Grateful and Proud: Yukon—It’s all about the Tundra

I took a swipe at the basics of Yukon in my last Grateful and Proud post, and here I’ll try for the vagaries—my feelings about the land and the weather and my experiences: all things Yukon that seemed so foreign to me at the time. 

My problem, though, is that there’s a lot I feel like I should tell you about, but that feeling of obligation has kept me from writing this post. Truth is, all I really want to tell you about is what it’s like to walk on the tundra. But, that one description doesn’t do enough. Still, it’s what I come back to, over and over, in my memories of spending a month and a half visiting Yukon in the beginning and end of summer, 2023.   

So Many Things I Should Tell You About

I should tell you about the people of the First Nations, how every act folks do up there—from a public event, to a sign in the road, to a charity bake sale—starts with an acknowledgement of the people who were on the land before and who still are on the land, the First Nations people. It’s controversial whether land acknowledgement statements before pubic events do more harm than good, and I’m not even there right now, so why am I even talking about them? I’ll just summarize by saying that people have lived in Yukon a dang long time, and they were—and some still are—mostly from six tribes: the Gwichʼin, the Hän, the Kaska Dena, the Tagish, the Northern and Southern Tutchone, and the Tlingit (Teslin). We saw and heard those names a lot, especially the Tagish and Tlingit. 

I should tell you about signs I saw in many places detailing the environmental impact of what had been built there during the white run on the land for mining and wildlife, or what is being built there now. About a massive viewing installation of a single mine recovery project we visited. (I looked for images to show you, and all I found from that day are pictures of bears.)

I should tell you a quick personal story about how, at one provincial park campground that we’d just pulled into, a small theater group, mostly First Nations teens, practiced a read-through of a play in the campground one evening. I don’t remember what it was about, just their young faces and voices. 

I don’t remember because that was a confusing evening: we had just pulled into the first-come/first-served “boonbocking” provincial park (the size of a national park, here) campground, where we’d walked the wooded lanes and picked a site–with a view of the Starlink satelites so we could use our phones (there are very few cell towers up there) and near a creek so we could use a collapsable bucket to wash the thickest mud off the hitch (so it wouldn’t dry and gunk up the moving parts) and near another open site close to the pit toilets for Melanie and Doug (who were behind us on the road). After much walking of the campground roads, I’d backed Tracy into our creek-side site using walkie talkies, and I’d jumped into the trailer to start setting up, and I saw a sight to traumatize me for the rest of my days doing this: a billion peices of broken glass were all over the floor, in the shower, in the crates of items I store in the shower, and in the thin track where the shower door should have been, where I now will be unable to store anything for the rest of the trip to and from Alaska and through the US until we can get an appointment with Airstream so we can pay them $1,000 to replace the door that I broke because I’m the one to pack the bins in the shower securely.  Well, that was a shocker I never got over. 

So, all that had happened, and I’d cleaned up enough of the glass (without a vacuum or nearby trash cans) so that Banjo could walk in the trailer, and I finally looked outside to see this. 

That was Tombstone Provincial Park. The place where Doug and Melanie told me they’d been joking on this trip that, no matter what the weather was like that day, at 11pm it would be sunny. So, we made a point to walk on a trail where we’d heard there was a moose cow and her calf (now I know enough to stay off such a trail) so we could take a photo of the sunshine at 11pm.  It had been cloudy all day, but, look, ma, sunshine!

I should tell you about Top of the World Highway, where we parked right off the road for the night, I saw this at 3am out the trailer window:

And we woke up to see this view all around us.

I should tell you about Dawson City, where we put the Airstream on a teeny ferry that went across the fast-flowing spring Yukon River on a pulley system (do I have that right?).

Where we drank a famed cocktail with a previously frozen dead human toe in it. And where we got certificates proving we’d done so!

I should tell you about the capitol, Whitehorse, where we walked through a gorgeous cultural center. 

I should tell you about some dammed-up part of a river (not the great Yukon River but beautiful nonetheless) with a native name I don’t remember, where we hiked above the water out seemingly nowhere, when we were passed at a trot by a young woman who’d forgotten to do something at home. Oh so normal. 

Tundra

There are so many things I feel like I should tell you about. But really, it’s the tundra.  

This is Arctic tundra, which is a layer of rock, water, and soil on top of permafrost, which is an under layer that never thaws (duh). The soil above it is super rich, because the decomposing  biomass above permafrost never sinks below it, and neither does falling rainwater, as far as I understand this. 

(A carbon sink means that, as global warming heats the ecosystem and causes soil thawing, the permafrost carbon cycle accelerates and releases the greenhouse gases contained in the composted soil into the atmosphere, creating a feedback cycle that further contributes to climate change.)

This rich soil has a very short growing season, and the dwarf trees and shrubs and the sedges, grasses, mosses, and lichens on it are thick and spongy. They are, at the same time, diverse. 

You have to keep your eyes on your feet as you walk, because they cover the ground and hide the rock above the permafrost. You can turn an ankle at the worst; at the best you step in a puddle of water several inches deep that stays there throughout the growing season. 

So, you walk along looking at your feet to keep from slipping or turning an ankle, and you notice the beautiful mosses and flowers and lichen. You keep watching your feet, looking around you. Then, you look up. Oh yeah. That.  

The arctic mountain ranges up there are covered in snow and are spectacular. 

You look down, you look up. 

You see prints at your feet, you look in your guidebook. 

You see a mountain range, you look at your phone to remember where you are. 

You have no signal.  Oh yeah. 

You see your friends smiling at you as you share this amazing experience. 

You are grateful you were able to walk on tundra before the permafrost all disappears. 

(There are many places within parks where you’re forbidden from walking on the tundra because the soil and plants are so delicate, but the rangers will often tell you how to do it a little more safely than if you were on your own, simply because we all should be able to experience the tundra before it disappears. The trick is to walk single file and cover your own tracks.)

More

Here are posts I wrote at the time. See, I just can’t tell you enough.

•  Watching a moose swim across Muncho Lake
•  What it’s like driving on the Alaska Highway (one of the very few roads through Yukon, so everyone takes it, and it’s under construction all the time)

 *  The town where everyone posts their homemade road sign pointing to their town

• The time we stopped on the side of the road to fix the leaking grey tank, and I didn’t want to leave

 * The one time we stayed in an actual campground, and it was CRAZY

• That beautiful river we hiked above where a young woman ran past us
• Seeing beautiful stuff at the cultural center in Whitehorse
• What it’s like to drive on the smaller highways (with an Airstream)
• Camping in that cool little town with an improbable golf course
• Maybe the most gorgeous hike I’ve ever been on, and that’s saying a lot
• More about tundra
• Summary of hardships traveling to and from Alaska
• Drinking that dead toe drink
• Canada Day on the Klondike
• Crossing over into Alaska via a town named Chicken