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).