A new way to chase the northern lights – by canoe
Mike MacEacheran takes to the water for a fresh perspective on the grandeur of the Yukon
It started with a simple instruction: “Now switch your head torch off.” The dark water was rippling, the moon was down, there was an arctic breeze and we could hear the ice splintering and groaning as the raked bow of our canoe thrust forward, inch by inch, to break the thin surface layer ahead. The vessel momentarily lurched left to right, through silvery abstract shapes into what looked like a dead end, but then broke free into open, seemingly fathomless water.
There was no sign of life on Lake Laberge, but as our paddles sifted through the dream-like black, starlight fell on to the freezing lake and twinkling shadows appeared where the water met the sky. The mercurial aurora borealis raced above our heads, its light ghosting in and out of the darkness, almost wreathing our canoe in a gossamer green glow.
No other experience of winter can prepare you for the Yukon. Its extremes are hard to fathom, and I travelled to Canada’s far northwest primarily because it offers the kind of heartstringplucking wintertime that Europe just can’t muster.
This is a territory rarely visited by Britons. Most transatlantic travellers start in Toronto with Niagara Falls on their first trip, and work up to Banff and the Rockies or to Vancouver and the bear-brimming islands of British Columbia, places that, in summer, are wonderful in their own right. Almost nowhere in Canada, though, does winter bring faraway adventures so close and intensify
the landscape’s drama with such ease as it does in the Great White North. Canoeing under the northern lights is also a pretty easy sell.
The action began almost as soon as I was picked up by Daniel Sams, the founder of Terra Riders, whose new night-time excursion into Ta’an Kwach’an land beyond territorial capital Whitehorse is the first of its kind in North America. Like many adventurers in the Yukon, Daniel is a transplant, and it didn’t take long to work out that he’s from Devon. He had a car sticker printed with “Cream On First” in bold lettering. He said “proper job” with approval when our canoe first glided out onto the lake without a wobble. He told me the idea for his out-there canoe tours first came from
his love of night hiking on Dartmoor.
“This isn’t canoeing as anyone knows it,” he said, prompting me to switch my head torch back on, its beam casting a wavelet of scattered jewels ahead of us. “There’s no sitting about waiting and, if the lights don’t show, you can have the stars and Milky Way reflecting back from all angles.”
Exploring the Yukon in winter, even during the season’s shorter dark days, does not mean intrepid travellers are restricted by the weather. Rather, the eiderdown of snow in the forests and ice on the lakes are an invitation to dogsled at a lick through boreal spruce and trembling aspen; to drive on hard-packed highways, but without the Ice Road Truckers danger; and to snowmobile into a whoosh of white powder.
So the next morning from Whitehorse, I got into the mood with an out of town walk along the snow-sprinkled banks of the Yukon River to see a landscape dripping with Call of the Wild fantasy. I found train tracks dating from the Klondike Gold Rush era skirting the edges of bristling forests, home to snowshoe hare and muskrat, which are still snared for fur. In the distance, soft white mountains loomed large against a bleach blue sky, while golden eagles perched on fir tops.
Afterwards, I visited the workmanlike SS Klondike paddle steamer, which at 210ft is half the size of the Royal Yacht Britannia, but was once far showier. A little less than a century ago, it was capable of ferrying some 300 tonnes of gold and silver freight along the river from Dawson City. With such riches to quarry, the news set off a stampede of some 100,000 settlers who weren’t prepared for the wilderness. Only a third made it.
Times change, of course: the steeplehigh steamer is now a National Historic Site of Canada, and visitors can learn more about the men who moiled for minerals at the MacBride Museum, where the log cabin Telegraph Office has
been reinvented as a home for Yukon legends. Should you be so inclined, here you can also see a taxidermied albino moose and attempt to fit your head into a polar bear’s mouth.
Since the days of Revenant-style survival, the Yukon’s story has largely been one of reconciliation, with First Nations groups reclaiming their silenced histories and indigenous guides and tour companies pushing the boundaries of adventure tourism. “We no longer romanticise the Klondike Gold Rush era,” collections expert Corin Noble told me. “Most of the history has been written by white men, and that is something we are changing.”
