Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Downshift.

Three months ago, at three in the morning, on the first dark night I had seen since heading to the arctic I pulled a beat-up T-bird into the parking lot of the Whitehorse city campground—I was back in the capital of the Yukon. In less then 48 hours I had come south from Inuvik, through the Canadian Rockies, past the Arctic circle, and out of the Mackenzie River basin. After 700 kilometers in a pickup hauling a skidoo in back, I caught a late night ride with two Gwich'in women leaving Dawson city to run some errands in Whitehorse—500 km away. After feeding me they had me take over driving and for the next four hours I avoided potholes, elk, and foxes. Not an easy task with only one headlight and a plastic tarp over the passenger side window. Not to mention it was my first night in 40 days.

Last week my parents and I rented a car for a week of exploring in southern Italy The road hazards here are different from those in the Arctic. Mountain passes are not filled with wild tundra, grizzly bears, and elk but rather with vineyards, castles, mopeds, and donkeys.

The landscape, though not natural, is still stunning. For several days we stayed in the city of Matera. A city with human roots in the bronze age. Around Matera runs a deep limestone canyon with one side covered in stone houses and the other pockmarked with 1000 year-old cave dwellings. The small river, that began cutting its way into the limestone hundreds of thousands of years-ago, flows brown and muddy through the bottom of the canyon. Its foul odor speaks both to its long and continuing relationship with the city above and of a humanity's ability to define itself with nature and still disregard it.

Chioggia, an island city, in northeastern Italy is a perfect example of this dualism. The city rises from the salt marshes of the Venetian lagoon, its people are fishermen, net makers, and boat builders, it has an amazing daily fresh fish market, and is frequently submerged by high tides and strong storm surges. Yet its canals and nearby beaches resemble flooded landfills—plastic, Styrofoam, and and an oily film float everywhere. Its local fisheries are crashing and soon huge flood protection programs may do unknown damage to those resources that remain. And everyday people buy their fresh fish with one hand and wash the filth from their sidewalks into the canal with the other.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Beaches.

At least 200 meters of beach near the city of Pellestrina--a community on one of the Venetian lagoon's barrier islands--is beautiful. I hope there is more then 200 meters, but from what I know about the beaches further south--near the city of Sottomarina--a clean beach is not a guarantee in Northern Italia.

As a demonstration:

On October 26 I walked along the sea, 2-meters from the water, for exactly ten minutes and saw the following.

plastic water bottles (10), sunglasses, diapers, plastic fishing net, a dead gull, fish heads, rubber toy shark, glass vials, motor oil containers (2), beer cans (5), coca-cola can, rubber gloves (10), work gloves, toy car, plastic bags (20 +), a flower pot, uncountable pieces of Styrofoam, shoes (3), wood, dead eel grass, a soccer ball, orange peels, candy wrappers, cigarette butts, pill bottles (2), tooth paste containers, a disposable razor, seashells, the jaw bone of a cow, plastic forks, pens (2), a bag of potatoes, plastic lids, half full bottle of antifreeze, dish soap, cardboard food cartons, feathers, and sand.

Monday, November 2, 2009

L'acqua alta.

A few minutes ago the sound of loud sirens broke the night's silence. Strong winds, full moon, high tide--the water's rising.

Friday, October 30, 2009

Saturday, October 24, 2009

350.

"I am sure the American people share with me a strong sense of the significance of this occasion and are prepared to give their full support to the United Nations to the end that our common aim of building a new and better world shall be attained."
--Former U.S. Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr.

These words, from October 24th 1945, refer to the offical ratification of the United Nations Charter. Fifty-four years later they are just as significant. Today, people all over the world are asking their leaders to support the United Nations in its efforts to reduce carbon emissions and protect our precious planet. See how at http://www.350.org/

Friday, October 23, 2009

Wet feet.

Yesterday, when I arrived in Chioggia--a city on the southern end of the Venetian Lagoon in northeastern Italy--the main boulevard was underwater. Caused by a combination of light rain and high tide, life at sealevel.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Topo.

So today, like most days lately, was spontaneous. My plans for the weekend were to rest a bit, try to firm up the next few weeks, and see a bit more of Monselice.

