Yukon Golden

“I can tell you a story about patience, but you’ll have to wait.” This is a little First Nations humour, Yukon-style. Don Trudeau, from the local Selkirk First Nation, is cooking up bannock over an open fire within sight of the Yukon River, near Pelly Crossing. He’s squatting over a makeshift grill – conveniently snapped together from nearby tree branches – that could put your Weber to shame. The tale in question is a little long to go into here, but by the end, we have all been served the smokey bread with some low-bush cranberry jam, which Trudeau’s wife, Audrey, has made.

My own story takes about eight days, which is how long it takes to get from Whitehorse to Dawson City by riverboat. (Well, there’s a little cheating: we hop part of the Thirty Mile stretch in a float plane.) We’ve come here with Great River Journey, an outfitter that ferries guests along the route of the Klondikers, putting us up in custom-built lodges on the way to bring the northern experience to softies like me. Our cabins have a comic-book tilt to them, evoking the rough-and-tough era of Robert Service, but inside are cushy beds and fireplaces that blaze with the flick of a switch. If the Yukon River is the original highway, this is the North’s ultimate road trip.

In the past, these parts of the Yukon would have been inaccessible to all but the most tenacious canoers. The land here is all rugged lakes and mountains, birch trees and juniper bushes that smell like sage-infused gin when you crumple the buds in your hand. It’s easy to forget what the man-made world looks like until you come across the carcass of an old sternwheeler abandoned on Hootalinqua Island, and even that’s close to 100 years old.

On our first night, George Asquith, a Yukoner by way of Toronto and the man who thought up Great River Journey, greets our little group on the dock of Upper Labarge Lodge. (Yes, the same lakeshore where Sam McGee was fictitiously cremated.) Asquith helicoptered in the stove that will turn out our dinner tonight and had the lumber for the lodge driven across a frozen lake. God only knows how he got that hot tub out here.

It took six visits to the Selkirk General Assembly before the First Nation agreed to invest in the utterly original idea of piloting groups of people up the river without a paddle (in a good way).

And that was only the raw materials. Asquith had to visit the Selkirk General Assembly six times before it agreed to his utterly original idea: piloting groups of people up a river without a paddle (in a good way). He then did the same with three other groups along the route: the Kwanlin Dün First Nation, the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council and the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation. It’s certainly not the first luxury outfitter owned by aboriginal peoples in Canada (there’s Nk’Mip Cellars in B.C. and the Hôtel-Musée Premières Nations in Wendake, Quebec, among others), but it was perhaps one of the most complex to orchestrate. Great River Journey (Yukon means “great river” in Gwich’in) is the first travel development that these peoples have invested in since the land-claim settlements finally went through, granting the First Nations self-government and control over virtually all the land here.

What ties together Great River Journey’s staff of First Nations people, Yukoners and Canada-mad foreigners like our German guide, Christian, is a love of this northern chunk of perfection. One morning, Christian gets down on his knee to cajole me into hiking up a ridge overlooking Fort Selkirk, the first Hudson’s Bay post in the Yukon. (I did, after all, buy a pair of L.L. Bean socks, embroidered with the word “Hike,” for the trip, so it’s hard to refuse.) Getting there involves a climb up a near vertical face, and then we have to sidestep giant jam-coloured poops that berry-eating bears have left in their tracks. But the view from the ridge – a sweeping lookout that was once the disputed prize of warring tribes – is worth the scramble back down the scree to meet the boat.