An Alaskan River Journey with author Adam Weymouth.Over the summers of 2016 and 2017, I canoed two thousands miles across North America, the length of the Yukon River, from one of its many sources at McNeil Lake to the Bering Sea, where the river runs seven miles wide.
McNeil Lake sits high in the Pelly Mountains, in the Yukon Territory, Canada. I was dropped there by a float plane not long after the ice had gone out, and sheets of it still floated on the water. The first weeks of the journey were in a raft – the river winds down through Grade 3-4 rapids well beyond my canoeing abilities – before swapping over to a canoe as the river met Teslin Lake.
Image: Peter Mather
Still 1800 miles from the sea, the river races out of Teslin Lake, swirling and eddying, bubbling like cauldrons. Abandoned log cabins from gold rush days, a wolf walking the shore, everything is glimpsed for moments before the river rushes on.
But as it flows from Canada into Alaska the current begins to slacken, the river widening out across its flood plane at a place known as the Flats, becoming a mile wide, now two, now three. The Yukon is so full of silt from distant mountaintops that you can see no more than a knuckle beneath the surface, and it whispers at the hull.
Often there were several weeks between points for resupply, and the eighteen-foot Clipper that I used was essential to fit in all the gear and the food I had to carry. I camped each night on gravel bars, keeping an eye out for the bears, and slept in the endless light of a northern summer. Each morning I would load the canoe and paddle on again.
The Yukon is the longest salmon run in the world. Some king salmon, after spending their lives deep in the Pacific, will travel two thousand miles against the current to return to the spawning grounds of their birth. Navigating by their sense of smell, they will find the exact same pools where they were hatched, to spawn themselves and then to die, exhausted by their journey.
I made the journey at the same time as that salmon run, and the purpose of the trip was to investigate why the salmon had begun to disappear in recent years, and to see how its disappearance was impacting on the many communities that relied upon it.
Along the rivers banks live indigenous communities - Tlingit, Athabascan, Yup'ik - who for millennia have seen the salmon as a vital food source, drying it and smoking it to make it through the long, hard winters. Often these villages are hundreds of miles from the nearest road, inaccesible but for boat or plane, and in these places the salmon is as important a resource as it has ever been.
As I travelled I fished with the people that I met, shared their food and spoke with them, and they told me how they think about the salmon. Integral as it is to their way of life, it has become woven, too, into their culture, but now that it is vanishing those relationships are starting to unravel. The lone trappers in their isolated cabins, the commercial fishermen, the many creatures that feast upon the salmon – the vanishing king is beginning to alter an entire ecosystem.
Kings of the Yukon is the story of that journey. It is the story of the salmon, and it examines what might be happening to one of the world's last great migrations. And through portraits of the people on the river that I spent time with – gold miners, Athabascan grandmothers, village chiefs, salmon biologists, missionaries, dog mushers and reality TV stars – it tells the story of the river. In the end, it is a story of how the people, the place and the fish are intricately connected, and by how risking losing one, we risk losing it all.
Article: Adam WeymouthImages: Ulli Mattsson unless credited.
Kings of the Yukon is out on May 15th and here at Peak UK we have a copy or two to give away to celebrate the launch of the book. Head over to the Facebook page for more details.
For more information on Adam's work check out Penguin Books.