By early afternoon I found myself down on the canal eating fresh bread and cheese and enjoying the sunshine--it was here that I met Nicola. He is a member of a local club that restores aging wooden boats. After communicating with him for a bit we decided that I should come back later in the afternoon. I left knowing that I had made a new friend, but had no idea what we were going to do when I came back--was I going to a)buy a boat, b)steal a boat, or c)go on a boat.

When I returned two more men were there to help load oars into the Mamo, a traditional working boat from this area, called a Topo. Fifty years ago this boat, and others like it, would transport stone and other goods throughout the Veneto. Today, though we were just out for a joy ride.

In the beginning we laughed, alot. Both at my clumsiness with the long, heavy oars and at my attempt to speak Italian. But as we settled in we began to understand each other and I began to understand the boat. The hour long trip on the canal was my first time on the water since arriving in Italy and the first time I have felt like I successfully carried on a conversation with Italian speakers.

After we returned to shore my new friends proudly showed off photos of other boats and their city. Then they invited me back for more later in the week.

Friday, October 16, 2009

Monselice.

For the next few days I am staying in the small town of Monselice. The town is nestled between medieval ruins and the Bisatto Canal, part of the extensive system of canals the Venetians used to link their republic to the Adriatic Sea.

The days here are clear, crisp, and beautiful. Autumn is in the air. It arrived late one night while I was sleeping in a small hut in Val Grande National Park in the Italian Alps. At 2 in the morning the Fohn winds from Scandinavia came south and forced my Italian colleague and I to spend an extra day in the mountains. He and I had left a larger group--composed of wonderful people from Italy, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Spain, Portugal, Lithuania, and the Netherlands--the day before to try for another summit on the edge of the largest wilderness area in the Italian Alps.

The view from our hut by day was of lakes and valleys to the south and the stone, snow, and glaciers of the Alps to the north. And by night the bright lights of Milano stretched out below and the Milky Way filled the sky overhead and around us.

On our last morning, with the temperatures low and the winds finally calming we raced down from the mountains to return to the city, he had a PHD thesis to finish and my first Watson report was due later that day.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Italia.

It has been quite a while since that train station in the Rhineland. That night I ended up sharing the floor of the station with a Polish political exile. I spoke no Polish and he no English but we still managed to have an intense and satisfying conversation. The next day I met up with a friend's family and enjoyed fine wines in a castle over looking the Rhine River valley.

Then south to Roma to meet up with a fellow wandering Watson and old friend. My three days spent there, a few hundred meters from the Pantheon, flew by and since then I've been living on a small farm near the northern Italian town of Piacenza. Long hours each day cutting wood in the forest and working in the vineyard followed by nightly Italian lessons and so much pasta.

The farm is located in the valley surrounding the River Trebbia, "the cleanest" river in Italy and a major tributary of the Po. Last week I spent most of a long day navigating my way to a amazing beach along the Trebbia--where I slept and swam away a sunny afternoon.

And in few days I head to the Alps, then finally to the coast.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

The Station.

22:15 German train station in the southern Rhineland.

With public transit there is nothing more satisfying then stepping from one connection to the next, except when you don't have your connecting ticket. So with two minutes on the clock you wander the bus station trying to find the automated ticket teller. Once located you try to navigate its menus, but your three day crash course in German is no help—thank you, hello, and river only get you so far. Luckily someone realizes what you are up to and informs you the train just left—you relax. With your new friend—in this case another non-German speaker you find the next train to your destination. Your friend coaches you through your purchase with expletives in English and an occasional NO whenever you try to select a ticket to France. With you ticket printed you both laugh and smile and he says enjoy your flight.

Another Week on the Road.

Heading out of Munich to meet up with a friend from Nevada before I move down into Italy. By the end of the week I'll get to see what my brain kept from four years of high school Italian.

Onto the Po River.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Europe

Landed at sunrise--too bad my brain wanted it to be bedtime--time to wander the streets for a bit and tire myself out.

Monday, September 7, 2009

North/South.

