Hiking the Yukon

The Yukon is a land larger than life. It says so on the signs as you cruise up the highway. Eighty percent of the province is still pristine wilderness. I've been going to the region since I was twenty-five, over twenty-five years. My trips keep getting longer and longer. I guess this is my thing in life. I was buying about thirty pounds of lentil beans today to send up there. A man next to me in the check-out line was eying them, so I told him about my trek. "I'm hiking across the Yukon," I said. It's sounds so absurdly over the top when I say it to someone. But that's my plan, to hike from the Yukon River in Alaska to as far east as I can get before the weather of summer wanes. I'll hike up the Nation River, into the Olgilvie Range, across the Dempster Highway, along the Beaver River and see how close I can get to the border of the Territories.

     I like how out on the land I become so serene. The only sounds you hear are wind, water, animals, and thunder. That's what I'm looking forward to the most, just simple, natural sounds to bring my brain back in sync; back to a state of bliss you can only get in nature. And when you get in really good shape on top of that, you really come into your own. You really feel like waking up and saying, yes, I'm alive.

     My life feels dry like cardboard when I stay in a town too long. Only out on the wild of the land do I really start coming alive. Thomas Hardy wrote something to the effect that, life does not leave man because life is too big, but life leaves man because man is too small. Not sure what the exact quote was, but I do not want life to leave me. I want to do it justice; I want to make life proud. I want to get to know the wild.