A Few Interior Landscapes
33 Mile
The roadhouse just seven miles shy of the Canadian border up the Haines Highway flies both flags—US and Canadian. A brown bear stumbles in a ditch just down the road, skinny and dazed. He or she is likely looking for dandelions, but all they are already gone.
It’s Fourth of July Eve, and a pig carcass lolls unattended on the lawn. I don’t want to know how they got it. 33 Mile’s Fourth celebration is a local favorite because, well, the pork roast. Besides, the Haines police don’t bother coming this far up the road to shut down the fireworks.
The place is hewn from large timbers. They’re playing 50s tunes on what could be an invisible jukebox. The condiments on linoleum tables look almost as old, and the portions are bigger than anything you’d see in Haines proper. Everyone says 33 Mile has the best burgers this side of Juneau, our closest McDonalds.
A skinny girl (who hasn’t bathed longer than I have) strolls in right past me in Xtratufs. A long knife swings on her belt. She orders soup, and the server seems to know her. She repeatedly calls the girl “honey” as they chitchat. Weather. Bears. Fireworks. More bears. That one in the ditch has been looking at folks funny, like he’s about to charge. They reckon he won’t last the month.
Finally, I catch a side-eye. Honey goes and takes a seat, and I step forward to order. The server sighs when I ask about veggie burgers.
“Yes, we have them, if that’s what you mean.”
Whitehorse
“You sure go to the Yukon a lot.”
My new friends say this to me like it’s a character judgement. Like it’s a referendum on what I think about Haines, and how it’s going here. Maybe it is.
Why do I keep spending so much gas money driving up and out of the fjord at the back of the Lynn Canal after I traveled so far to get to Alaska? It’s not just for Real Canadian Superstore in Whitehorse, or the bakery in Haines Junction, or even the sustainable shop downtown, with its endless shelves of delightful soaps and laundry powders. Is it?
One does not have to go very far up the Haines Highway for the mistiness of the fjord to drift off on the tides. How fast the sea becomes a postcard swallowed by Yukon’s vast network of mountains and rivers.
The other side of the pass, the Yukon Territory (after a kiss of BC), just feels more like Colorado than Southeast. Soaring cathedrals of hard rock, but with more greens, blues, and violets. Skies are bluer here. The silvery-gray shimmer of the coastal rainforest dispelled. Fireweed soars triumphant along the roadways, magenta arrows pointing the way to Kluane, to autumn, even though summer has just begun.
Like home, too, the rock here is strong: giant bones that can contain the enormity of the world they hold up. Caves rattle with eons and mammoth bones. But unlike home, the sponginess of the permafrost gives way to bogginess that swallows your Tufs with a sigh of Labrador tea. Back in Colorado, there is no sponginess: only the arid grind of stone and bone, occasionally veiled with a resolute crunch of dried-out pine needles.
I camp near the hot springs—another reason to come to Whitehorse. The people in Haines complain that’s it’s boujee since the remodel, but I appreciate the polished floors, multiple saunas, and vegan smoothies.
There are five more hours of daylight to go and it’s already bedtime. This too, is different. There is even more light here than in Haines. Yukon's southernmost border starts at the 60th parallel north, which is nearly 19 degrees farther north than Colorado's absolute northernmost point. Home, but norther.
I sleep deeply for four hours. The sun wakes me like a parent telling me I’ve overslept, ogling at the foot of the bed, its tangerine glow through the black spruce boughs, prying open my eyes at 2 AM.
Million Dollar Falls
And then there it was, the sound of the river.
Neither the Chilkoot, which trickles its pewter around the weir with its as yet unrealized promise of salmon. Nor the Chilkat, big and braided while it milks its way down to the inlet. This is the Takhanne boring in my ears. It’s an earnest rush of a big snowmelt, bounding into the earth beneath me. Below the sixty-foot drop, wave trains crash and seethe before giving way on the dark brown banks blanketed by pine.
I light the fire starter I made from torn up shards of a Starlink box and the melted wax from a saint’s votive excavated from one of Haines’ endless free piles. The wax snatches the flame like Sasha snatches a snack, and bursts into righteousness.
