The Nisutlin: Yukon’s ‘Quiet Waters’

“Shit, we’ve got to stop right now.”

We can just make out a stretch of low, unvegetated bank. By the time Stephen and I slide to a silty stop and get out, we’re in complete darkness. Then something or some things start to blundering through the shallows and for a few heart-pounding, pupil-dilating, sphincter-shifting seconds it’s impossible to tell if it’s heading away or coming towards us. My bear spray is in the same place as my headlamp. My sense of direction has disappeared. I freeze like a frightened rabbit.

We’re a couple of days into a 200-kilometre journey that we’ve calculated will be a seven-day canoe trip given that we intend to take our sweet time on this sleepy watercourse. Because daytime temperatures have been so unusually high – enough to cause multiple forest fires in the area and pre-sunstroke indecisiveness in one of us – we’re trying something we hadn’t planned: travelling by instinct rather than the clock. Resting in the heat of the day and only launching once it’s cooled down.

And like all new systems, it needs some tweaking.

Although extreme summer heat and an unstructured paddling schedule are new for Canadian-born Stephen, canoe trips are not; he was a wilderness white water canoe guide for 11 consecutive seasons in a past life. Stephen still loves the pants off the outdoors but has done his dash sharing it with the unlikeminded after suffering psychological death as a river guide over a decade back. He woke one particular Yukon morning “zenning out with nature” but was “slapped by the inane urban talk” of the group over breakfast and something in him broke.

I met Stephen at a New Year’s Eve party in a huge fire-warmed shed on the outskirts of the territory’s capital of Whitehorse with an outside temperature of 33 below. When I emailed him a few months later to say I’d be back for summer, hoping he’d suggest a multiday canoe trip, he suggested a multiday canoe trip.

The Yukon’s like that.

By the time the sound of splashing has diminished we’ve found our headlamps and are relieved to illuminate fresh moose tracks. Not that moose aren’t a threat – some consider them the most dangerous North American animal due to an unpredictable nature in a creature that size – but right now anything’s better than bear prints when we need to stay put until first light. Still on the mistakes trajectory of a late-night learning curve, we erect the tent and try to snooze without sleeping bags or mats.

A few hours later, chilled and sleep-deprived, we push off from what we’ve discovered is more a mosquitoey mudflat than a sandy bar. Bad hair day ducks watch us from the opposite bank. The moose and calf gaze, big-eyed, from between the cottonwood trees on the small island they bolted to in the dark. Mosquitoes and moose both thrive in the wetlands of the alluvial plain that the Nisutlin winds its way through.

The vessel is Stephen’s beloved Swift Dumoine, which he describes as “a good all-rounder but not excellent at anything” that can be paddled solo. He purchased it after moving to the Yukon because the Swift Dumoine he brought with him from Ontario had wooden gunwales made of cherry that had to be removed at 30 below, which meant detaching them every Whitehorse winter. The buyers were relocating to Alberta.

Our gorgeous flat water paddles are made from solid pieces of wood. They’re designed to catch a lot of water in slow or no current and allow us to stroke almost silently. My beaver tail moves the most water while the otter, at the stern with Stephen, has a narrower blade towards the top, a shorter shaft length and is smoother in stroke.

The Yukon has a wild river appropriate for every level of paddler and just about every trip type. My reason for coming back to the Yukon – a territory the size of South Australia with a population of around 35,000 people (and double that in moose) – was to have a break from all things loud and fast. When someone described the Nisutlin as “dead flat and boring” it went to the top of my list. Equal parts rebellious adrenaline junkie and peace-loving nature snag, Stephen’s only condition about which corridor we took was that it didn’t have office carpet.

Our chosen watery pathway is through the traditional territory of the Teslin Tlingit (pronounced KLING-kit) along a river they named Nisutlin because the word means ‘quiet waters’. The Nisutlin is one of the few south-flowing rivers in the Yukon River watershed, beginning in the Pelly Mountains and flowing southeast into Teslin Lake. It’s a big, slow Class 1 route, varying from around 30 to 60 metres wide with general river speeds of between three and eight kilometres an hour.

Of the few human-made structures beside the Nisutlin, most are fish camps and cabins belonging to First Nations people. Teslin Tlingit families have had fish camps along this river and trapped in the area for eons.

Although the Nisutlin is considered relatively accessible from Whitehorse, someone still had to take a whole day out to shuttle a car to our final destination of the Village of Teslin then drop us at the Rose River put-in just off South Canol Road. Less accessible rivers in the Yukon involve light planes and folding canoes.

We launch onto the Rose late afternoon then stop and set up camp less than an hour later to enjoy the limited time we have on this pretty little river, which meets up with the Nisutlin less than ten kilometres from the put-in. The Rose is so intimately narrow that wildlife is thrillingly close, and if the forest fire on the other side of Quiet Lake had decided to head our direction we’d have been a fried fish taco. An enormous pyrocumulus cloud grows in the sky above our camp that first evening and makes us feel wonderfully vulnerable and a little curious as to whether or not we’ve made a foolish decision and will die together that night within a cocoon of melted tent fabric…

…You can read the full adventure in Wild issue 146. Subscribe today.