Ghost town

(Lou, Yukon)
We finally made it to Forty Mile on 27th December!

Now we can’t get there again.

It’s beginning to feel like Never-Never Land.

Forty Mile townsite from the Yukon River

Forty Mile is a ghost town from the gold rush era, and our nearest “place”. In it’s heyday at the end of the 1800s, it was home to 700 people and had its own Telegraph Office and Opera House.

When the gold rush charged on to Circle, it was slowly abandoned, the last resident leaving in 1958. Some civic buildings and cabins remain and are now an historic site. Our friends, and nearest neighbours, live a few miles from there and we’d been trying to get to them since freeze up.

We made 12 miles of trail downriver before Christmas over un-obligingly rough ice. Or thought we did. When we remembered to look at the tachometer on the snowmachine, we found the 12 miles almost halved to 6.5.

That included the full length of our land trail. We spent days cutting out a land trail on foot (there wasn’t enough snow for the machine at the time) and we proudly believed it to be 5 miles long. A glance at the tachometer shrunk it to an embarrassing 1.6.

All a bit dis-spiriting and probably a big factor in our deciding to fuck the whole thing off and wait for more snow (which would fill the gaps in the jumbled river ice making travel easier.)

We knew Forty Mile was 26 river miles away. Someone with a GPS measured the river miles by boat and told us it was definitely 26. Not 16, as we’d previously believed.

Our friends had put trail in from their end towards us, to get to a trap line, but between the two unfinished trails was a couple of miles of the worst bank to bank jumble ice.

So we watched the skies for snow clouds and I got on with doing some laundry.

We get very few guests, two visits through the whole of last winter, but something about knickers and bras on display above the stove seems to call them in. Yes, we had human visitors this week!

We managed to compose ourselves, despite months of isolation, and not follow our dog. Homer ran and hid in the bush until they’d gone, knocking me over in a blind panic to escape the invaders.

Our friends, and two others with a trap line out here, set out on four snowmachines to visit us. Four snowmachines is good news. It means the snow gets packed down hard and the ice lumps are crushed. In theory. The journey was rougher than they realised and it took them 4.5 hellish hours to get to us.

Tough on machines. I'm changing out a drive belt on the trail here

We didn’t have much to offer them after their ordeal and the poor bastards headed back after a warm up and some tea and cheese. Homer then confounded us by flying out of the bushes and trying to run off with them. It’s a while since he’s seen anyone else, so presumably any biped creature on a snowmachine must be Mr Neil or Miss Louise. Very confusing for a not too smart sled dog.

On 27th we set off to Forty Mile, again, for a return visit with our friends. With only one machine and a rinky-dink trail winding its way around jagged ice, there was a fair amount of walking to be done by the passenger.

I don’t think I’ve explained the full excruciating ordeal of “walking”. It’s not walking. It’s staggering, falling, getting up and stumbling on. The trail is not packed down yet but it is obscured by snow. So each step forward on to the smooth white is a guessing game.

Will it be a gentle footfall into softly pressed snow or a pinnacle of hard ice stabbed into the ball of your foot? A sideways wipe on a slippery angled ice sheet or a plunge into a hole that has the vertebrae at the back of your neck cracking like match sticks. It is not a casual saunter whilst admiring the scenery.

Arrival at forty Mile fish landing. Fish wheel for catching salmon behind.

We made it to their place in 3.5 hours. They moved their cabin 10 miles closer to us, which was nice of them.

As I’ve mentioned, we are not good with distance. And our knowledgeable friend with the GPS got the distance to Forty Mile wrong. It’s 16 river miles away, as we had thought, not 26. Either that or that spooky ol’ ghost town has upped and moved itself.

Our truck. Still there. Abandoned at the ghost town.

He also told us Dawson was 60 river miles away, not 45- 50 as we’d thought. So now have no idea on that either. It could be just around the corner with Vancouver a short bus ride on for all we know.

Our neighbours are an hour's travel on a good trail, more if the trail is shit and all day if something goes wrong. That’s all we can be sure of.