I feed the baby fire with the kindling I stole from the ski hut in Haines Pass. Colorful crotchet oven mitts dangle above its door like Tibetan prayer flags. The hut is swept and stocked with dry food and firewood. Its plywood walls and door are tattooed in notes and drawings from people who’d stayed there before: Yukoners, Alaskans, hikers, skiers.
“Keep on birding in the free world.”
“Haines Pass Baby!”
Since I drove up here from home in April, Haines Pass has all gone green and gray with rain: the white a memory. Come again in six months and those words left by those skiers will be another bridge: winter’s long recoil. Bear spray at my hip, Sasha and I wander. But we are very much alone.
Now the water. And the waterfall. Insisting on erasing the sounds of my pasts—one in each ear. Sasha circles our site with joy. She knows what a campground is now. This sheepdog who requires routine to regulate her hypervigilance takes comfort in this newly forming idea of mutable home. The sound of the truckbed camper rising. The clank of kibble striking metal dinner bowl. I delight in spending the night away from our little dry cabin back in Haines, already crowded like a sunny patch of forest floor with new community.
The rain comes in hard before the darkness. My little fire persists, which leaves me feeling triumphant, like a guide capable of keeping a flame alive in a hurricane. Even Sasha radiates in the satisfaction of being warm and dry while the world around us absorbs the cold deflected by our heat.
The rain here is not Haines rain. It is not feathery rainforest rain. This is the rain that blows in on the wind and will pass shortly, returning the sun, mountain rain. It falls in fat drops that go splat on the rocks. Each splat leaves a wet thumbprint. Wet plopping to the earth with purpose.
This rain is familiar.
“You sure go to the Yukon a lot.”
The Yukon, the interior’s beginning at the end of the Inside Passage, is like homecoming without being anywhere near home.
Tagish Lake
I cannot see either end of Tagish Lake, whose unusual wishbone shape spans the border of the Yukon Territory and northern BC. While Alaskans speak of their oceanways as lower bodies, here, in the nearby interior, laconic nomenclature lives above the waist. Tagish’s long, blue branches are called arms, and they wrap around either side of the Canadians’ borders, 74 miles long.
I camp on the Yukon side. Sasha offleash sniffs the bones of what the signs tell me are what’s left of the Venus Silver Mine. The abandoned machinery of a long-dead era now rots like a caribous carcass on the grey rock beach. The story, to a Coloradan, is a familiar one. Claims staked early at the turn of the last century by men from elsewhere who came in hard, purged other peoples’ money, and established a boomtown—named after themselves.
In elementary school, while delicately skirting the stories of what happened to the Buffalo by choosing to focus instead on the mystery of the Anasazi, all Coloradan children are taught the history of our “Silver State.” Silver was our gold rush before skiing. But when the Panic of 1893 crashed silver prices, mines across our mountains instantly shut, and their villages and camps dissolved into ghost towns.
A Canadian with a mutt comes down. She’s new to Whitehorse, recently relocated there from Toronto after a divorce. The dogs play as she squats on the beach squinting through binoculars for mountain goats after rinsing her frying pan in the emerald and aquamarine lake. Snow patches still cling on the hills ringing the shores. The woman spots two mountain goats cleaving to a rib of ridge, and hands me the binoculars.
“See them? There’s two!” she exclaims.
I find them quick, like motes in the eye: just barely visible to the right of a tear-shaped patch of winter. But I didn’t come all this way to the world of whales and brown bears to see alpine animals who clog the side of our highways back home.
“Yeah, wow,” I reply. “There they are.”
Kluane Lake
Kluane Lake nestles in between mountains of brown and green and grey that rise from the vastness and settle beneath clouds. Fireweed borders the roads with its striking magenta. The one burst of color striking out to say I AM HERE TOO. Notice me! Yukon grandeur made even grander by the smallest flower: a border to the borderlands beauty.
The woman who minds the campground has blue veins that run down her neck like river lines on a topo map. She tells me, “a mama and her two cubs have been coming through. Once a day, but they cause no trouble. It’s the black bears that you have to watch out for—they’re curious. The grizzlies mind their own.”
The lake stretches like a secret. Not the U-shaped wishbone of Tagish so much as a liquid mirror in whose reflection are buried the secrets of northern places that bring people like me here. The Aurora. The caribou migrating in such numbers that “the mountain appeared to be moving.” Kluane has been wishing well to it all.
