Yukon Yearnings is the story of my kayak trip down the Yukon River, from the source to the Bering Sea. The paddling distance for that solo kayak journey was just over 2, 300 miles. It was not until completing the journey and retturning home that I discovered that no one else had achieved that. I was the first person to have paddled the entire Yukon River.
Prior to the current kayak trip I had paddled two thousand miles of the river from Lake Atlin, British Columbia, to Russian Mission, Alaska. My reason for going back to the Yukon was not to be the first person to paddle the whole river. My reason was to experience the wilderness again. Paddling in the solitude of that wilderness enclosed me in the peace of the lakes and the river. There were no distractions, no time constraints, and no urgent pressures to be in a certain place by a certain time The deep, quiet forests and the snowcapped mountains just enraptured me.
Passing the villages and stopping in some allowed me to meet the people living on the river. Their kindness was as significant as the beauty of the nature all the way to the Bering Sea.
About the author
As a young boy, a friend of mine and I would camp for a couple of days out in the countryside, the wilderness of south eastern Nebraska. We didnt even have a tent, just used blankets to stay warm and keep insects off of us. But that was something that I thoroughly enjoyed and wanted to continue as I got older, which led to kayaking.
That camping somehow connected with my childhood experience. Being born in Latvia near the end of WWII, my parents grabbed me and my two brothers and fled Latvia because the Russian army invaded. We ended up in Germany and lived in refugee camps for six years. In one of them my father was killed in a truck accident. A couple of years later we arrived in America after a Methodist Church sponsored my mother and the three boys, to bring us to America.
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