I was not afraid until I heard the roar.
At first I refused to acknowledge what the growing sound was. It must be the angry growl of a chainsaw, or perhaps a jet. I promised myself that it couldn’t be the sound of the water ahead, but even before my kayak turned the next bend, I knew it was. I was heading into the Yukon River’s legendary Five Finger Rapids and there was no going back. It was the first month of a 2,000-mile journey retracing the Klondike Gold Rush route and beyond. I had traveled four days by ferry up to Skagway, Alaska, and then hiked the Chilkoot Trail through the Coast Mountains to Lake Bennett. From there the plan was to paddle the Yukon River all the way to the Bering Sea. It was a trip that I had planned with a partner who knew a lot more about river travel than I did. A partner who, two weeks before the start, had to choose work over the river. I had barely been kayaking before—never
overnight—and nearly decided to call it quits before even starting. There were plenty of things to be afraid of: whirlpools, high waves, wind, drowning, hypothermia, but most of all I was afraid of being alone. What business did I, a girl raised in East Coast suburbia, have on the mighty Yukon solo? But in the end I knew that if I didn’t kayak
the river now, I was in danger of never seeing its length. Of never following this dream and having to live with that disappointment. Having to always wonder “what if?” Growing old with “what ifs” sounded more painful than anything.
Five Fingers is so named because the
Yukon narrows drastically at this point and an enormous volume of water is quite suddenly squashed into five different channels over reefs and around towering islands of rock. Above the rapids, my head filled with the stories I had read about these treacherous waters. According to one gold rush traveler (who was perhaps prone to hyperbole) it was the responsibility of every miner who survived Five Fingers to pause after the angry water and dig a grave to bury one of the unlucky. Oh boy. I paused for a moment in an eddy to collect
myself. My life vest was strapped tightly, my gumboots were off (no good having those things weighing me down if I ended up swimming in ice water) and my emergency bag was ready to go. Okay. One, two, three… and I dipped the nose of my red Folbot Kodiak into the muscular current. How high were those white waves? Three feet? Four feet? Twenty feet? A strong current punched from the left
and I fought back to keep the boat heading downstream. Tearing past the islands and cliffs and reefs into wider river, riding the waves like a champion. It took me until halfway through the rapids to realize…this is fun! I let out a “WHOOP!” and flew down the river into the evening feeling alive. I fell asleep in love with it all. With the
new challenges and daily lessons. A lesson on navigating riffles, a lesson on avoiding
whirlpools, a lesson from the wolves and bears and gulls, a lesson on the surprising goodness of kindly strangers. I’ll tell you the big secret. The trick to these long-distance expeditions is to forget the end entirely, to lose yourself in the adventure. You can’t look at the whole picture. Two thousand miles of paddling—that’s impossible! Little step by little step, stroke by stroke and then, all of a sudden, you will see that all of these tiny efforts can add up to something great and you can do the impossible. I headed out to the headwaters of the
Yukon knee-shaking scared, and what do you know, it turned out to be one of the greatest adventures of my life. Months later, I did reach the coast, but the end goal isn’t the point. You don’t hike the Appalachian Trail just to summit Katahdin, you don’t trek the Continental Divide Trail to see that slab of concrete at Crazy Cook, and you don’t paddle the Yukon to see the Bering, just like you don’t live to die. It is the journey that is everything. Trade the couch for adventure. Trade inertia
for wildness. Trade comfort for life. Kristin Gates is an accomplished long-
distance hiker and dog musher; she is the first woman to traverse Alaska’s Brooks Range solo. She blogs about her adventures at
www.milesforbreakfast.com.
The First-Timer
KRISTIN GATES Boston, Massachusetts
Why I Do It
“For months, for hundreds of miles, you have this wonderful purpose, this single goal to work towards. It is your job to see the world, to learn from the wild.” —Kristin Gates
50 | ADVENTURE KAYAK
PHOTOS: KRISTIN GATES
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