Fort Selkirk – Fires – Smoke – White River – Stuart River

Start time:	5:29:00
Altitude:	455.7 metres ASL
Time Stopped:	7 hrs 51 mins

I’m not a morning person. I’m a night owl by nature. My working life has been spent in newspapers, working for organisations which only hit their stride in the afternoon and work into the night to put newspapers on doorsteps in the early hours of the morning. My particular specialty is IT in newspapers, which is a double whammy of nocturnal habituation.

For the second day running, we had made a slow start. I can’t remember anything specific that held us up. I don’t think we overslept, we weren’t sore or aching from the previous days paddle¹. We weren’t even cold from a night spent on a thin foam mat on a cold wet sand bar. We were just slow. We’d have to work on that.

It proved harder to get out of our sheltered back water than it had been getting in. We didn’t run out of water or options, but it did narrow to the point where we were scraping both ends of the boat getting around the final twists of the side channel. For a short time, the GPS had shown us moving away from the main channel as we navigated a twisting channel around bushy islands. This was definitely not the racing line.

Back on the river, there was no sign of the flare up which had sent us to ground. Halfway to Fort Selkirk, we could see an area of hillside which appeared to be freshly burnt, still smouldering hot, it had burned itself out overnight.

The smoke started as we passed Fort Selkirk and approached an area of fire we’d been checking on before the race.

I was a bit melancholy about paddling past Fort Selkirk, a recreated settlement which can only be reached by river without stopping in to take a look. We’d never be back this way again.

For the 150km from Fort Selkirk to Dawson, the river is flanked by continuous hills which were holding the smoke in the valley. It was a windless day and the smoke seemed to be acting like a blanket, trapping the heat of the sun down on the water. It really wasn’t a day where I wanted to be wearing a rubbery dust mask for an extended period.

Because smoke in 2023 had caused us to withdraw, we had gone beyond the race requirements and were packing industrial level TPE masks with replaceable cartridges. The sort that I would use for sanding or spray painting. The sort you can wear all day in a working environment. It turned out to be the right decision, because the smoke only cleared for a few short stretches over the 16 hours to Stuart River. The mask was hot, but workable and removed even the faintest smell of smoke, even when the haze dropped our visibility to a few kilometres.

We wouldn’t see any other teams that until late in the day as we were approaching White River, when one of the canoe teams would appear fleetingly on the opposite side of the river. With a population density of 1 person every 14 square kilometres (including towns), you can’t expect to see many people.

There are very few breaks from the monotony of paddling a small kayak on a big river. The occasional island provides a momentary choice of channels. For this stretch of the river, they are mostly obvious choices.

Halfway to Coffee Creek, we spied a pair of paddlers in a canoe. They were just pulling up their canoe next to a grassy bank. Trippers making their way from Whitehorse to Dawson over 5-7 days. Our line took us within 20 feet of their landing point. We were about 40ft away when we realised that they were crouched in the long grass in the middle of a bathroom break. Ooops. Four people every 50 square kilometres and the other two turn up the minute you think you’re alone.

They seemed disinclined to converse with us, so we continued onwards.

About the same time, I noticed that the SPOT tracker on my shoulder had turned itself off. I turned it back on but an hour later when I checked it, it was off again. Probably flat batteries which was unexpected given they were fresh lithiums installed after the gear check. Because we were carrying two SPOTs, we opted to leave it and replace them at night with dry hands in the tent.

A little closer to Coffee Creek and my GPS started alerting that it was also running on low battery. That was unexpected too. With no need to run a backlight in the extended daylight of the Yukon, the lithiums in the GPS units should be good for at least 5 days. We’d planned to switch them the night after Dawson. This presented more of a problem than the SPOT. We had our course for the entire race loaded into both GPSs and one complete set of replacement batteries each. If the batteries were dying in under three days, there was a possibility we’d have exhausted our batteries before we’d navigated the Flats.

By Coffee Creek, my GPS was dead flat and Kate’s had also started flashing a low battery warning².

New plan.

We’d run without GPS for the rest of the day. The river is pretty simple to Dawson. This being our third time through I was confident that I remembered it well enough to run it, even if the lack of a GPS might mean we missed a few of the sneakier cuts. We’d swap the batteries in both units at night in the tent (again with dry hands to protect the electronics), then we’d run with only one GPS active for the rest of the race.

I made a mental note to pack more spare batteries if we ever came back to do this again.

We weren’t coming back again though. This was unfinished business and once finished, we could go and paddle somewhere else. We spent most of our day talking about the other places we might paddle once this was done. Mostly they were warm places, with hotels, and showers, and porcelain toilets that flushed.

Fixed on the idea that this was the last time we would ever pass this way, we decided to take a different line through the White River confluence. In previous years, we’d taken an outside of the bend, river-left, line through the area where the White River merges into the Yukon from the south west. Our thinking had been to pick up the increased flow from the White. This year there were fires burning along the White River, so staying river-right and taking an inside line would avoid the worst of the smoke. Friends we’d spoken to in other years had preferred the inside line. This would be the last chance to check it out.

White River feeds into the Yukon from an ancient volcanic ash plateau. It literally turns the clear water of the Yukon white with ash particulates. As the flows merge, there is a line in the water separating milky white ash laden water on the left from clear Yukon water on the right. It’s a distinct line, and doesn’t fade in evenly. Eventually, the white side simply squeezes out the clean side. I can now report that the last clear water vanishes 10km downriver at the confluence of the Stuart³.

By 10pm, we were past our target for the day, Stuart River. We were out of the smoke and lined up for the run to Dawson where we’d be well inside the cutoff. Despite running the last 50km by memory, we were happy enough with the route we’d taken. We’d taken a couple of slower channels, or paths that had lead into slower channels, but nothing significant.

We pitched out tent on a long gravel bank at the head of an island tall with trees. There was certainly room for a bear or bears amongst the trees, but we had enough open ground on the gravel bar to pitch the tent clear of both the trees and the boat, which by now would unavoidably smell of food and humans.

We settled in for the night with the tent tethered to a tree stump as protection from the wind⁴.

Stop time:	21:59:02
Moving time:	16:30:02
Distance:	198.6 km (123.4 mi)
Average speed:	12.1 kph
Campsite:	63° 21′ 1.33″ N, 139° 32′ 34.9″ W
Race Position:	15th
Distance Completed:	361 mi

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1. The drugs were still doing their job. Everybody has Googled “lethal dosage of ibuprofen” right? ↩︎
2. We figured after the race that we’d either accidentally turned on the GPS backlights or we’d somehow packed batteries which hadn’t been fresh. Either way, we’ll be packing more than the required number of batteries next time ↩︎
3. You can see the water change colour in the photos. From White River to Dalton, the water is milky with ash. ↩︎
4. This was a pretty good campsite with lots of open ground between the boat, our rubbish, and the tent. Even if there were bears in the trees, we were 50 metres from there as well ↩︎