Planning-Yukon River cruise 2016

When I was a young man and had first arrived in the Yukon, my dog and I did a canoe trip down the Yukon from Whitehorse almost to the mouth of the Yukon River.
I still remember how boring the Alaska part of the river was in comparison to the portion down to Dawson.
This is the access site to the hydro-metric data for the Yukon River:
https://wateroffice.ec.gc.ca/google_map ... oSearch=Go
These pictures will give you an idea of the river front at Dawson:
https://www.google.com/search?q=yukon+r ... r%20dawson
 
Jay what a great plan!

We got back from a summer in Alaska in our RV. Spent some time in Chicken and drove out the gravel road to Eagle on the Yukon.. Eagle is a very nice small village with a colorful history at the end of a 60 mile gravel road that a C dory could be trailered over with no real problems. And it has gas right on the river with a store and a restaurant. You probably have been there. It would be another possible launch or retrieve site.

You could go up stream from Eagle to Dawson with lower risk against the current and either take out at Dawson or even go all the way to White Horse. My guess is that you could find someone to ferry you back to the truck and trailer from Dawson. The owner of the hotel in Eagle told me that they did not have much theft there because all the highway patrol had to do was wait at the end of the single gravel road and take them to jail. Hard to escape from Eagle.

When we crossed the ferry at Dawson there were boats tied on the gravel banks of both sides of the river and I think there were ramps on both banks. The current at Dawson was honking along in August and the boats of all kinds were crabbing across the current on their runs across the river.

I dont know if you ever tried it but Macs prop guard has worked for me and kept my prop from the rocks. You lose a little speed but it lets me go places that I would not do without it. It might help on the gravel braids. Did you take a "come along "on your last river trip and did you have to use it.

I saw a come along in a river boat on the bank and asked the owner what that was for ---big fish--- and he said no that was his unsticking tool when he grounded out. I have no idea who was kidding who. But it is something I would take on one of those Alaskan color of cement rivers that dont have enough common courtesy to stay in a regular channel for more than a few hours. They are the most random collection of confused water I have ever seen. I would not have believed how crazy they are if I had not seen so many of them.
 
Jay,
I have to go on an Exercise for 10 days.
Will try to get more info about Dawson from someone who has the latest
info. I'll e -mail you when I get back.
Cheers, Peter.
 
AJF, thanks for the river water level link & I throughly enjoyed the photos.

Slowtrot, it sounds like you had a super summer rv trip. We have not been to Eagle yet, but have read considerably about it & knew a guy who mined for years in the Chicken area, who could tell some fantastic tales about it. I will be working on the planning details of this trip through out the winter & Eagle has not been ruled out as part of this Yukon River cruise. It's good to know they sell fuel there on river as one option is after making it down to Dawson to continue on to Eagle & then back to at least Dawson on the river. I haven't totally ruled out either starting at Whitehorse & finishing at Eagle or going all the way down to Eagle & back to Whitehorse. Also under consideration is how much time & where to spend it out of Skagway on the ocean or skip the ocean next year & put all the time into the Yukon River & the lakes at its head.

On our last Yukon River trip we used the Mac River Runner prop protectors & also carried a come-along & shovel. On that trip they all were good insurance, but even with the high speed down river return, we would have made it without them. We had the props only make contact with the bottom twice & that was lite contact. I now have stainless skeg covers that have a small flat protector on the bottom, but not near as protective of the props as Mac River runners, but better than none. On the last run down between Whitehorse & Carmacks a distance of slightly over 200 miles we left Whitehorse at 6:30 am & arrived at Carmacks at 5:15, which is 9 3/4 hours at a average speed of 20.5 mph. Our time will not be so limited this trip & plan to drift along with enough increase in speed to maintain steerage when needed, so there should be even less chance of severe prop contact or groundings, though I will have the shovel & come-along again for insurance.

I know what you mean about those cement covered many braided rivers. I have been on several in the Mokai & they are impossible to read. Even the upper Yukon which is a beautiful color created by its glacier origins is hard to see into & for the most part must be read from the action of the water on the surface & how in general a rivers course creates deep & shallow areas. The areas where the most braids occur breaks up this normalcy & in places makes it very difficult to near impossible to read except for perhaps the very expert, which I am not.

Peter, thanks & looking forward to your emails.

Jay
 
By using the satellite generated google Maps & the Bing map, weather app Wundermap on my IPad to view the Yukon River from Whitehorse, Yukon Territory to Eagle, Alaska, I've found a major help in navigating the river. At first my goal was to use the google sat map in conjunction with our "Yukon Channel Charts" by Bruce Batchelor or other river guide maps. The one by Bruce, we used in 2003 & I seriously doubt our trip then would have been successful without it. I hoped the sat view would allow us to make additional notes on the chart book to help navigate the more difficult parts of the river.

