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.

The full Klondike Gold Rush route from Seattle (with a small detour to the ancestral lands)

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…