Midnight SEEKING GOLD AND GLORY IN THE


TOUGHEST PADDLING RACE ON EARTH Words by Kaydi Pyette


THE START LINE IS CHAOS. A whistle sounds and 155 paddlers sprint 400 meters Le Mans-style for their boats. Spectators line the shore, hooting and flashing cameras. The press of Spandex and neoprene is intense. Vaulting into our canoe, we narrowly avoid a collision with a voyageur team as we enter current. We fall in mid-pack. The forerunners are already 300 meters away. Three hours later, the Yukon River’s canyon walls give way to notorious Lake Laberge. Our map marks this section with strongly worded warnings


promising disaster to those who don’t heed the rising wind. A handful of motor boaters die on Laberge’s 50-kilometer stretch every year. It’s up to five kilometers wide in sections. It takes us seven and a half hours to slog across. We silently wonder how we’ll continue for another 650 kilometers but neither of us dare say a word.


BACK IN THE DEPTHS OF WINTER, the Yukon River Quest (YRQ) sounded like a fun challenge to my partner, Geoff, and me. It was the cabin fever talking. I should have known, because despite being the canoe-crazy one in the relationship, this was all Geoff’s idea. The longest annual canoe and kayak race in the world, the YRQ takes paddlers 715 kilometers from Whitehorse to Dawson on the remote Yukon River


in northern Canada. There are just 10 hours of mandatory rest stops along the way, and racers must finish in 84 hours. Competitors fight the elements, the clock and each other, but by far the hardest battle plays out in each boat as sleep deprivation and exhaustion take


their toll. This same route transported tens of thousands of prospectors during the Klondike Gold Rush between 1897 and 1899. We’ve come for the same reason as those stampeders—the promise of adventure and glory.


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