The first thing I noticed in doing this is the google maps of this area are much inferior to the Bing Maps, which was somewhat of a surprise. Using the Wundermap weather app, sparked a memory, that my Navionics IPad charts also use the Bing Map & I had found them also superior to Google. When I used the Navionics chart on the IPad here at home to look over the Yukon River, I was surprised to see the exact same images as I had been studying on the Wundermap app. Some areas are very detailed & they include the ones, I need the most in the many braided river sections. Other section have much less detail, some cloud cover or the river partially ice covered, but the amazing thing to me is the details are all good for knowing where the boat is on the river & for the most part giving advance visual notice in time to select the channel or even the best position in the channel. Of course with the changing river it's not as accurate as the chart would normally be on a ocean or lake, but still an extremely useful tool to be used with the written guide & our eyes. Our experience of often boating in areas where the charts positioning of the boat on it being inaccurate, but still helpful will be very useful in using it now on the river. I've rarely found a detail discrepancy in the electronic chart & the satellite photos should be right on if detail is good, but often I have seen a temporary loss of satellite signal from various causes & in outlying areas a misplace of the boat on the chart that is at least uniform, so one can figure out the error & know where the boat actually is on the chart. With the Yukon River definitely being an outlying area from the normal chart use, I suspect this will be the most difficult aspect of using it there.

On our successful 2003 Yukon River trip, which was practically all done at planing speed, due to limited time away from work, the most difficult part of navigating involved us continuously trying to figure out exactly where we were on the river, so we could successfully use the river guide for channel selection & boat placement in it. That trip didn't include the more difficult braided section down river closer to Dawson, so with this trip being planned for that sections inclusion, I was very pleased to see the satellite chart detail on my Navionics App & will now be checking to see if the Garmin North America rivers & lakes card on my Garmin 545 also has this satellite image detail to use. I do know my older Garmin 276C Canada topographic card will be useful too.
 
Thou satellite phone coverage is fairly good through out the Yukon. You will find in the Yukon River valley the coverage is sporadic. I've also seen a few areas on the river as well where I haven't been able to get a GPS signal lock.
I've been working with the satellite/digital imagery in the Yukon for the last couple of years (personal interest in 3d maps) and the quality of information that is available drops off once you are north of 61 degrees. Some areas have extremely good information but usually because of specific interest in the resources in the area.
 
Jay - I believe on the Navionics apps, the image overlays (either Bing or Google) require an internet connection. So while they may be very useful for planning purposes, I'm guessing that you won't have good mobile service in many of the areas on the water and hence won't have that imagery available in real time.
 
AJF, I have used a Iridium based sat phone in the Yukon & it worked well for us, but I have heard the global star is pretty well useless there. This time I will be leaving the sat phone at home & using the Delorme In Reach, which can send & receive text & allow others to follow us in real time. It will be interesting to see how accurate & detailed the In Reach provides on our real time tracking. I would think it will be good as the user must be internet connected to view.

In 2003 our only GPS was a old Lowrance hand held. It didn't have a screen map, but it would leave a track, give speed over ground & show coordinates & it never lost contact with the satellites, but perhaps it would have, had we gone further north than Carmacks. Now with the Garmin 276C loaded with Canadian Topo maps of the Yukon River area from Whitehorse to the Alaska Border, we will have a much better idea of our position to coordinate with the map guide book, even without the satellite images I was hoping for.

Roger, of course you are right about needing a Internet connection to see the satellite images on the IPad & I jumped the gun thinking they would show without it. Thanks for enlightening me, now I can study them this winter, like I had originally planned. The Garmin 545 didn't have the sat imagery I was hoping for either.
 
tbag":3goi1sbc said:
I have been thinking about this trip too. I think it would be AWESOME!!!!! I live in Juneau and it would just be a short ferry ride and tow up to Whitehorse. The way I would do it is put your boat in at Whitehorse and leave it there. Then make the 330 mile trip to Dawson City and stash your rig there. Then fly back to Whitehorse via AirNorth (http://www.flyairnorth.com/) and take off. If you time it right you could do all that in less than 12 hours. There is a great bookstoer in Whitehorse, Macs books and they suggested this guide for the floating the Yukon (http://www.yukonbooks.com/shop/customer ... =48&page=2). I will be watching this thread. I am few years away from pulling this off. I have two young kids. Maybe 5 years from now. But this will pave the way.
Click to expand...

I live down in Ketchikan, have a 4.5 year old, would love to go on this trip in a couple years if you want to up your departure.
 
Jay,

It sounds as though you have some good info on where to leave the truck and trailer and you're now thinking about river navigation issues. Here are some thoughts.

Satellite views of the Yukon would be very useful, but if you're out of cellphone range satellite views may not be available. Granted, satellite view may be somewhat outdated but they are better then nothing. (Trying to pick out the best channel of a braided river, FROM WATER LEVEL can be difficult.). Could you lay out your course on the river, using satellite photos then take a SCREEN SHOT of the river with your preferred route depicted? You would then be able to pull-up the screen shot photo and use that as a go-by. You could even do this from home to practice the technique.

I did an earlier variation of this for my 2000 trip to SEAK in the Boston Whaler. I layed out a GPS route for the entire trip using nautical charts. I then transferred those waypoints onto my Garmin GPS III+ (obsolete, I know!!) to create a basic route. I then printed a paper copies of the proposed route(with the GPS waypoints and tracks showing...) and put them in page protectors for the actual trip. Seemed unnecessarily complex at the time, but I didn't have a chart plotter at that time.

