Yukon bush life

(Lou, Yukon) We’ve drilled holes in the bottom of our boat. Why not? A few holes in the transom can only improve things. The weather warmed up to -7c yesterday, time to get the power tools and get a few jobs done. The Garmin Fish Finder instructions told us to drill two holes in the boat. It suggested not to do this whilst afloat. Can’t think why? Good job they pointed that out. I was a bit nervous so we spent ages fiddling with the bracket and screws to make sure it was absolutely in the right place before drilling. It wasn’t, so we now have extra holes that we’ll have to fill or spend a lot of time bailing. Why fit a fish finder in March? We’ve heard about ice fishing so thought it might be fun to winch the boat across the river and look for grayling through 10 foot of ice. Let’s see how well this baby works. No, even we’re not that mad. We will use the device in the summer as a depth sounder to stop us hitting gravel bars and tearing chunks out of another $200 propel...

(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...