Alaska and the Yukon: The Next Adventure
I’m leaving tomorrow for two months in Alaska and the Yukon– a Klondike adventure.
Back in the 1890s, fortune-seekers took over a year getting to the Klondike: a boat voyage from Seattle, an arduous mountain trek, winter building a boat in the Yukon, and a final paddle downriver to the gold fields.
If you were to copy that passage in 2018, you would have tradeoffs:
- The bad news: no gold at the end.
- The good news: a modern adventurer can pull off that distance in about a month. Two months, if you count the time it takes to build a simple boat.
My trip is not explicitly a recreation of the Klondike route. In fact, the parity is incidental, and I’m not making the Inside Passage boat voyage this year (we did that in 2014). But it’s a handy framing to tie together this messy, rugged, family-and-friends summer trip.
We’re taking elements– navigation, trekking and water routes, boat building– and scrambling them up to make our own adventure.
Here’s our plan:
- Sunnyside, Alaska (mid-July to mid-August): Kelsey builds a boat, Rick tears down an old cabin, Dana cooks things, further adventures ensue
- Chilkoot Trail (mid-August): A four-day hike from Alaska into the Yukon Territory over the Chilkoot Pass
- Whitehorse, Yukon (late August): Navigation footracing in the North American Orienteering Championships
- Yukon River (late August into September): Two-week canoe paddle from Whitehorse to Dawson City
The Homestead and Building a Boat: 1 Month in Sunnyside, Alaska
Rick grew up on the shores of Chichagof Island– in what was the Alaska Territory when he was born. We go to Sunnyside, a little non-town on the beach down the shore from 100-person Pelican.
Every summer since my 17th birthday, my family has returned to that land. It echoes of a traditional Tlingit summer fish camp, except for us, we mostly build stuff.
This summer, my personal mission is to build a sailboat, a bit like this one:
I’m a novice sailor. I figured that building/owning my own sailboat would help me practice. That, and it looks fun to build– the plans I bought are based on the open source Puddle Duck Racer, which is designed to be cheaply constructed with materials you can find at a hardware store.
There’s no hardware store in Pelican (or Sunnyside), so I’m planning to get my timber in Juneau (I have a day), and other parts either online or in Seattle over the next couple of days.
Novice sailor, novice boat builder, remote location where you can’t get spares… what could go wrong?
I have one month at Sunnyside, and I’m hoping to have a plausible watercraft by the end of it. Hopefully my friends will want to help, and don’t get too distracted by Rick’s old-cabin-demolition project, Dana’s cooking-with-bonfires project, or the usual canoeing, hiking, and fishing adventures.
Hiking the Chilkoot Pass: 4 Days from Alaska to the Yukon
The mid-August ferry takes us from Pelican back to Juneau, arriving in the middle of the night. We’ll meet friends there who will join us on the next-morning ferry to Skagway. We’ll likely sleep on the ferry terminal floor.
We have to figure out where to spend the next night in Skagway, watch a mandatory briefing at the National Park office, and catch a shuttle to the trailhead at Dyea before we begin the trek from Alaska into the Yukon.
The Chilkoot Pass marks the border between the U.S. and Canada– the second mountaintop border crossing I’ll make this year!
The most famous segment of the trail is the Golden Staircase leading up to the pass. Gold Rush fortune seekers paid to climb steps made of ice:
The snow will be gone when we’re there, leaving a steep scramble up through large boulders. We’ll pass through the remote border post to Canada and the treeless high lakeland beyond.
North American Orienteering Championships: 1 Week in Whitehorse, Yukon
At Bennet, the trail ends and we catch a train. The train carves along the edge of steep Yukon lakes all the way to Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon.
Starting the morning after the hike, we’ll be racing:
The Whitehorse area is beautiful: open forests, stunning blue lakes, the world’s smallest desert. We come for the detailed terrain:
Look at those negative contours! Check out the subtlety of the land, the challenge of the hard-to-pick-out vegetation features! Imagine running through this kind of clear, high-visibility forest:
The North American Orienteering Championships are typically one of the year’s most social and high-quality orienteering events. The Canadians and Americans draw on years of friendly rivalry. Competition comes both in the woods and over games of Set and Pirate Scrabble in the evenings.
Yukon Orienteering has a full week of events (also including the Canadian Orienteering Championships):
- Saturday 8/18: NAOC Long (world ranking) at Croucher Creek
- Sunday 8/19: NAOC Middle (world ranking) at Lewes Lake
- Monday 8/20: NAOC Relay at the Grey Mountain Biathlon Trials course
- Tuesday 8/21: NAOC & COC Sprint (world ranking) in the Carcross Desert
- Wednesday 8/22: rest
- Thursday 8/23: COC Long at Chadburn Lake
- Friday 8/24: COC Middle at Hidden Lakes
We’ll get to see and race with athletes we’ve known for decades– in some of North America’s best orienteering terrain.
Paddling: 2 Weeks on the Yukon River
I think it was Rick’s idea to paddle on the Yukon River while we’re there. He asked me a few months ago: “so, one week, or two?”
Under the theory that more adventure is better, I said two. So starting the morning after the races, we’re paddling from Whitehorse all the way to Dawson City.
Following that incidental Gold Rush theme, fortune-seekers traditionally took the same route after a boat-building winter in Whitehorse. They, too, paddled to finish up at the gold fields at in Dawson City.
We’re good at paddling canoes, but haven’t done distance before. I think I went canoe camping once with an elementary school friend. I don’t know much about rapids, capsize recovery, how to optimize weight distribution along the boat’s length.
Fortunately, we have a few things in our favor:
- Family friends are joining (at least for the first week) who have experience with this stuff
- The Yukon is a fairly calm downriver paddle, most iffy at Lake LaBerge (potential quick wind change) and the Five Finger Rapids. For the mileage we’re covering, this is pretty smooth
We also have a canoe during our month in Sunnyside, so we have a chance to train while we’re there.
Seattle’s summer feels short at the best of times. In my six weeks home, I’ve been climbing in the Cascades, backpacking on the coast, and sailing on Lake Washington. But it will be September by the time I’m back.
Further north, summer daylight lasts even longer. We need the working hours long daylight brings: each segment’s plan is ambitious. We designed it that way.
I’m looking forward to working my muscles sore, eating hungry, sleeping exhausted. I’ll use all the daytime that this summer brings me. We chase that thin-stretched sun packed with plans and possibilities.