Each morning I wake up to the sounds of the ocean—seals slapping their tails on the water, waves crashing, and the whistles of early morning dog walkers. Usually the rising sun wakes me up, though some mornings Alex—one of the two human ecologists that lives with me on the beach—tries to flip me out of my hammock while grinding the morning coffee. By mid morning we are up in the garden harvesting all types of organic vegetables for deliveries to local markets and restaurants and to stock the Wind Whipped Farm's roadside stand. Farming on the coast of Vancouver Island has been a good way to close my time in Canada. The abundance of fresh food from the farm stands as a contrast to the shelves and diets of my friends in the north. The land also provides contrast-though equally as ancient as the weathered krumholtz of the tundra, the trees here stand tall and dark, towering over the beaches.

Tomorrow I head to my first new continent—At noon I fly to Munich, Germany and start my way towards Italy and the Po River.

Below is something I wrote a few days ago while thinking back on my last week up north.


In front of a row of conjoined, prefabricated, aluminum apartments a few blocks off the main street in Inuvik there is an aging red Ford pick up. Inside one of these small, tidy apartment supplies for a week in the bush are assembled—warm clothes for the ride up river, rifles, a new batch of out of date newspapers to read, sugar, coffee, tea, and several chucks of frozen caribou meat.

Soon the supplies are loaded into the bed of the truck. After a few errands around town we are down at the town boat launch. Along the beach many of the boats are tied to one another in a long chain whose only link to shore is our bowline—which is only lightly tied around a small branch driven into the mud. Once loaded and untangled from this nautical knot we head up river. In a few minutes we have passed the limits of Inuvik and its exhaust, engine noise, and human detritus.

The forty kilometer trip takes nearly two hours—during which time we pass only a handful of camps. Some of these were built from old school buses, logs, scrapwood from town, storage trailers, or Hudson Bay Company trading posts.

Once at fish camp we immediately get to work. A fire is lit in the outside oven so Alice can begin to bake her bannock—a type of biscuit she is only willing to bake in the bush since she claims it is impossible to make it in the “machine” back in town—and the never ending pots of coffee and tea begin to brew.

Meanwhile John and I set the net in the river and start at the dozens of camp chore—splitting wood, cleaning rifles and dishes, and going for water. Though the river flows past camp we head upstream through a side creek to a small lake where the river's slit has settled out. This water here is clear and ready to drink—a treat considering that many in town put their tap water through a filter before drinking it to remove the abundant heavy metals that come north with other industrial air pollutants.

On our way back to camp we are followed by a flock of gulls that are as anxious about checking net as we are. Though our first haul of the week is light, John is relived that there are any fish at all. Long ago, he says, this is the time of year (Mid August) when fish runs slow and many would leave camps along the delta for caribou hunting in the mountains.

We bring our fish up to Alice and the three of us begin cutting fillets and dryfish. While we work Alice talks fondly about the times when dozens of families would come to this spot in the summer to amass dryfish stores for the long winter. Now many of the fish we catch will be sold in town, a reality that troubles Alice. She worries that too few people still know how or have the desire to spend suitable time in the bush making dryfish to feed themselves and fuel their dog teams. With each fish being worth as much as $20 in town we constantly guard them from Canadian jays, ravens, and weasels.

When not in camp much of Alice and John's food, like most in Inuvik, comes frozen, canned, processed, over ripe, over priced, and from far to the south--symptoms of the communities remoteness and of the cultural assimilation policies of the not so distant past. Today there are movements afoot to help the residents of Inuvik enjoy a fresh, healthier diet. Nearly ten years ago an indoor community garden, in the town's old hockey rink, opened and provides plots for citizens to take advantage of endless summer days and grow their own produce; while non-profit groups advocate for healthy northern diets through outreach and education.

Our own diet at fish camp is a testament to Inuvik's food culture. At camp we continuously eat fresh whitefish and cony meat and eggs—grilled, baked, boiled,smoked, and fried—plus platefuls of fresh caribou and bannock, but as a special treat my hosts offer me whitebread and canned ham. An irony that is hard for me to understand let alone swallow.

Towards the end of the the week our smokehouse fills with fish Alice begins to talk about the coming weekend's big bingo. We pack up our fish, put out our fires, close up camp, and head back to town.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Back below the Arctic Circle.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

South.

Today I begin my trip south, towards more familiar latitudes and shorter, warmer day.

