Yukon bush life

Disappearing water hole Sometimes I find myself thinking, Christ this is hard. When it’s 45 below, and our waterhole has disappeared under glacial ice, and everything we didn’t put upstairs froze solid overnight, and we cannot get warm in the house as no matter how much wood we burn the heat stops 3 feet from the wood stove. It’s times like those when you need to remind yourself just how much worse it could be and go camping. We didn’t purposefully pick the coldest night so far this winter, we just went “Let’s go test the new tent out on Tuesday.” Tuesday was the beginning of a cold snap that’s kept us between 35-45 below for two weeks. Setting off We set off anyway, late in the day with the 40 year-old wall tent and "hippy killer" wood stove. It was a test to see how it would feel if we’d been travelling all day and then had to stop, find two trees the right space apart to hang the tent, clear the ground, cut firewood and camp for the night. ...

Bull caribou walking across local glacier The tributary rivers in this part of the Yukon were named by an eccentric mathematician. We have the Fifteen Mile River, which we have just discovered is 21 miles from Dawson. Also, the Twelve Mile and Forty Mile Rivers, 18 and 55 miles from town, respectively and just over the border in Alaska, there is the Seventy Mile River, which is 70 miles from absolutely bloody nowhere at all. Fifteen Mile River I believe the numerals were plucked from a bingo machine, one drunken night in Dawson City, and randomly distributed down the Yukon  (See footnote). End of the road- overflow water on the Fifteen Mile. The Twelve Mile River is also called the Chanandu. Mishearing the local accent we thought it was the Xanadu. But the film with rollerskating Olivia Newton-John, that anyone of my age might remember, was apparently not named after a tributary of the mighty Yukon River. What a shame. View from Forty Mile ...