A two-week Rat Race expedition through the Yukon reveals bears, northern lights, gold-rush ghosts and a wilderness shaped by human memory. Amber Berard-Althouse, a member of Kluane First Nation and the Agunda, or Wolf, clan, tells me not to use the word ‘pristine’ to describe the wilderness in the Yukon. She explains that the land is the way it is because her people have looked after it for thousands of years.
Her tourism company, The Land Heals, helps visitors understand the history and lived experience of contemporary Indigenous people in this northern corner of Canada. I’m about to spend two weeks traversing the Yukon Territory by foot, gravel bike and canoe on an expedition with Rat Race. Berard-Althouse sketches the complicated history of this country and the way her generation has tried to return to the land after the schism of the 20th century.
We walk through Whitehorse, pausing to glean yarrow flowers for stomach-settling tea, or to finger fireweed while Berard-Althouse explains its anti-inflammatory sap. She knows the meadows, riverbanks and taiga forest the way most people know their own garden: its medicinal logic, its seasonal tempers. The difference between a place with a human memory and a place imagined without one is notable.
Traversing the Yukon Territory
I pack my gear and board a transport van south from Whitehorse to Carcross, the hinge where Alaska, British Columbia and the Yukon Territory join. The Yukon River, which begins as glacial meltwater at Llewellyn Glacier and Lake Lindeman in British Columbia, flows northwest for 3,190km through the Yukon Territory and Alaska before reaching the Bering Sea. Along the way, it absorbs sediment and scale, its surface color shifting with the mineral load and the quality of light.
Our group includes expedition leader Abbi Naylor; Maria Russell, a professional skydiver; John Hall, a retired psychiatrist and ballroom dancer; and Ian McLaren, a veteran of Britain’s Spine and Dragon’s Back races. They discover that the plan will frequently change due to unforeseen circumstances, such as an Air Canada strike that almost prevents three of them from reaching the Yukon.
The group treks the Canadian section of the Chilkoot Trail, taking the historic White Pass and Yukon Route railway from Carcross to Bennett. The train winds along a narrow-gauge railway through scenery of theatrical scale. Bennett, formerly a Klondike-era boomtown, is now very much the opposite, ghostly empty when the locomotive trundles out of sight.
Cycling and Canoeing
The expedition team rides gravel bikes from Carcross, past Whitehorse, and north into a environment increasingly untethered from human scale. They ride beyond Miles Canyon, where floatplanes lift from polished reaches of water.
At Coal Mine Campground, they load four canoes, loading 60-litre barrels and dry bags with enough equipment and provisions for a week on the water. The team makes camp at Fort Selkirk, at the confluence of the Pelly and Yukon, where Northern Tutchone and Tlingit peoples occupied this ground for thousands of years before European contact.
Wildlife and Northern Lights
Wildlife is more sparse than expected at this latitude in the late summer, but animal spoor is omnipresent. Bald eagles are the most common they encounter, broad wingspans wheeling above, the weight of their bodies bending riverside alders. On the third day on the river, they see the aurora borealis over Fort Selkirk, a pale featureless arc low on the northern horizon that erupts into a sine wave of green light swimming across the sky.
Later, while paddling, they see Dall sheep trusting friction to defy gravity while they feed on rugged woody plants. A trio of flighty moose huff before vanishing into the willows.
The black bear pauses to consider, and they assume it will retreat into the puckerbrush. Instead, it plunges into the water and begins swimming straight through the cluster of strange craft bobbing along its surface. The animal crosses the full width of the Yukon and comes ashore on a steep incised bank 30 metres from the canoes, alone and backlit by the morning sun.
Conclusion of the Expedition
They finish a day ahead of schedule, just as the rain begins to fall. Small buildings and mown fields begin to interrupt seemingly endless ranks of trees. Dawson City resolves from the bluffs – first a smudge on the horizon, then painted wooden buildings strung along the floodplain, long docks and steamboats and curious barges crowned with antlers and stovepipes. The Yukon is not a wilderness emptied of human presence; it is shaped by it.
I think of Amber Berard-Althouse picking yarrow beside the road in Whitehorse, the painted fences at Fort Selkirk, the bear streaming and effulgent in the morning light. For thousands of years, people have travelled this river, drawn sustenance from it, fought over it, told its stories and returned. Rat Race designs and operates unique adventures on all seven continents, with over 50 extraordinary adventures to choose from.