"Whatever evaluation we finally make of a stretch of land, however, no matter how profound or accurate, we will find it inadequate. The land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we can know. Our obligation toward it then becomes simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard. To try and sense the range and variety of its expression--its weather and colors and animals. To intend from the beginning to preserve some of the mystery within it as a kind of wisdom to be experienced, not questioned. And to be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there." Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

Monday, August 17, 2009

Arctic Climate Change.

"I see all these changes and feel...depressed...worried about what will happen to my grandchildren."

These words were spoken by a Gwich'in elder at the start of Inuvik's youth summit on climate change. He is referring to environmental changes observed in his life time.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Mackenzie Mud.

Today was another rainy August day. The rain was not heavy—just a constant, dampening, gray drizzle. It was enough to saturate the ground and fill puddles and potholes. Puddles and potholes whose muddy waters flowed into one an other and formed miniature Mackenzie rivers. Pieces of litter—the ubiquitous cigarette butts and wrappers—sailed downstream between these tiny ponds, across the frozen ground, and into the east channel—the branch of the Mackenzie that flows past Inuvik.

In town the east channel is lined by banks of deep, slick mud. Mud that coats the hulls of boats and pulls unsuspecting boots deep into its clutches. Most boats along the shore are reached by balancing on long boards or pieces of driftwood, the boats are tied off to sticks driven deep into the dark mud. There are nearly no permanent docks—dramatic changes in ice and water levels constantly reshape the shoreline.

On one trip upstream I watched the shore—nearly four meters high—crumple into the river, carrying a decaying log cabin with it, while a newer camp further back in the woods kept watch.

Hidden in these banks are natural gas deposits and mammoth tusks, buried thousands of years ago by the rising mud of the river.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Canadian Sporting Events.

Vancouver, British Columbia is hosting the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. This past weekend Inuvik hosted the 40th Annual Circumpolar games. There was no ski jumping or bobsledding, just a celebration of traditional skills from around the Arctic. There were contests in seal skinning and muktuk(whale meat) eating. Each night ended with drum dances that lasted long into the late evening light.

While watching some afternoon festivities I heard an announcement that there were still spots in the men's muskrat skinning event. I could hardly contain my excitement as a walked up to the stage to see if I could fill in as a last minute entry. I was welcomed with open arms, but warned that it could be dangerous, this event was highly competitive (an athlete in the women's competition had just been taken to the hospital for stitches--she returned in time for the seal skinning). After a quick tutorial on the best method for striping the fur off of these cute, very dead little animals I was off--armed with a very sharp knife, hammer(for mounting the skin to a piece of wood for drying), and the knowledge that Canadian health care would take care of me if my knife slipped. Nine minutes later I was done. I had not placed last--though the winner could have finished a half dozen skins in the time it took me to do one.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Fish Camp.

South along the east branch of the Mackenzie there are camps scattered along the high, muddy banks. Many were built over or around sites where people once lived off the land--fishing for winter stores and trapping for the fur trade.

Now they serve as places to escape the "big city" pace of Inuvik, as bases for hunting and fishing trips, destinations for winter ski-doo rides, and homes for some of the last old time bushmen. These individuals still live off of fishing, hunting, and trapping. They are at home anywhere in the delta.

This week I stayed and worked at one of these bush camps. John, Alice, and Robert--the kind people who took me into their home--maintain the traditions of their Gwich'in ancestors who would fish the same eddy each summer--gathering enough dry fish to last them and their dog teams through until spring.

Saturday, August 1, 2009

Rainy Saturday.

Today's cool rain is a reminder that with the coming of August the arctic summer is nearing an end. Each night the twilight gains another eight minutes.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Buzz.

Scattered over hundreds of kilometers around the Mackenzie Delta are nearly 25,000 lakes. The permafrost, which underlies much of the region, folded and lifted the land, forming basins. Basins that were filled by retreating glaciers and refilled by the melting snow each spring and rain each summer. Caribou herds move across here in winter, when the landscape is frozen. In the summer, waterfowl—including large groups of loons and pairs of snowy white tundra swans—come to this place to feed. This week, we joined them. Justin and Xan, who are continuing their research on arctic treeline, and myself. We were dropped by a local pilot on a rocky beach, on an island with no name. After wading our supplies ashore our plane taxied away, leaving us in the tundra, surrounded by total silence. A silence short-lived, in minutes it was replaced by the buzz of mosquitoes and their more persistent cohorts—blackflies. A buzzing known locally as the Mackenzie River torment.

