Yukon bush life

(Yukon) Snow! It still makes me gasp. Those first few flakes of the season drifting in the beam of my headlamp. Snow in the boat Never mind we were planning to go to town the next day, never mind we have no chains or winter tires for the truck, never mind it’s 7am, pitch black and Neil is fast asleep, “Neil! Guess what?” He couldn’t. “Snow!” Neil can stand before the most wondrous sights nature has to offer and say “Oh that’s nice, shall we have a biscuit?” but even Neil said, dreamily, “Oh… snow!” Snow in the washing   Will we still feel that flutter of excitement after 10 years here, I wonder? The year I don’t wake up and gasp at the first snow is the year we up sticks and shift to Thailand. We’ll be done with the Yukon. This time last fall I remember temps going down to -20c. The river was bumping with ice chunks and we had the boat safely out. We’ve been blessed with a few weeks of extra boat travel this fall. We’ve ...

(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...

(Lou, Yukon) At last, we have a few inches of dusty snow. We’ve got the snow shoes down from the cabin wall and trundled the snowmachine off its logs. There’s not enough snow to run the machine far, but we were able to test out our new ramps on to the property. First trip down the new ramp And more importantly, up There’s a big improvement in the plumbing system. No more Jack and Jill up the hill from the creek with heavy pales of water. Ramp at waterhole bolstered with frozen in logs and snow Buckets can be dumped in the back of the machine and whizzed home with a roar and a cloud of filthy 2-stroke engine fumes. Almost as easy as getting it from a tap. Still trailing along We’ve been out on snow shoes brushing out an old trail we found. We hope to bypass some of the jumbled river ice by cutting across the apron of land next to us. Open lead in the river downstream from us It’s about 3 miles long and hard work with chainsaw, loppers and brush axe, b...