Bert Gildart: Writer and Photographer

©Bert Gildart: The February issue of Boating (claiming to be the “World’s Largest Powerboat Magazine”), featured a story about one of the many river trips Janie and I have made in Alaska in our Johnboat.

The title for its story was “Great Adventures, Why are you still tied to the dock,” and described three other outings under separate titles in addition to ours.

Our adventure was entitled “North to the Yukon,” and the story resulted from telephone interviews editors in New York conducted with us in our home in Montana.

Answers were easy to provide as we had written stories about these lengthy boat trips for several different publications, including the environmental section of the Christian Science Monitor.

Our Alaska boat trip was certainly an adventure, but if you’re willing to invest the time required for organization you can also make the trip, and do so in a manner that will not make it a misadventure.

Obviously, there are some things you must have and one of those is flat-bottomed boat, for despite the fact that the Yukon is a huge brawling river, in places it is also a very shallow river, and it is difficult to predict just where those places might be.

So you need a Johnboat, and one of substantial size. Ours is 20 feet long, and it is considered small.

We power it with a 50 hp four stroke Yamaha, and because you must often travel hundreds of miles without access to fuel, you’ll need to carry about 50 gallons of gas.

In other words, you need space.

The other thing you need is a good tent, and we carried a wall tent constructed from a burn-proof fabric.

Because weather is at times harsh, you need a place to hole up for several days that is comfortable, and without the

capability of a tent that can handle a small wood stove (“called a sheep-herder stove”) you’ll be uncomfortable.

We also carried collapsible cots, a Coleman lantern, winter cloths and lots of dried food.

Why embark on such an adventure? In part to experience the raw country, for there were nights when caribou surged in mass across the Porcupine River, one of the tributaries of the Yukon up which we traveled.

And then there were simply nights we spent in the tent listening to the wind blow—realizing that no other human beings were anywhere within a hundred miles or more.

Just the wolves, which often howled, and the curious bears that sometimes left tracks within feet of our tent.

And then there were days with the few inhabitants who do live along the Yukon and Porcupine located in their small villages. Essentially, all were Native Americans belonging to a tribe known as the Gwich’in.

Once we worked as summer school teachers in a number of these Gwich’in villages, responding to a call from a friend (then the assistant superintendent) for people willing to explain their profession, which in my case was journalism and photojournalism.

We continued for three more summers as teachers and some of these villagers we now consider friends whom we will always want to know about.

In fact, several have visited us here in Montana, and one of our web pages is devoted to this group.Trips along the Yukon and Porcupine later compelled us to take other trips, and one of them took us up the ALCAN to the Dempster Highway.

The Dempster is a 500-mile long road that leads from the ALCAN to the McKenzie River and to more Gwich’in Indian Villages, but located in Canada.

Here, we traveled with a friend down much of this historic river to the Peel Channel of the McKenzie, and then to the Arctic Ocean, all in our Johnboat.

Along the route, we stayed at fish camps, and met remarkable people such Caroline Kay, a woman who had lived a life in the bush.

And so our lives go on, and we are particularly enjoying the recounting of these adventures the day before our anniversary, happy we’ve been blessed to lead such a life and anxious for the time to come when we can embark on yet other excursions, some of which will certainly be made by boat or travel trailer.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 12:05 pm and is filed under The Gwich'in & ANWR, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.