We spent several hours measuring krumholtz Picea mariana—black spruce—trees, stranded on this island from an earlier time when the treeline extended further north into the arctic—perhaps 1,000 years ago. After taking a break for a few hours in the afternoon we decided to make a fire to "smudge" away the tundra's biting insects. This smoky oasis became our only escape from the constant buzz of the bugs and the stifling heat of our bug jackets. Later I went for a swim—hiding below the surface from the bugs overhead.

After collecting data and eating a smoky stir fry we headed out for a late evening trek across the island and its small hills—hills known in Inuvialuktun, the language of the Inuvialviut, as engigstciah. From a distance the terrain looks relatively flat and barren, though as we moved through it we realized this was only an illusion. The ground is a patchwork of moss and sedge hummock, filled in by bushy alders, spindly birches, bearberry, blueberry, cranberry, and a few dozen other species reminiscent of Maine's coastal peat bogs. Mixed among the low vegetation are dozens of different lichens, adding to the feel that things here grow in miniature. All across the island we find antlers discarded by passing caribou, tukto. Most of these are nearly buried by moss and lichen, signs the antlers have spent a long time in the slow growing tundra.

The following day we spent near the smoky fire, identifying plants, drying herbs, watching loons and hawks fly overhead, and collecting seeds for germination in a lab back in Vancouver. In the afternoon the silence and openness of the country around us was broken when our floatplane arrived from Inuvik. It circled us twice and disappeared from view, reappearing on the water a few minutes later. Though the plane offered an escape from the bugs I secretly wished it away.

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Through a fine mesh.

As two researchers from the University of British Columbia and I pull our truck into a gravel packing lot 20 kilometers south of Inuvik, Justin, the project's research assistant, comments “the bugs don't look so bad today.” He still passes me his extra bug jacket and dons his own, while Xan, the principle investigator, pulls hers over her head. The bug jackets are a combination screen house and fencing outfit. Our heads are encased in canvas hoods, a fine mesh surrounds our faces. We jump out of the truck into the dim gray light, light that has hardly changed in the last 24 hours, Justin clips bear spray to his belt (“Just in case.”), we grab a few rucksacks of field equipment—measuring tapes, hollow augers for taking cores from tree trunks, notebooks—and head directly into the bush. We are immediately up to our knees in willow and birch shrubs, hardly a meter high , stunted by the harsh arctic winters. Xan and Justin are here to study the only tree in sight, Picea gluaca, the white spruce. Scattered around us are a few dozen spindly specimens of this familiar conifer which ranges across northern New England and the Great Lakes in the United States and north through Canada to the arctic tundra. Here, slightly west of the Mackenzie River ,we are roughly 90 km from the northern limit, or treeline, of this great northern forest. Xan and Justin are here collecting data that will contribute to a circumpolar study of the effects global climate change could have on the growth and range of the arctic treeline.

This close to the treeline the trees grow incredibly slow and deal with some of the most extreme weather on the planet, temperatures below -50ยบ C, months with little or no sunlight, intense winds, floods, droughts, and permanently frozen soil. As we walk towards one of the taller trees in the study plot Xan explains "most of my study sites are further north along the delta, where we would never see a tree of this size," there most of the trees grow in mats, twisted along the ground--a growth form known as Krumholtz. She estimates the tree in front of us, roughly as wide around as my calf and only about 10 meters high, could easily be 150 years old, and the waist high “seedlings” scattered around us, well into their 30's.

For the next several hours we take measurements—diameter and height, note surrounding vegetation, and collect tree cores. Xan and Justin will analyze these cores in the laboratory to determine the age and growth rates of the the trees in their study plots. Justin's bug report for the day turns out to be just a little off—not long after we begin working the mosquitoes, three different types with three different attack strategies, begin to fly at our faces and hands. As it warms up their numbers double and black flies arrive to support their attack on any piece of ourselves we are foolish enough to leave exposed. When reading measurements or recording data it is hard to tell what distorts your vision more, the mesh of your bug net, or the cloud of insects flying around you. At times we are visited by wasps who dive bomb mosquitoes and flies, eating them on our shoulders, we begin to regard them as heroes.

Up the Dempster.

