In its calmer moments, Bennett Lake, positioned within the southwest nook of Canada’s Yukon Territory, is a placid pool of aquamarine. When one of many space’s infamous storms blows in, nonetheless, its waters roil with a sure violence. For Leigh Swansborough and Clarissa Black, who had been caught in a sudden maelstrom this summer season whereas paddling the lake, this meant making an attempt to stop their packrafts from capsizing within the monstrous seven-foot swells and 40mph winds. “Every stroke that you take, it feels like it’s pushing you five feet backwards into this sort of grey swirl,” says Black. “I thought, okay, this is how people die.”
Black, an animal coach and founding father of Pets for Vets, a nonprofit that pairs veterans with shelter animals, and Swansborough, a psychological well being clinician who hopes to launch an journey remedy nonprofit, had been simply over two weeks into what would grow to be a virtually 1,200-mile, four-and-a-half-month journey throughout the Yukon. Their mission, dubbed Finding Tuktoyaktuk, for the journey’s endpoint on the Arctic Ocean, started on June 1, 2018, in Skagway, Alaska, firstly of the 33-mile Chilkoot Trail, a vital commerce route for the indigenous Tlingit individuals and a serious artery for the Klondike Gold Rush.
“Every stroke that you take, it feels like it’s pushing you five feet backwards into this sort of grey swirl,” says Black. “I thought, okay, this is how people die.”
The duo envisioned following the Klondikers’ authentic route after finishing the path, which meant paddling roughly 560 miles alongside linked lakes and the Yukon River to achieve the previous boomtown of Dawson City. Then they might stroll the complete 571 miles from Dawson City to the Arctic Ocean and the tiny city of Tuktoyaktu. Though there’s a newly opened highway connecting Tuktoyaktu with Canada, they needed to be the primary to stroll the traditional frozen path to the Arctic shores.
“Women have bought into this narrative that it’s not safe to be in the wilderness,” says Swansborough. “Statistically, I know it’s safer for a woman to be outside than in her own home.” The duo hoped that their journey may assist bolster the woefully underrepresented canon of female-fronted journey. “You internalize what you’re socialized to, so if you don’t see people that look like you doing something, you don’t really think and internalize, ‘This is something I can do,’” says Black. “Our real goal was to show women that you can go out into the wild, in nature, if that’s what your dream is.”
While Swansborough and Black had achieved shorter journeys up to now—mountain climbing the John Muir Trail, paddling the Colorado River—that they had by no means contemplated something of this magnitude. One main hurdle was organizing resupplies throughout the distant Yukon Territory—particularly essential as Swansborough is allergic to soy. Before the journey, she ready $1,200 price of meals drops, solely to understand that she couldn’t ship them from her dwelling in Los Angeles to Canadian publish places of work through normal supply as a consequence of restrictions on worldwide mail. Instead, she navigated Canada’s intensive customer heart providers to seek out prepared strangers who would kindly settle for packing containers on her behalf. “It was a logistical nightmare,” she laughs.
Lake Laberge. It wasn’t all frozen fingers and toes. Photo: Swansborough
The challenges continued all through the journey. Although they started in early summer season, the Chilkoot Trail was nonetheless beneath winter circumstances, which required further vigilance from Swansborough, who lives with rheumatoid arthritis and Raynaud’s illness, a circulatory subject whose therapy is often to keep away from publicity to chilly. Adding to this, she suffered a foul ankle sprain and needed to be helped over the phase’s excessive level, Chilkoot Pass, by Black—who was herself recovering from accidents sustained in a automobile accident the week prior.
Things had been trying peachy after they completed the Chilkoot and began paddling throughout Bennett Lake, knocking out half of its 26-mile size in at some point. Then the storm hit. The upside is that after they lastly made the crossing, the weary paddlers had been capable of decamp and decompress for a number of days when locals opened their houses, generously providing beds, showers, and sizzling meals.
Camp on the best way to the Arctic. Photo: Swansborough
When the climate (and their nerves) calmed, the pair set again out on the water, finally reaching their greatest resupply cease, Whitehorse. Then the unthinkable occurred. While they slept one night in a campground on the town, somebody slipped off with a number of baggage of drugs that had been stowed of their tent vestibule. While some objects had been recovered, many others—essential gear, almost all of Black’s clothes, a GoPro digital camera—had been gone. Black and Swansborough thought the journey was over. Luckily, the hospitality they encountered after the storm on Bennett Lake proved to be the rule, not the exception. After the duo shared their story throughout a beforehand scheduled CBC radio interview, the individuals of Whitehorse stepped as much as assist the ladies proceed their journey.
The third leg of the expedition, the lengthy stroll up the Demspter Highway, was not with out its personal trials. For one, the custom-built cart they’d ordered to ferry their hundred-pound load (there are solely three outposts alongside the freeway for resupply) by no means arrived in Dawson City. The duo compromised with a Burley trailer provided up by a beneficiant native, however had been thrilled—and humbled—when an airline mechanic noticed them trudging alongside, provided his contact info ought to they need assistance, after which shocked them the following day with a model new cart.
After 1200 miles of trudging by means of snow and paddling by means of near-frozen rivers, the Arctic Ocean. Photo: Swansborough
The duo continued to hit snags on their journey—depleted meals provides, a three-season tent insufficient for the fury of winter arriving on the tail finish of a visit that was initially alleged to have taken three months—however time and time once more, the individuals of the Yukon would seem, with burgers and sodas and tarps and sleeping baggage, to nudge them northward. There appeared to exist a mutual admiration, and a shared sense of inspiration. “That incredible human spirit, the connection, the caring, the kindness of the north, of the Yukon—it was unbelievable,” says Black. Swansborough is equally grateful. “Even if you’re an outsider, you’re still treated as family,” she says. “It restored my faith in humanity.”
The windchill hovered round zero when the duo lastly reached Tuktoyaktuk and the Arctic Ocean. Black jumped in a fishing gap carved into the ice, a quick, bracing dose of actuality in an overwhelmingly surreal second. Despite each problem they confronted, the duo persevered—in no small due to the entire individuals they met alongside the best way, and naturally, to their very own tenacity.
“I think obstacles should be reminders of how powerful and truly capable you really are,” says Black. “It’s more mental than anything else. You don’t have to be the best athlete. If you want to do it, you can succeed. You can figure out a way forward.”