<\/a>Bob Gillis and Adam Bucki ski a side channel of the Yukon River during a ski trip from Eagle, Alaska, to Coal Creek, Alaska. (Ned Rozell | For the Juneau Empire)<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
I met Adam Bucki when he was a Geophysical Institute graduate student studying rock glaciers. He lives in Houston, Texas, now. The last time he was near Eagle, 20 years ago on a caribou hunt, his wife Carrie did the driving from Fairbanks as he scribbled captions for a scientific poster in the passenger seat. He mailed them to a coworker from the Chicken post office.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
I knew the Yukon River as it flows into Alaska from a couple summers as a park ranger in Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. That was when Bill Clinton was president and the locals weren’t so enamored with the Park Service.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
The Yukon was new for Bob and Adam, and maybe they got tired of me stopping, pointing, and saying things like “those trees are where Ed Gelvin’s A-frame was once, I don’t know what happened to it.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
The Yukon I knew back then was mostly the dimpled, liquid one, flat as a plywood sheet and hissing brown against the skin of your boat. This February blue\/white river, ice chunks poking up like shark fins, was something new. I told Bob and Adam that maybe we could ski as fast as a canoe, but that turned out not to be true, maybe because when you snack in a boat you drift downstream.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
<\/a>Courtesy photo | Josh Spice \n Bob Gillis, Adam Bucki and Ned Rozell at Coal Creek camp, about four miles inland from the Yukon River and Slaven’s Roadhouse.<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
Friends and I have, in the past, thought about skiing on the snow compacted to a 1,000-mile ribbon over river and hill that is the Yukon Quest trail. Bob Baker and Tim Kelley skied the entire thing once, 30 years ago. When Bob told me he and Tim had left a checkpoint when the dogs would not, because of a blistering cold wind, I knew I was not the same as Bob and Tim.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
We never skied the Quest. My friends and I were always scared of the cold, the type that sinks heavy to the valleys of the Fortymile River and Birch Creek. This year was no exception.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Even in a time of warming, Alaska is still good at making its own cold. This January, Fairbanks’ average temperature was minus 21.4 degrees F. The high for the month was plus 4. Since feasible ski-trip temperatures range from about minus 10 to plus 35, we came up with some Plan Bs.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
The week of the Yukon Quest arrived. As the calendar flipped to February, things changed, as they often weirdly do. Air temperatures warmed above zero, and the forecast promised more of the same. Bob, Adam and I caught a plane to Eagle.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
<\/a>Slaven’s Roadhouse, a restored 1932 structure on the Yukon River used by Park Service rangers as a “hospitality stop” during the Yukon Quest sled dog race. (Courtesy photo | Bob Gillis)<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
Because we couldn’t fly from Fairbanks with the white gas for our mountaineering stoves, we bought some at the Eagle Trading Company store. We filled our bottles outside in the wind. We gave the remainder of the $25 gallon can to John Borg, a principle character in John McPhee’s Coming into the Country, still maybe my favorite book.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
John seemed happy to get the fuel. And it was good to see John’s old Chevy C-10 pickup was still running, as it has been since before McPhee’s book was published in 1976. Its blue camper shell was full of down-parka wearing checkpoint volunteers, on their way to the airstrip to fly to Dawson City ahead of the race.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
We said goodbye to John and pulled on our backpacks. We followed the wooden Yukon Quest trail stakes down Eagle streets to the boat landing, our ramp to the frozen river.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Once launched onto Alaska’s largest river — which is a quarter mile wide at Eagle — we felt a blustery downriver wind. But the breeze was at our backs. When we skied, sometimes it felt like there was no wind at all — until we stopped, and the breeze pulled heat from our sweaty clothes.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Our plan was to ski all the way to the town of Circle, which is 160 miles from Eagle. We figured we could manage about 20 to 25 miles per day, about the spacing of a few public-use cabins maintained by park rangers. We were prepared to sleep outside, and did, but never had to.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
One of the reasons for all the indoor living was the hospitality of the few people who live on the river. Home visits were a big difference between summer travel by boat and winter travel by trail — the path of the Yukon Quest went right by the three houses of the folks that live on the river between Eagle and Circle. Those eight people are the only souls living in a space the size of Connecticut.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t