Inuvik attracts all sorts of people. Most come up the long gravel highway from Dawson City—the Dempster, while others float down the Mackenzie from its headwaters. Hitchhikers, RVers, motorists, bicyclists, dirtbikers, canoeists, kayakers and hikers end up here from across the US and Canada. They travel around the world from China, Germany, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, and beyond.

One of my first nights at the campground in town I met Sean. He has been riding his dirt bike through the arctic for four weeks. Though we met late in the evening our endless sun induced insomnia kept us awake photographing an agitated beaver till well past "sunset" (about 1:30am). In the morning he headed for home (3200 kilometers south) and left me with some arctic advice--“never trust the foxes, they're out to get you!” It turns out that a week earlier while camping along the Dempster a particularly sly fox stole his campstove.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Public libraries.

Working in Nevada this past spring I discovered how useful the public library system can be for someone on the road without a home. There my coworkers and I would escape the heat of the day under the trees outside of the Mesquite and Moapa libraries; we would find a good book to pass the time, marvel at flush toilets, or just bask in front of the air conditioned doorways.

Here in Inuvik the library provides a welcome escape from today's cold, steady rain. It also seems to be the place to meet local children as about 20 have come over to inquire about what I'm doing here living in a tent for the summer.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Inuvik, NWT.

I have made it above the Arctic circle! People here tell me that entitles me to a certificate from cityhall, though I think the ancient propeller airplane that got me here deserves most of the credit--not to mention the nice people at the airport who saved me a $30 cab fare by giving me a lift to town.

This has to be a quick update as I have two meetings today to try and catch what might be the last rides into the delta for the summer--apparently summer here is just about over (the sun set for an hour last night!).

I've already run into 4 foxes and helped paddle a canoe to the town's boat ramp. Though I think the ride was more of treat for me than a genuine request for help, the gentleman had just just paddled his boat 27 days down the Mackenzie.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Migration.

A few evening ago I carried a rental whitewater kayak from an outfitter in Whitehorse to the base of the city's hydropower dam. With a few hundred meters left to walk a van stopped to offer me a ride. The driver, on an extended trip from Austria, said "that boat looks quite heavy, why aren't you trying to hitchhike?" I explained that I was, in fact trying to get a ride, but with a boat and paddle I had no free thumbs to flag down a passing car. He laughed, and said he thought that might have been the case when he drove by me in the opposite direction half an hour before. Moral of the story--get a packraft.

Today I left the hostel with my inflatable packraft and was floating down the river in less than twenty minutes. There was a pretty ominous set of clouds blowing in so I decided to take a short float through the rapids and towards downtown. The raft handled its first big water well, though after sitting in a few inches of water for 45 minutes I decided to get a bailing sponge for all future trips.

After coming through the class II rapids just below the dam the river braids into a few shallow channels that will fill with spawning Chinook salmon in a few weeks. At the city's boat ramps there were nearly a dozen teams of canoeists preparing to head the opposite direction as the salmon on the first ever 1000-mile race down the Yukon River. Further downstream the river's banks are lined with hundreds of old dock piling from the days when steamships were the primary means of transportation for prospectors and settlers traveling into the Yukon Territory.

Today the steamships and prospectors are gone; and now it is by boat, car, plane, or foot (at least in the summer) that most travelers move through the Yukon. Tomorrow I will be taking the plane route and flying 1200 kilometers north to Inuvik in the Northwest Territories to get to know the Mackenzie River and its expansive delta. I am hoping to stay through the end of August in the delta before moving halfway around the world to Venice, Italy. But we'll see, I am planning on letting the weather dictate how long I stay. The forecast for the next few days is 25-27 C--though I've heard I can expect frost and snow by mid August.

On a culinary note a few folks at the hostel and I have been making dinner from ingredients we find around the kitchen (save a few fresh veggies) and last night one of the chefs made an seriously awesome strawberry, pear, apple, sunflower, peanut, walnut, raisin, mango, coconut, puffed rice cereal, mystery cereal powder, rhubarb cobbler (plus lots of sugar).

Saturday, July 18, 2009

First impressions.

When I arrived to Whitehorse at 2 am Monday morning I had no idea what I would do with a week in the city. At 3 am, when the sun started to rise, I fell asleep accepting that I might be in Whitehorse for a week with no place to stay and nothing but the clothes I was wearing, a toothbrush, my camera, and a water bottle.