Luckily nothing went wrong. We had a lovely visit and managed not to pick our noses or fart loudly (it just ends up like that when you live alone in the woods) and be generally social for a whole evening.

Homer had to stay in his pen. He was delighted to see us return safely

Confident that travel could only get better, we set off on New Year’s Eve to visit another friend. There are two year-round households near Forty Mile, our Alaskan friends and a gentleman who is also a very dear pal of ours. We hadn’t seen him since September and we miss him. It snowed overnight, just as we had wished and prayed for. Snow makes travelling so much easier.

Snow on our cache

Unless it snows too much.

Sweeping the porch

Then keeps on snowing and snowing and snowing until you have over a foot of the bloody stuff and the trail disappears before your eyes.

And the machine

Yes, stupidly we did not mark our trail with willow branches so now it is gone. Totally. Like someone laid a foot-thick downy duvet across the whole river. And Forty Mile, which was 16 or 26 miles away, might as well be on the fucking moon again.

Waiting for daylight by one of the few stakes we did put in, hoping to find the trail

We set off as planned but we could not locate any of our hard won trail.

Daylight. Not much bloody better

We gritted our teeth and started off across the duvet making a new trail. Only it’s not really a duvet, it is light, fluffy snow blindly obscuring jagged chunks of rock-hard ice.

Until the snow settles and gets packed by the wind it actually makes things harder, if such a thing were possible. Our new trail was literally filling in behind us as more of the inconvenient white stuff started plummeting out of the sky. So we would have to break trail all the way there and all the way back.

One side

then the other

Each lurch of the machine sent the pillion rider careering off sideways. That’s if they weren’t already face down in the snow. At one point the machine rolled to the side and my foot slipped off the running board, deep into a hole and jammed fast. I felt the weight of the machine press against the delicate bones in my ankle. Time stopped. I waited for a snap, the pain and game over but, thank God, the heavy machine rolled no further.

And now stuck in a bloody hole

We stopped for coffee. The blizzard spinning around us. It was horribly warm, -15C and the snow was wet and sticky. We could see nothing. It might take 2 hours or all day to get there. Was it sensible to carry on towards a ghost town of indeterminate distance?

We were in the whirling abyss. Anything could happen. We might emerge a hundred and twenty years ago and find Forty Mile heaving with gold miners in period costume. Or meet ourselves on the trail going home, riding a snowmachine from the future with an elderly white husky. It was all too fucking weird.

Then I fell flat on my face whilst trying to get the thermos out. Anything that gets between me and a caffeinated drink is going to cause a sense of humour failure.

Sense of humour failure

“I want to go home”. So did Neil. We turned round and ploughed back through our fast-disappearing trail in a duvet of soft, slippery, much wished-for snow, feeling sad we would not see our pal again that year.

We have rallied ourselves and begun to put in the trail again and, yes, marked it with willows this time. We’ve done a full 120 miles already! No, with help from Homer and his wonderful nose, we have sniffed out our original trail, that’s 6½ miles.

Sniffing for trail

We have even more snowfall now so the rest of it is gone for good, but as the wind packs the flakes down it will not be the ordeal it was previously. Though whether it will be an entirely different type of ordeal remains to be seen.

Bendy snow on the porch

In the evening, the last of 2016, the weather stayed mild. Without the visit to our pal we had no idea how to mark the end of such an incredible year.

I went out for a piss and pondered what we could do. Miraculously, the stars had danced out from behind the clouds. The Northern Lights made their entrance and billowed above us, so garishly green and so silent. Like a big camp cabaret with the sound turned down.

We grabbed folding chairs and the last of our beer and sat outside to watch the show. All this for an audience of 3. And one of us wasn’t even paying attention.

Then the lights flounced off, the stars made their exit and the snow reeled in again. We were exhausted and all went happily to bed at the rock’n’roll hour of 10pm.

Even Homer, who hadn’t looked up but managed a good chew on the plastic toggle of Mr Neil’s mitt before either of us spotted what he was up to.