Dave Metz's Blog: Crossing the Great Unknown

Crossing the Great Unknown

I spent forty days crossing the Olgilvie Range in the Yukon this summer, from the Yukon River to the Dempster highway. It’s a huge stretch of mountains little known. Most the creeks, peaks, and passes don’t have names. No one ever went there, so there was never a reason to give them names; never a consideration for it. So, the major pass I crossed didn’t have a name. The bears, the wolves, the song birds, the moose, there were many. A lone wolf, darting through the shadows of the trees, followed me for a while, curious about my dogs. I almost ran into a grizzly who was hunkered down in a thicket on a cold, rainy day. They’ll stay in their bush as long as you don’t approach it. It’s such a remote place that I didn’t hear a plane for a month. I was out of the lanes, if that was even possible anymore in this day and age of crimp, crumple, and cram of nature.

For the first half of the journey, towing supplies in a canoe upriver, I was afraid I’d have to turn back due to the ruggedness of the country and running out of food, but I pressed on despite my fear, figuring I’d somehow pull through and find a way. I crossed the pass, followed another river for a day, and then crossed a great expanse of taiga and tussocks until I hit the Olgilvie River twenty miles below its headwaters. Within the Olgilvies there are smaller mountain ranges too, also massive in themselves, like the Taiga Ranges and the Nahoni Range which I crossed or skirted the edges.

I followed the Olgilvie River for days down to the Dempster Highway, running on fumes, nearly out of food. I stumbled down the road and eventually got a ride back to Dawson when I thought I was getting too thin, down over twenty pounds I’d later find out. But now, and this was the one thing I so urgently hoped for by going on this expedition, I had a glint in my eye knowing that beyond my struggle, there was a wild out there still, far bigger than myself. I so dearly wanted to be part of it, each year for a couple months at least, even if it meant suffering with the heavy load on my back, great loneliness, a nagging fear of desperation to make it through, and severe hunger bordering on starvation. It was worth the price to connect with wilderness again.

The day after I got back from the pristine solitude of the Yukon, they, somebody, was having a blaring car rally on the street right in front of my house. Just great. I don’t know why the city puts on such events. Normally this would have driven me through the ceiling, the irrefutable absurdity of it all. People sat in lawn chairs along the street watching these things bomb by, like they were living entities capable of feeling.

I had reserves now built up from being in nature for so long, my spirit regenerated. So I sat in my backyard with my dogs drinking beer, tolerating the event. But it went on and on into the night, Jesus. Depending on the individual, I believe you only can tolerate so many frenzied dealings like this until your gone-ballistic switch triggers. I used up a good deal of my reserves on the drive home, people driving like their minds had gone totally off the rails, no composure or restraint whatsoever.

After about two hours, a good beer-buzz going, I stumbled back into my house, shut the windows and blinds, and put on the movie Jeremiah Johnson. Shit, I wished I was in the Yukon again, where the only sane creatures were the animals, and the only insanity was where wilderness ended and civilization began.