So much of the Yukon feels this way. Even as RVs cut through, cruise ships of two, usually retirees, that cut the land. They are swallowed by the landscape, which they then try right back to swallow up in turn. The cruise ships that dock in the fjords are less subtle. They lash out at the Coast and Chilkat mountains, floating mountains that block our view of the town. But if they did not come, neither would I. Interior and coastal, tourists and seasonal worker. Local and stranger. Lovers and ex. Brown bears and blacks; everybody has a point of comparison, of contrast, means of expressing curiosity or minding your own.
Why do you keep coming to the Yukon?
Because the air here is cleaner than Haines because it’s not heavy with the water. The air back home is not even the air back home right now. After our terrible drought of a winter, home, Colorado, is on fire.
I cry over my morning coffee as I finish The Sun Is A Compass, and the book ends with the author giving birth. Must all female adventure stories end this way? Epic hikes and treks or paddles whose terminuses are husbands and handmade cabins and babies who go on helicopter rides for their first backcountry trips?
Where are these women? I want to know. I think of the RV retirees and the woman with the river lines on her cheeks and want to scream. The majority of women I meet in this line of work—the guides and scientists and park rangers—are mostly in permafrost relationships. Spongey inbetweens. Melting. Fragile. Glacial remnants.
No one writes about that, though. The stories that get printed and sold in the smalltown Alaskan bookshops sell the narrative of the adventuring couple. It’s a new have it all fantasy for the outdoorsy millennial or gen z’er. Men, of course, have been doing this since the Odyssey. Since the Old Testament, or whatever.
They go out into the big scary nature alone, have revelations and write books, and get shit named after them. Peak baggers. Ocean crossers. Mythmakers. They go alone and come home to a new understand of self and a woman waiting whom they would have treated like shit before they left and probably will again once the sheen of glorious return has worn off.
But women must trek across the mountains or paddle around a continent into the arms of a man and birth a child. Then, she must take them with her back to the woods to truly be wild, free, complete. Bless these Madonnas of the Forest, for I am not one of them.
So far, none of the women I’ve encountered out here are. I’ve met all these women out in the Yukon, camping alone. I do not see men solo camping. Or groups of male friends. Couples, yes. Families, yes. But women—we venture out here on our won in droves. For so long, we’ve been told this tale of men leading women into the wilderness to keep them safe. But maybe, it’s the other way around. Most men won’t go anywhere alone. Not truly alone. Alone with the world watching them break a record or do a badass thing, yes. But that’s not the same thing as a woman who goes just to go, or maybe even get away from these men.
The aloneness as vast as this lake hiding between mountains seduces woman away from man quois man, even if we don’t or won’t speak of it. Mama bears roam without fathers. The trope is always mamas and her cubs. It’s evoked to remind us to be fierce in protecting our own. Do the big adventure with or without the mate, but don’t forget to take care of everyone when it’s all said and done.
Take care to mind your own. Eventually the yearlings go. Mama remains. Out there, fishing and scavenging for berries all on her own again.
Dyea
Tomorrow I will close the Golden Triangle and board the Hubbard, which will take me back to home for now, or Haines.
Four enormous cruise ships are docked in Skagway today: 12,800 souls. A gold rush for modern times. Concentrated human activity that breeds commerce. A dirt road out of the t-shirt shops winds down, down, down and away to the head of a trail that killed the cruise ship people’s ancestors. A graveyard for those who failed to get anything named after them except a cemetery that’s actually named for the thing that killed them. Slide Cemetery houses the bones of 19th century prospectors trying to get up the White Pass when the locals, natives, told them don’t go. Even most skiers know that avalanches are the mountain’s way of wiping the slate clean.
In the shops, they keep asking if I am local. I don’t even know what that means anymore. I don’t know where I live or where most of my mail is ending up right now. I’m unwashed, so I must look like a guide—is that what she meant? Or just that I’m not like a cruise ship person, so I must serve them. Black bear or brown.
Why do I keep coming to the Yukon?
Because, here, the dandelion aren’t quite done. Because there are women who roam free as bears who delight in an abundance of daylight and fish. Because wild iris bloom in the flats. Exquisite, tiny purple fingers reaching for the sun.