Yukon bush life

(Lou, Yukon) We made our first “commute to work” this week to get a business licence. We left early, 7am just like we used to in London. There was no traffic or train delays, but it was 35 below. Dawson was even colder at -40 and the cold crept into our facemasks and under hats, and blew into the back of our mitts as we got closer to town. Dawn was spectacular. The sky slid from steel grey through pale rose to burning orange as the sun made her entrance. She glared so fiercely, I drove one-handed, blotting her out with a mitt whilst trying to peer through a small unfrozen patch at the bottom of my iced-up goggles. We were heading due south to Dawson and straight into the new day. At this latitude, 64 degrees north, the sun sits on the horizon and burns against the snow so bright your eyes weary of it. You want nothing but to crawl away and hide in a box for a while. Neil likes to do some Scottish country dancing as we get to town to warm his feet. Weirdo We hit the...

(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 w...