Another idea, but this is pretty far out: Convince Jody Kidd and his QUADCOPTER to go along! With a quadcopter you could have real time views of the braided river, from aloft!

Best,
Casey&Mary
 
Thanks Jack, & I do plan on sharing this adventure by Delorme In Reach, written log, photos & maybe some video.

Casey, on our 2004 cruise north from Prince Rupert, I used much the same method as you on your 2000 SEAK trip, for a back up to our Nobletech electronic charts on a notebook computer. This along with additional paper charts & GPS way points allowed us to continue cruising for the week plus it took for the replacement computer to arrive after we lost the original in the Fords Terror incident, so I well understand the method you'er suggesting & think a variation of it to be useful in preplanning & while on the river. The guide book we plan to use is called "Yukon Channel Charts" by Bruce Bachelor, which includes sternwheeler style strip maps. This is what we used in 2003 & think without it, the trip from Carmacks to Whitehorse & back would not have been successful. This time we plan on using the Internet sat map views to improve the route already made on the strip maps, along with the Garmin GPS 276C Topo maps to fairly accurately pinpoint our location, when actually on the river. In 2003 we found the strip maps fairly easy to use & we already have many notes for improved navigation on them. I think your idea of screen saver shots very good & I will be working up a series of them to be best incorporated in conjunction with the GPS chart & book strip maps.

We would love to have Jody along with us & his Voyager with or without the Quadcopter, though I agree it's views sure could be useful in real time.

Jay
 
Yes AJF, it was first published in 1975 & I kinda doubt my 1995 updated version had river routes changed from the original, but still found it remarkably accurate in 2003. The Mile Rourke book is now 10 years old & most likely outdated some too. I had looked it over & was still debating on buying it to use for comparison with Bachelors with your present post pushing me into buying it now. Thanks.

Jay
 
Jay
You might find this site of interest' especially the old photos of the Whitehorse and Dawson river front. I'm afraid they no longer look that way. https://www.facebook.com/1967YukonRiver ... nref=story

You might have seen this video already of the last trip of a paddle wheeler down the Yukon river. When I first came to the Yukon several of paddle wheedlers you see on the shore in Whitehorse were still there until a tragic fire in 1974 destroyed them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOLX8L3olRk
 
AJF, I found both links you shared fascinating. The video & photos of the amphicars amazing & that they made it along with all the others even more so. I hadn't viewed before, the video of the last trip of the Keno, so it was really good to see. In viewing it, I found this link to the last voyage of the Klondike going up steam from Dawson to Whitehorse. It's another short video well worth watching too.

http://youtu.be/KpTtFngqePI

Jay
 
In the last couple of days, I've spent many hours comparing my copy of Bruce Bachelor's Yukon River proposed routes & what I can actually see from the satellite imagery from Bing. I've now made several adjustments on our strip maps & have notations on them where the imagery isn't good, that I plan to compare to the Mike Rourke guide book, when it arrives for final route plans. In doing this, I've now decided not to do screen shots of the sat imagery, which Casey suggested & I thought a good idea. When actually on the river & in a place a decision needs to be made quickly, I think the best simple system without to much data to sort through, that lets me 1st & foremost read the river & my surroundings paramount. This, I think can be best accomplished with just the strip map book with our adjusted routes & other notations on it, in combination with the Garmin GPS & recorded river mileage showing our position on the river fairly accurately. Perhaps if the sat imagery wasn't so broken up in many different areas of size detail, along with views being blocked by ice & clouds, I would be more comfortable in its use on the river.

This reviewing of our 2003 notes on the strip maps & the sat imagery brought back many memories of that trip & boosted confidence, especially in the river section between Whitehorse & Carmacks. On the lower river section of 260 miles, between Carmacks & Dawson, I found several areas where the suggested routes are now filled in with sand bars & know there are other areas where the sat imagery is poor or the river has changed yet again, that we will have to adjust for on the spot & a main reason, I want to keep our navigation aids simple with emphases being "eyes on" river reading of the river & it's surroundings, combined with before hours spent memorizing the more useful sat imagery.

Jay
 
Hi Jay

I'm not sure if you're familiar with Geomatics Yukon as a source for imagery information for the Yukon. But if not you might want to check it out : http://www.geomaticsyukon.ca/
I use the site a lot for a variety of projects and find it very useful. Just be prepared to spend a lot of time finding how to access all the information that is available on this site.
 
Things again AJF, for another good link. I have read several books about the paddle wheelers on the Yukon & this will most likely be added to them, but likely not until I get to Whitehorse. I've found the shipping cost from there to be steep. It should make for good reading while actually on the river. My favorite book so far about the Yukon River was by C R Porter "Klondike Paradise" & only incidentally about the actual river due to the author's youth time there described. It had wonderful descriptions of his time on the river & equally so the history of Ben My Chree, his purchase of Ben My Chree on Tagish Lake & his overcoming the challenge of building a cabin & living there.

Our cruise to Ben My Chree in 2003, the same year we were last on the Yukon River & the first year we boated in a C-Dory is one of my life's more memorable events.

Jay
 
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