Well I guess it was too much to expect our stella run of weather (so far) to continue. We poked our heads out of our tents this morning only to be met with dark clouds, and inevitable rain moving in on us. With some moose meat steak left over from last night, we quickly cooked up the left overs in an omelet before pushing off.
The rain moved in pretty quickly, so we made haste in taking down and packing away our tents, packing everything away into our dry bags and made sure that all our important gear was safely and dryly stowed before the wet stuff started falling.
We needed to make up a little ground today, according to Chad’s careful map calculations, so we aimed for covering an ambitious 100km on the river before calling it a day.
As it turned out, the rain stopped mid-morning. We broke up our ‘harder than usual’ paddling with plenty of good ol’ rafting stints. To keep us on our toes, we were joined by a storm in the evening that tested our abilities to keep the canoes upright as we battled large waves that were being whipped up and forcing us up against cliff faces. That was fun… something different anyway.
In the afternoon we passed the mouth of the White and Stewart Rivers. The White River which, funnily enough, is an off-white in colour to look at, pours tonnes of volcanic sediment into the Yukon River. As a result, the Yukon’s water became murky and thick, rendering it useless as drinking water – a luxury we had become used to up until today. Chad, bless him, warned us to fill our drink bottles with but seconds to spare.
As we eventually hit the desired 100km mark, we pulled up on a sand bank, decided that it really wasn’t suitable, headed down the river a little further and settled for a small beach on the bank of the river. We set up camp and got stuck into some Caribou and Bison smokies with sauerkraut for dinner. I’m still wondering where the hell Chad is pulling all this amazing game meat from each day?!?! Not that I’m complaining… the meals so far have been amazing!
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