Yukon bush life

Filling with ice Winter came all of a sudden this year. We saw a few wee chunks of ice in the river on November 1st, nothing bigger than you would put in a G & T. By the 5 th it had choked with ice and stopped completely. Stopped A few days later it was -30˚C and a few days after that, we had a huge dump of snow. I was still wandering round the yard in flip flops and jeans wondering what had happened. 30 below. Sun dog over the river We were out walking when it stopped. It dammed downstream and backed up, flooding over our feet. I managed to capture it all on the GoPro, take a look if you didn’t see it on our Facebook page- It’s all too exciting and we’ve found ourselves rushing around doing things we thought were a month away.  Punching ice out of the water hole We've already been across river and gone 6 miles up towards Dawson, and 7 miles down towards Alaska. For the past two years, we hadn’t even crossed the river here for...

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. ...