Luckily, events of the next day shifted my outlook at bit. First thing in the morning I found a campground just outside of town to spend a night before any rooms opened in the city's hostel. My bags arrived by midday, I got invited on several paddling trips by dinner, and learned some of the nuances of Alaska's fisheries from a small scale salmon fisherman turned school teacher before heading off to bed.

The following morning I checked into the Beez Kneez, a backpacking hostel in downtown Whitehorse. I've been here since, and as one of the few guests staying more than one night I have had the opportunity to meet a few interesting people. As it turns out Whitehorse is more cosmopolitan then I would have guessed (fresh falafel on the street corners--"Best in the Yukon). Here is a brief rundown of some of the people and their reasons for passing through the Yukon.

--Leo,Canadian, moving from Chicago to work as a youth counselor in Whitehorse.
--Natalie, Canadian, recovering from a 4-month bike trip across Alaska and northwest Canada
--Gavin, Australian, on a 2-year trip around North America, heading into Alaska.
--Katie, cook from Vancouver, seeing if she likes backpacking by spending a few weeks in the Yukon.
--A man from Belgium in a WV bus with a gas leak and a cute dog, 14-months into a several year trip around North and South America.
--Yines, German backpacker, came to the Yukon for work, still looking.
--Two brothers from Austria, learning how to surf on the Yukon their first day of a 5-month trip through Alaska and the Yukon.
--12 men from Belgium, starting an 18 day river trip from Whitehorse.
--Thomas, German software engineer living in Florida, biking from Alaska to Patagonia and climbing the highest peak of every country on the way (www.panamericanpeaks.com), a few of us from the hostel met him at a restaurant in town, he ate 3 times as much food as the rest of us and then asked for the dessert menu.
--Morgan and Bowin, up from Vancouver, British Columbia, starting an 8 day canoe trip down the Yukon, their first river trip!

This time of year Whitehorse only gets about 3 to 4 hours of "darkness" each night. The long, warm days of sunshine seem to inspire everyone to be outside experiencing as much of the day as possible (perhaps a coping mechanism against the very long, very dark days of winter). I met a few kayakers in town who helped me get my hands on a playboat and wetsuit (Yukon river temp is about 2 C). The boat was a bit big for me but I still surfed on the Yukon well into the evening (started at 7pm and floated into town around 11 pm under a nearly blue sky). The city has a fairly large community of river people and a pretty strong bond with the river. From most places in town you can see the swift, nearly aquamarine surface of the river. From the base of the city's hydrodam the Yukon is free flowing several thousand kilometers to its mouth in the Bering Sea. In the next few weeks the salmon, that are now a few hundred kilometers downstream, will swim up the dam's fishladder on their long journey from the sea, and if they are lucky evade the bald eagles and fly fishermen waiting for them in Whitehorse.

During much of the last few days Leo, Natalie, and I have been exploring the city and some of the lakes and trails just outside of the downtown. Last night, with a few others from the hostel we played a midnight game of frisbee in the city's Peace Park, until the swarms of Yukon mosquitoes carried us back to the hostel.

My flight to Inuvik and the Mackenzie River, where I hear there is less night and more mosquitoes than Whitehorse, leaves early Monday morning.

Thanks to everyone who happens to be following me around the world.
All the best,
Brett

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Apparently losing bags is a rite of passage when you get to the Yukon. Mine have arrived.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Headwaters.

Headwaters are where rivers begin, and therefore an appropriate start for a story about rivers.

After leaving from New Mexico yesterday I experienced the first set of small rapids this trip had for me, last minute airport connections (lots of running through LA and Vancouver), planes with unidentified dents in them (first delay), lost luggage (backpack couldn't run fast enough), airports with no phones to check on luggage status, and a 2 am taxi drive to the only open hotel in Whitehorse.

Today I've moved back into calm waters, I have a campsite on the Yukon River for tonight and a place to sleep until I head to Inuvik, in the Northwest Territories, early next week. My bag is still missing, but that just makes walking around town that much easier.

“We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls ride over the river, we know not. Ah, well! we may conjecture many things.”
-John Wesley Powell