:30 we had tied up to shore safely inside the river channel.
We had pulled up alongside the remains of the steamship Casca which wrecked at the end of the lake in 1911. Several old log cabins and a rusty pickup truck that was driven the 50 miles over the ice in the 1950's along with other wooded structures were visible through the spruce forest. We wandered the shore for a while giving the dog a welcome break from the trip down the lake but I was tired and cold and soon I was back on the boat rolling out my sleeping bag and laying down in my Carhartts and sport coat for a fitful night's (day's) sleep. It was 10.