Top Ten Dangers Hiking
Across the Wild Yukon
After
two weeks hauling my canoe up a really wild trib alone with the dogs, it suddenly
hit me like a wave. I still had so far to go and my food would probably run out
toward the end, but I didn’t turn back. I figured I could squeak through
somehow, making it on fumes and muscle mass if need be. I had never read
anything about anyone hiking through this region before, across the Olgilive
Range from the Yukon River in Alaska to the Dempster Highway in Canada, and I
was starting to doubt myself. I was living on the edge really, or so it felt, a
true frontier, maybe one of the last in the world. I was scared, but the
vastness, primitiveness, and uncertainty of what lay ahead made me feel alive.
Sometimes, the moose would just stop and stare at me because they had never
seen a person before.
I wanted to keep my canoe as long as I
could, towing it behind me full of supplies. Once I started hiking I’d have to
move faster or risk starving. To me the canoe represented security in wilderness
travel and by leaving it at the headwaters I’d be taking myself into another
realm of survival, a much harder one, but an even wilder one that stirred my
mind rapturously. I wouldn’t have the canoe for an easy exit from the
wilderness if I needed to get out in a hurry if I got hurt or needed to get
more food. I had a small 410 shotgun though, which I could break down and keep
in my pack or carry in my hand. It was the size of a B B gun, and light, almost
the perfect wilderness gun except that it wasn’t very powerful. I could get
food with it by using a shell or a slug, but it wouldn’t save me from a
charging bear, though it could scare one like it had done two years ago on my
first attempt of three to cross the Olgilives. Fortunately, a bear preying on a
human was very rare and a charge usually a bluff; a test of one’s ability to
remain calm under pressure. Tense up and a bear will zero in on that like a son
of a bitch and become more likely to attack.
In general, a bear encounter probably
wasn’t even in my top ten things to worry about out here. Starving was number
one hands down, being I had so much ground to cover and needed a lot of
calories to do it. The dogs getting hurt was number two, since they were not
expendable. What trouble they had, I had. If they went hungry, I went hungrier.
They’d attack a porcupine in an instant if I wasn’t watching and could easily
die from infection, and there were a lot of big porcupines in Alaska and the
Yukon, like the size of a small hog.
As long as I was on the river, one of us
drowning was probably number three, because of the many logjams and cut banks
the dogs or I could get hung up on. We had to maneuver past them all day long.
Hell, even a foot of fast-flowing water could drown a person if he were pinned
just right, so I had to be vigilant against that, for myself, but probably more
so for the dogs.
Eating something poisonous by mistake or
getting ill was high on the list since I was consuming wild plants on a daily
basis for extra calories, how little it may be. Falling down on a rock or off a
cliff, especially later on when I’d be crossing the mountains was probably in
the top five. Smash my skull or break a leg and the party was over, for me and
the dogs. If I died they would die, linger around until they starved to death.
Pure hunting dogs they may have been, but they were not wolves. They were not
wild, and not capable of surviving out here indefinitely without me.
Getting stomped by a moose was actually a
bigger concern than getting mauled by a bear. A moose will stomp you till your
dead, if he decides you’re worth stomping, but a grizzly will usually stop
mauling you once you stop moving, so playing dead was actually the thing to do
if a grizzly made contact. Hell, shooting myself with my own gun by mistake was
probably a higher concern than getting killed by an actual bear.
There were a lot of other smaller dangers
too, like breaking a finger, banging a shin, stubbing a toe, sunburn, bug
bites, dehydration, blisters, exhaustion, and so on, but those were not likely
to cause death, just a big inconvenience, but I had to keep those at bay too
since an accumulation of smaller problems could lead to a bigger one.
Getting lost was a concern, but not as big
of a problem as one might think. I usually knew where I needed to go. The
problem was simply if I could get there before my food ran out. Actually,
danger number one, the biggest threat of death if I included the drive up from
Oregon would be dying in a car crash. A human body was not evolved to withstand
those kinds of impacts. Life in a city or on our highways, in my opinion, was
usually more dangerous than living in the wild, so if I truly wanted to
increase my odds of living I should stay in the wild longer.
Nellie on the Nation River
Olgilvie River
