No! There’s the land. (Have you seen it?)
It’s the cussedest land that I know,
From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it
To the deep, deathlike valleys below.
Some say God was tired when He made it;
Some say it’s a fine land to shun;
Maybe; but there’s some as would trade it
For no land on earth—and I’m one.
The Spell of the Yukon by Robert Service

I have a confession to make. I’ve fallen deeply, deeply in love with the Yukon. And it took me completely by surprise. I mistakenly thought that the Yukon was a vast stretch of baren wilderness one must pass through and endure on the way to Alaska. I couldn’t have been more wrong, and I repent of having ever entertained such an ignorant thought. This last winter while I sat in our Salt Lake City apartment planning this trip, I looked at maps and guides, and all I saw was a thin blue line passing across the page without a lot of towns to break the journey. There was a lot of blank space on the section that said Yukon. I tried imagining what lay beyond the thin blue line, but I really had no idea what we would see.

When I was a late teenager, back in the 1970’s, I had one secret wish of my heart. I wished that I could see the mighty Sierra Nevada Mountains, and in particular, Yosemite Valley 100 years prior to that time of my life (1976). In 1876, that would be almost 30 years before John Muir would publish My First Summer in the Sierra’s. Oh, how I yearned to see what Muir first saw when he stepped into that majestic valley. It was a dream I thought never to experience in real life. That is, at least, until I came to the Yukon. For the past week, I’ve attempted to identify what it is that has captured my heart so fiercely.

At first, I thought it was the incredible and vast wilderness that surrounds me here, to drive 50 miles on the Alaska Highway without seeing the imprint of civilization other than the asphalt under our car. No power or telephone lines, no billboards, no litter, or graffiti. Just trees and rocks and water (reference to the Canadian song Rocks and Trees by the Arrogant Worms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pcqud4yGNiA). That is a part of it, but there is something more, something more profound.

I’ve pondered the relationship of Yosemite then (1976) to the Yukon now, attempting to understand what my yearning is, and why these teenage thoughts come back to me. I even made it a matter of prayer the other night. The answer that came back immediately was that I’m seeing vast stretches of wilderness that still bears the imprint of divine creation. The Yukon contains vast stretches of forest that draw upon roots of that pristine garden that once covered the entire land. Forests that have not yet been harvested, monetized, commercialized, or otherwise “civilized”. In a sense, I’m seeing the Hand of God unaltered by mankind. These are difficult feelings to express, and then to share in a blog post. The photographs I attach here in no way represent fully what we see. An image is a two-dimensional representation of a single moment in time from an isolated point of view. Driving across mountains and plains, along deep blue lakes and past meadows of wildflowers is a living experience that these images fail to capture. The view out our window is continuous for hundreds of miles at a stretch and are composed of millions of smaller, more intimate scenes. And there are surprises, like when a black bear darts out of the forest and scampers across the road in front of us.

It’s a wild untamed beauty with rough edges. There is a loneliness that calls out to me, that I understand. I feel closer to nature here—just step 10’ off the road into the forest, and I am within arms-reach of that bear—his reach, not mine. I’ve never seen so many Christmas trees growing in perfect harmony—the Black Spruce. We’ve had a lot of rain this trip, and the trees really do reach up into the clouds.

With 20 hours of daylight, flowers grow to maturity quickly and reach greater size with deeper and richer colors. I won’t share images of sunsets or sunrises here—I can’t stay awake until midnight to shoot nor arise at 4:00am. We’ve had far too much rain anyways.

We’ve learned about the First Nation people, the Tlingits, who have lived here for millennia. We were introduced to Beringia—the land mass that formed the bridge between Asia and North America during the Ice Age. I never quite grasped that study until we visited the Beringia Museum in Whitehorse. And what a rich and colorful history developed during the Yukon gold rush on the Klondike River. We rode the narrow-gauge train over White Pass to Skagway in Alaska and back—the route the early prospectors followed.

Emerald Lake- The color comes from sunlight striking the calcium carbonate deposited from glacial sediment.

We only have a few short drives remaining before we enter Alaska and the Yukon will be in the rear-view mirror. I’m excited to reach Alaska, but I will miss what we experienced in the Yukon.

There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;
It’s luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder,
It’s the forests where silence has lease,
It’s the beauty that fills me with wonder,
It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.
The Spell of the Yukon by Robert Service