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When my wife Annie returned to our canoe down the banks of the Yukon River, she looked shocked. “Yes, there used to be a campground there,” she said. “But it's gone now.”
“How far did we go off topic?'' I asked. On June 30, 2023, after paddling 50 miles from Dawson City over a 12-hour day and battling headwinds and crosswinds most of the way, I expected to arrive at Forty Mile Campground, one of the few official campgrounds. Was. On a Yukon River trip from Whitehorse to Circle.
“Come and see for yourself,” she said. “There's nothing left. The ice has taken everything away.”
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The view above the bank was like another world. Yukon's oldest built-up area appears to have been carved out by an army of D9 tractors, with deep ditches and puddles where ice scarred the ground as it collapsed. Campfire rings were scattered everywhere, and the barn was gone. And of the roughly ten historic buildings on the town's grounds, most of which we could see were off their foundations. His iconic two-storey Royal Canadian Mounted Police Station was badly damaged and leaning, and his first floor was supported by 3-dimensional timber. As we boiled water for ramen and tried to make sense of what we were seeing, a drizzling rain fell.
Before we started our trip, we had heard about the damage caused by ice jams in the spring of 2023, but there was little news about Forty Mile. Most of the damage we heard was on the Alaska side of the border, with flooding and building damage in Circle, and some utility sheds affected by ice jams downstream from Eagle. There had also been some flooding in Dawson City during the breakup, but it had cleared up long before we arrived at the end of June. Mile 40 was the first place we had seen such severe damage. It was difficult to understand why they did not ask us about the damage in detail in advance.
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The break from most of the Yukon River and modern life was one of the best parts of the trip, until I saw Forty Mile. In an age where technology is ubiquitous and push notifications are almost inevitable, there was no data connection for more than a few hours after the service launched in Whitehorse. Experiencing the patterns of 19th century river travel was overwhelmingly positive. But at the confluence of the Fortymile and Yukon rivers, we were reminded of the other side of the coin. Long before it became a trading post, a mainstay of the Klondike Gold Rush, Yukon's oldest town was a seasonal campsite known as Chede Dek by the Tr'ondek Fechin people. Now, any tangible reminder of its history had been washed away and crushed by millions of tons of river ice, and it felt like no one knew about it.
We spent a restless night near downtown Fortymile, feeling like we were trespassing in a place where so much had been lost, but that night we were too tired to feel safe. I couldn't keep walking. In the morning, we broke up camp in the rain and hurried off.
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The shock of the extent of the damage continued as we made our way down the river. In some places, 6-foot-tall, multi-ton chunks of ice still remain on banks where they were pushed during demolition, an inexplicable situation even in the 75-degree temperatures on July 1, after more than a month of warm weather. In fact, it never weakened. The river deposited several inches of silt between the trees for hundreds of yards, burying all the mossy understory in fine brown mud. On an island in the middle of a river channel, acres of 40-foot-tall trees were sheared from the roots like blades of grass encountered by the world's largest mower.
When we arrived inland at the town of Circle, at the end of the Steeds Highway, we sent a message to our family in Fairbanks and told them we had arrived safely and loaded up our gear on the beach, a stone's throw from our six homes. I told them that. They had been pushed off their foundations by the ice and were resting in nearby trees.
Here in the North, we are more aware than most that our existence here is not entirely within our control. Like miners and mounted police with cabins 40 miles away, we depend on goods shipped from far away. We believe that the electricity will not go out and the gas supply will not run out, even if some people take some risks by using wood stoves as a backup.
After many winters of wondering why I kept thinking about those dark, gray nights on the banks of the Yukon River, I settled on this: It's hard to be reminded that the forces of nature ultimately hold all the cards, and that tangible evidence of our existence can be erased so easily and on a whim. It's hard to face the fact that when you lose something, whether it's a historic building or the people who built it, it can be gone forever. And it's unsettling to feel that a place like Fortymile could be wiped out and it could make little difference to most people.
Still, we persist. After months of little public information about Fortymile's ultimate fate, news began circulating several months ago that damage assessments at the scene had been completed and repairs would be made to the extent possible. Ta.
Over the past few weeks, warm weather in the Yukon Territory and interior Alaska has caused ice along about 3,000 miles of the Yukon River to rot and begin to break up. There have been reports of ice jams on the Yukon and Fortymile rivers, but so far there has been no information about the kind of catastrophic damage that occurred last spring.
I hope no news is good news.
Tom Hewitt is ADN's opinion editor. Previously, he was an editorial page editor for the Fairbanks Daily News and served as a minor editorial page editor for the Fairbanks News KTVF and KXDF News.
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