Yukon bush life

(Lou, Yukon) The most important events of the last week involve neither lemmings nor our dog. The river has begun to run with ice, temps dropped to -16C and we had our first meagre fall of snowflakes. Winter.  We woke one morning to a flotilla of ice chunks riding the river. Over the past week this has become a steady flow of ice pans spinning and slushing against each other, thick enough now that if you were quick and suicidal you might make a dash from one bank to the other, leaping across them like lily pads. The beginnings of the ice shelf has filled our eddy and lines the river bank and our creek swirls through a series of frozen falls. A difficult, arduous and pointless job For the last week or so we have been swearing, screaming and arguing viciously under the pretext of re-roofing the old cabin.  Things all started amicably enough. We had to rebuild one section of the roof in order to fit a woodstove and make a chimney hole for a recent guest a...

Neil's version of events: Winter 2011, Camberwell south London I didn’t pay attention when I picked Louise up from Heathrow. She'd just come back from her annual Alaskan pilgrimage (she'd been visiting regularly since before we met).  I was happy for her to go on her own. The frozen North wasn't my thing. I was more the large pilsener and bratwurst kind of traveller.  When she mentioned some crazy offer to move to a homestead in the Alaskan wilderness it didn’t quite register. I was in the middle of organising a conference at BSkyB, grappling to get 30 broadband lines installed at a hotel within 72 hours. Traveller's delight - bratwurst Louise and I met whilst rehearsing for a fringe theatre play. I was living in a dingy bedsit in Wimbledon and life wasn’t going anywhere. I'd made an effort to inject some sparkle by taking up acting.  We hit it off (well, we fell in love) and I moved into her council flat in Brixton. A few years later we bou...

Lou's version of events: Winter 2011 Camberwell, South London My acting headshot We left London and moved to Alaska because I called Neil a moron.  Neil and I were living in (then) cheap and dowdy Camberwell. Neil had a job at BSkyB, I was working, or often not working, as an actor. We had a lopsided cat (a stroke victim), no kids.  Life was fine but dull. Not much to complain about, though that never stopped me.  The far north I had a passion for the far north and would save all year to spend a couple of weeks in Alaska on dogsledding trips. Neil had a passion for nice food, pubs and comfort so I travelled alone.  On holiday in Alaska Cabin sitting Whilst mushing in the Alaskan bush I met a guy, let’s call him Hank, who needed a house-sitter for his remote, off-road homestead and 50-some sled dogs. Six weeks alone in the wilderness!  I cleared the decks of acting jobs (cancelled one day's role play for a bank, I was in high demand...

Our cabin on the Yukon Neil and Lou’s story We live very remote, in a log cabin in the sub Arctic Yukon bush. We are off the road system, off the electricity grid (and off our heads). We came to the Yukon in 2012 from inner city London, two urban middle-aged professionals with not much in the way of survival skills. I worked as an actor, Neil was a manager at BSkyB. We'd never used a chainsaw, ridden a snowmachine, driven a boat, got firewood, fished, hunted, pickled... we'd never even made jam but were pretty hot with internal communications plans and line learning. I always wanted to live in the Alaskan wilderness, Neil didn’t. In fact, far from it.  Alaska! I'd watched a Disney film called The Wilderness Family as a small child growing up in Plymouth and fell in love with the freedom and excitement that Alaska seemed to offer. I later found out the film was made in Colorado and set in Canada, so this has all been based on a mistake. Neil grew...