Yukon bush life

(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) One day is the same as another here. A man-made event like Christmas can easily pass us by if we aren’t paying attention. There’s no dithering on Oxford Street trying to find presents, no carols playing, no family rows about who’s going where and with whom. Nothing to differentiate the day unless we somehow make it special. A glimpse of Christmas sunshine from the river We have two criteria for celebrations and festivals- an easy day with no hard physical work and an unusual activity. A day of chainsawing was our easy day for Christmas Eve. We are burning logs from last year’s woodpile stacked behind the house. They need to be bucked (cut) into stove-size lengths then heaved round to the front of the house in a wheelbarrow. ( See our How To on firewood ) Not particularly relaxing or festive, I grant you, but compared to trail breaking or felling trees and hauling them back, it felt like a day of light housework. Our unusual event was BEER. We haven’t...