Over the next few days, I seldom saw another tourist – a rare privilege. I travelled west to Haines Junction, where fixed-wing planes take the odd stray like me for a spin above Canada’s biggest swathe of wilderness. This is Kluane National Park, bigger than Slovenia, and taking off from a frozen runway beneath curled puffs of cumulus the feeling is of arriving into a whole new empty world. In magical light, there are summits without interruption and glaciers plunging through ice-bound valleys like leviathans. The extraterrestrial sandworms of Dune come to mind.
Distance is relative in Canada, and not far north of here lies the Braeburn Lodge roadhouse, home of cinnamon rolls as big as curling stones, and the start of the epic Klondike Highway. At this latitude, the Yukon begins to enter an increasingly extreme realm, and I embraced my day-long, 330-mile drive to Dawson City. Occasionally, there was traffic – deer and migrating caribou crossing the road – but for those sick of motorway commutes, it is a salve for troubled minds. It is freedom dressed in a winter fur coat.
Partly thanks to this emptiness, by nightfall I arrived to see Dawson City lit by a gauzy aurora. Populated by 1,300 hardy souls, the town is almost a city of ghosts, once drawing heavily bearded gold diggers and bar girls who, in turn, wanted to mine their pockets.
There is still plenty to recommend it beyond the essence of a Wild West movie set, and its boardwalk grid of streets remains punctuated with rollicking saloons, a vaudeville theatre and a bonanza of historic quirks. One such highlight is the long shuttered Bank of British North America.
Its main party piece, however, is to sit in a nook of the Downtown Hotel and neck a sourtoe cocktail – honey-sweetened Yukon Jack whisky from Louisville, Kentucky, with a mummified human toe at the tumbler’s bottom. The key rule of this bizarre 40-year-old ritual is a line repeated to me by the toe master, Captain Terry Lee, like a prayer from a parallel universe. “You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow, but your lips have got to touch the toe,” he instructed, dropping the desiccated digit into the Drambuie-like dram with a pair of rubber-tipped kitchen tongs. Off-the-wall silly, it endures as a hat tip to the lives of those who survived the Yukon’s harshest 19th-century winters. Call it Ernest Hemingway with frostbite. And let the record show: I am now the latest member of the Sourtoe Cocktail Club. Number 96,552, in fact.
Much of the Yukon still remains unseen to most, and Dawson City provides a gateway to a polar paradise of boreal forest and frozen lakes, and, as it has forever been home to the First Nations, it challenges perceptions of what it takes to survive this far north.
One morning, I met Bobbi Rose Koe, of Teetl’it Gwich’in First Nation and founder of Dinjii Zhuh Adventures, who took me to Tombstone Territorial Park along the snow-caked Dempster Highway, once an old dog-sled route and now the only road in Canada that crosses the Arctic Circle. To the east, she told me, lies the Peel River watershed, an intense mountain ecosystem where she was schooled on the land, and where she now leads intense packrafting river trips in summer.
“It’s a spiritual place because it has always been our home,” Bobbi Rose said as we tramped along the banks of the North Klondike River, the snowflakes sparkling on her seal-skin gloves. “I grew up with the animals, the wind and the river, and I know my ancestors walk with me now.” Suffusing the snow as we walked was a giant spider’s web of caribou prints and moose antlers that had been shed like leaves. One rack was the width of an articulated lorry.
This far north – and this far from anywhere else, really – it’s easy to feel insignificant against the magnitude of such an eternal land. And yet, this meditative landscape also helps refocus a scattered, post-pandemic mind. I first came to the Yukon out of season in late October because the Trudeau government had just opened its borders, but I now realise winter is the very reason to go.
It is wild and yet still within reach. The aurora lingers on the edge of every nightfall, and – with a guiding hand – the snow-cast mountains, lakes and rivers are heavy with the promise of some kind of frozen adventure. For a trip most others wouldn’t dare dream of, you couldn’t do much better than that.
Soft white mountains loomed large against a bleach sky, while golden eagles perched on fir tops