Yukon

Posted 21st February 2016

I have been going to the Yukon for 15 years - to the Canadian wilderness on the edge of Alaska where our friends are gold miners, silver miners, prospectors and geologists. It feels like the wild west. My husband and I love to go in the winter when it is minus 20 to minus 40 centigrade. We snowshoe and snow mobile and stay in our friend's cabins in the wilderness. There is nothing and nobody apart from the 3 of us for hundreds of miles.

Most years the Northern Lights are spectacular every night and usually the days are sunny with blue skies. Below -30c, if you throw boiling water in the air it condenses and leaves a trail of white vapour in the air so we break a hole in the ice on the river to get the water, collect it in barrels and haul it by snow machine, boil it and then throw it in the air! Hours of fun!

 

Some years the snow is so deep that when I fall off my snow mobile I sink up to my armpits...and then it can take an hour to get the machine back upright again...even with 2 men digging and me giving directions! My favourite place is a cabin out in the wilderness. It takes us 8 hours to get there by snow machine and then another day to get to another cabin beside a hot spring. Sitting with a beer in the hot tub, looking at the Northern Lights at -40c with our hair frozen solid, as a moose walks by with her calf is a memory I will never forget.

 

 

Last year, friends lent me their dog team of 7 dogs and went ahead to a cabin by snowmachine. It was so amazing out on the trail on my own, surrounded by huge mountains with the only sound being the runners of the dog sled on the snow and the dogs panting. It was so tranquil until I came to a steep hill with a sharp bend at the bottom and even though I jumped on the brake, my weight wasn't enough to stop them and I went head first into the snow bank!

 

At night, the wolves howl around the cabin and we tell stories. Much of my jewellery is inspired by the frozen North and I long to go back.

 

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