Our first morning in the wild introduced us to our new morning routine of getting the food bag down from the tree, making & eating breakfast, cleaning dishes, packing tent, sleeping bag and isolation mat and pack everything into the canoe. Unfortunately the weather worsened: Quite some wind made the sky overcast.
We started paddling and soon found ourselves on the Lake Laberge! Although we knew beforehand about its size: It is huuge! We hat to cross the whole length of 50km (as a comparison, Lake Zurich is 42km long). 50km without supporting river currents! As it was still winding quite a bit (luckily tailwind), waves welcomed us. Although coming from the back, it was a struggle to keep the heading of the canoe stable. Despite a couple of rain drops it never started to rain.
After quite some paddling, we decided to stop at a nice place and eat some lunch. Cucumber, tomatoes and soup should fuel us for the next couple of kilometers.
After a total of 7 hours and 42 km we reached a camp spot, we thought could be worth checking out. And it was a blast! From the fire pit, we had a great view over the whole lake. Latter was getting calmer and the weather cleared up to spend some more sunshine for us to charge ourselves with energy 🙂
Today was also the start of the great Yukon River Quest – the worlds largest paddling race going from Whitehorse down to Dawson. Athletes in different team sizes would then paddle through day and (bright) nights. There is just one mandatory stop in Carmacks and one between Carmacks and Dawson for safety reasons. Teams that manage to end the race before the time limit spent around 48 hours for paddling over 700 km! As we sat by the fire we now saw paddlers in canoes, kayaks and even SUPs (!) passing and jealousy watching us BBQing some sausages.
