Getting my feet wet

It was finally the May night I had waited years for.

It was still, quite literally, freezing, but warm enough the Yellowknife River had finally started to break up. I bundled up as if I was going out on tour — leggings, mittens, a toque, but Birkenstocks.

My recently purchased kayak, which since weeks earlier, had made a home of my stairs, could finally be loaded through the three rows of my Sienna all the way to the dash and taken out to the Ingraham Trail for a midnight paddle amongst thousands of migratory birds.

With my pants and leggings pushed up, I walked my kayak into the river, hopped in, dried off my feet, pulled on thick woolen socks and shimmied the towel down between my feet and the bottom of the kayak for a little insulation, and set off upstream to meet the edge of the ice, and then back downstream to meet birds as far as the eye could see.

It was bliss, everything I had been missing and longing for about the late spring, but yes, storage may remain a small issue…

Reclaiming a lost love

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“I wanted to come back and see the nature that gave me peace and love in my heart when I needed it most.”

Some of my deepest, most cherished memories of Yellowknife were in this area between Cameron Falls and the Cameron River Ramparts a few kilometres further up the highway. They were through the fall of 2021 and into the winter.

Still locked down with the borders closed, I was moving through the deepest emotions and dark days, literally and figuratively. I was learning to love the nature here again by separating it from the people who were making the decisions that had tore my life apart.

And now that I’ve been back for a few months and the sun is getting lower, the air a little cooler, and the fall colours reaching their most beautiful, I wanted to come back and see the nature that gave me peace and love in my heart when I needed it most. And I wanted to feel it from a place of love and true appreciation, and I brought with me from the Yukon my love love love of berry picking so I made sure to scoop up lingonberries and blueberries on the way.

It was every bit as beautiful and special as I remembered. It felt completely serene. I could have stayed all day just as I did during those crisp fall days 4 years ago.

I miss every mountainscape and all the alpine of the Yukon so much that it hurts, but there is a calm and serenity that runs through the nature here that’s perfect to nature bathe in as well, and I’m so, so thankful for it.

I’m still not sure if this really answers my dad’s question a couple of months ago of how does it feel to be back in Yellowknife because it’s just so much bigger than that, but it is good to be back.

Back to the frozen abyss

Deep winter, sunrise views along the Alaska Highway at the edge of Kluane National Park are some of my favourite views. Favourite, favourite views.

We were in and out of ice fog for a lot of the day, a lot of the drive. You can’t have the magic of a hoar frost covered landscape without the suffocatingly dense ice fog first.

This is the environment and the climate that I just can’t be without. It’s so beautiful it almost hurts the soul.

Back to the scene of the muskelkater

As we were coming down around 8 in the evening, we resigned ourselves to wishing that we had gotten an earlier start to the day - which says a lot about a couple of pure night owls.

The truth, though, is that no matter what time we started our day of berry picking, we were always going to have wished it could have been longer. This was only made worse by just how gorgeous the evening had become. From one of the muddiest drives out in light rain to magical, golden sunlight.

Berry picking has become a yearly ritual for me these last few. I love having these little bursts of flavour and vitamins stored for the winter. I love the small act of rebellion against our grocery cartels in Canada. But more than all that, I love the solace and the quiet way up and far away. It is the best shared silence, ever.

Rain or shine, we climb

While still reeling from my sleepless few days and nights prior, Doris had some friends from Germany arrive in Whitehorse before a small, couple hundred kilometre canoe trip up the Yukon River.

During the cosiest late dinner, Doris had set her sights set on the Kusawa ridge hike for the next day - a light 850m elevation gain over about 4.5 kilometres above Kusawa Lake. We knew the forecast wasn’t great, but the thought of a fjord hike through cloud and mist seemed perfectly fitting.

That evening, home with fresh baked bread and warm soup, muskelkater was already setting in something serious, as if we weren’t expecting it from our shaky legs the entire way down. But our hearts were full, proud of ourselves, in love with the beauty, and already excited for the next time.