Uncharted Territory – Checkpoint at Dawson – Forty Mile

Start time:	04:39:00
Altitude:	354.8 metres ASL
Time Stopped:	6 hrs 40 mins

Kate woke first determined to be away on time. I was onboard with the idea too. We were feeling good, but I had a few things that needed attention. Firstly the batteries needed swapping, in everything. I hadn’t changed them at night – wet hands and wet gear don’t mix with electronics and if we were rationing batteries, swapping Kate’s SPOT out in the morning would give us a few extra hours.

The spare batteries were in the same bag as the sat phone, so they were in the tent with us. What wasn’t in the tent was a screwdriver or anything screwdriver shaped that I could use to unscrew the battery cover on my SPOT4. That combined with the relative darkness¹ of pre-dawn made for a little fiddling and a lot of cursing in the tent. Kate had moved outside to boil some water for our breakfast porridge.

I then proceeded to burn some more time dealing with the various blisters that had started to emerge. A time consuming task of applying Bandaid fabric toughstrips to each affected finger joint, but necessary if I was going to keep the blisters to a manageable level. The ToughStrips last two to three days and you can add a wrap of duct tape over the top if they start to fray earlier. Current blister count 11. Nothing too serious.

Combined with some other general faffing around, we were 40 minutes late getting back on the water. At least we were improving?

With the smoke behind us, we were back to enjoying the paddling. There were no other boats in sight. We were keeping to our plan and we’d be through Dawson well inside the cutoff time for the race at 7pm.

From Stuart River to Dawson is again pretty straightforward. The main channel is obvious. There are some potential shortcuts available which will save time, but you need to be a little cautious about them when the river level is low.

Two hours downstream we passed Sixty Mile Creek, a spot we remembered well from the YRQ in 2019. They weren’t pleasant memories.

We’d made the mistake of asking a fisherman there how far it was to Dawson and he’d told us it was 30 kilometres. We’d only been making small talk. We knew the distance to Dawson. It was 65km. It was printed on a sheet of race notes taped to my deck. Despite that, we lifted our pace and went for the finish line like we had 30kms to go and as a result we hit the wall 30km out from Dawson. We crashed hard. Out of energy, tired to the point of exhaustion, we’d been ready to stop paddling hard. We might have just floated the last 35km to Dawson, if the river hadn’t dealt us another blow and taken the boat into an eddy which started feeding us back upstream.

After that day, Sixty Mile Creek had been a river marker, that represented a failure in our minds. The point where our endurance had broken.

Passing through it strongly in 2023 had been an exorcism of sorts. Dispelling the demons of past races.

The residual demon now resided in Dawson, where our 2023 Yukon 1000 had ended. Once we were past that. It was all unknowns.

We reached Dawson, feeling good at 11:29am. Jon had said in the briefing that we didn’t need to stop. It’s an unsupported race and there’s no need to stop in and have a chat, just paddle past and get on your way.

In direct conflict with those instructions, Jon was on the bank with his phone out to capture some video.

“What do you think of it so far?”

“Pppffffftt!” I blew him a loud raspberry².

He laughed.

There was a brief exchange about how Kate thought we were probably tracking last because of the extra time on land. Without giving too much away, Jon told us that the teams were actually quite tightly grouped on the river. We weren’t the only ones who had opted for a bit of extra sleep to remain in good shape. He told us that the satphone link for the US Border crossing at Eagle was down, so we didn’t need to go up to the phone booth. All we had to do was pause for five minutes on the beach and then we could carry on. He would try to be there to check the teams in with US Immigration, but with a couple of teams running tight to the cutoff, he might not get out of Dawson until later that day.

A couple of teams running close to the cutoff meant we were probably 7.5 hours clear of the tail enders.

(We didn’t know it at the time, but afterwards, we discovered that both of our SPOTs had stopped transmitting for the hour either side of Dawson. We didn’t touch them, but they both restarted about the same time 10km north of the town.)

It’s strange, recounting this journey now, a few months later, my clear and vivid memory of leaving Dawson includes paddling under a bridge and looking back to see the bridge behind us. It’s vividly clear. A concrete multi lane bridge about 50ft above the water.

There’s no bridge. There’s nothing that even looks like a bridge. The river crossing is a ferry boat. I think my brain has inserted some sort of watery Rubicon to mark the expulsion of our final hoodoo. We’d made it past Dawson. For better or worse we were on our way to Dalton.

It almost immediately turned to worse.

We had barely lost sight of Dawson when my shoulder started to glitch for the first time. It’s a long standing injury from a slip while trail running back in 2015. A bicep tendon tear and a labrum tear that my specialist says will probably be OK until the day it isn’t and goes pop, requiring reconstructive surgery. If it does go pop, I won’t be paddling home.

Today, just past the last evacuation point for 900 kilometres, it decided to make its presence felt, emerging as a dull ache punctuated with occasional spikes that were painful enough to throw me off my stroke cadence. This was despite the diet of pain meds we were both consuming every four hours throughout the day³. Stupidly, it wasn’t the paddling that had set it off, but most likely a lateral pull when I’d pulled the boat up to a sandbar, with Kate still in it, so I could answer a call of nature (there were some questions we would research after the race about the side effects of pain meds, specifically related to late stage digestion. It turned out that caffeine pills may have been the culprit)

Over the next few hours, while I took the occasional micro-break to stretch my shoulder, Kate did a great job of keeping us moving down river. The shoulder wasn’t broken, but it was getting slowly worse, bad enough for me to dip into the medications for day 10 to bolster my dosage, which helped but didn’t remover the pain.

By 8pm with my shoulder becoming hard to ignore and my meds reaching maximum daily limits⁴, we agreed that since we were running about 40km ahead of our plan, our best option was to pull up early and see what a good night’s sleep would do.

With no pressure, we at least managed to find a gravel bar which had a good spot to pull the boat up on stones, and a flat patch of sand (silt) to pitch the tent. Apart from the bleakness and lack of trees, it was a good campsite.

I used some of the extra time off the water to make a change to location of my GPS mount, which involved drilling a couple of new holes in the boat. Everybody had a drill in their boat repair kit, right? Actually what we had was a small electric screwdriver which we’d brought to Whitehorse to fit the footrests. It was a case of bring it with us, or dump it in Whitehorse. Now it came in handy.

As I worked, a couple of other teams trundled past. I’m sure we had everybody confused about what we were up to. These were probably the same teams we’d passed earlier in the day, and now we were giving up our position, again.

With the GPS moved – it had been really hard to read in the constant low angle northern sunlight – I re-packed the tools into the end of the boat and slid into the tent beside Kate who was already sound asleep. We’d been on the go for 4 days, wearing the same paddling clothes almost constantly. I was starting to notice an odour⁵.

Sleep came quickly. For us, it was a good night’s sleep.

Stop time:	20:06:01
Moving time:	15:27:01
Distance:	190.4 km (118.3 mi)
Average speed:	12.4 kph
Campsite:	64° 30′ 55.58″ N, 140° 30′ 32.32″ W
Race Position:	20th
Distance Completed:	480 mi

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1. I’m now recalling an earlier comment about there being no night after Carmacks, which was why we hadn’t bothered to pack any headlamps. It was dark in the tent in the morning. ↩︎
2. I’d spent some considerable time on the river thinking up something inspirational or humorous to say and that was all I could manage. ↩︎
3. Ibuprofen, diclofenac, and some prescription for my shoulder ↩︎
4. Everbody has Googled the lethal dose of ibuprofen, right? ↩︎
5. This is the last time I remember noticing an odour until we were in Dalton where the “clean people” seemed to be avoiding us ↩︎