How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Yukon

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Atop a different mountain a few days later, having traded the bike for Golden Girl, a feisty quarter horse, I am surrounded by weather: rain to the left, sunshine to the right, snow straight ahead and a rainbow behind me. (Rainbows are so common in Whitehorse that they soon seem mundane. “Ugh, another rainbow” becomes the running joke.) The landscape is raw and relentless, and I consider a line I’d read earlier in The Spell of the Yukon, a poem by Robert Service: “Some say God was tired when He made it.”

But my contemplative moment is fleeting; the palomino has lost interest in the surrounding grass, and she’s off, flying down the impossibly steep pitch we climbed earlier, conquering dense brush and thick mud. We hit the flats and we’re galloping at full steam, zigzagging through woods and hopping over fallen trees. Finally, we return to the ranch, where I play with some animals that I find a little easier to handle: a litter of six-week-old huskies.

Miles Canyon is a short stretch of the Yukon River where the water narrows from 150 to about 30 metres. The canyon was a crucial, often treacherous passageway to the site of the Klondike Gold Rush, 500 kilometres north of Whitehorse. In June 1898, at the peak of the rush – after most of the gold was gone but before the influx of stampeders ebbed – the canyon claimed 150 boats and five men’s lives in a single week.

Today, hiking trails weave around the canyon, but I decide that merely walking alongside the water would be cheating history; I’d tackle the route as the prospectors did. With no rickety wooden boats on hand, I opt for a kayak, recruiting a guide in Kalin Pallett, a lumbering gentle giant and manager of a local outdoors shop. Along with Krista, an Ontario expat, and Meagan, a Whitehorse native, we set out to traverse the dreaded Miles Canyon.

Kalin tells me that he paddles about 75 days a year, far fewer than he did before moving here from Mississauga. Acclimatizing to the short summer, he says, is among many adaptations he made. “I had to break the habit of eating a sandwich and talking on my cellphone while driving on the 401. That doesn’t fly here.”

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