ACES river trip
Carrie posted in Recreation on October 15th, 2008
It was interesting to get back on the river again. The same one I had loved, the same one I had cursed. I thought I would feel the need to push hard and get around the next bend but it seems that the lack of a running start, hype, and intense competition surrounding you decreases the stress of the paddle. In fact I found myself looking forward to the end of the paddling day as much as the students, though I never confessed this. The paddling wasn’t strenuous at all and I actually had to hold back to prevent my boat from going ahead of the rest, but I enjoyed getting out and stretching my legs, drying out the tent and sitting down in the setting sun with my mug of tea.
This trip down the Yukon was with the ACES class of the Wood Street School. Wood Street is host to variety of specialised programmes made available to high school students from around the Yukon. In grade 9 there is PASE (Plein Air Sciences Experientiales) which is an outdoor ed course offered in French. ACES (Adventure, Challenge, Environment, and Service) is done in either semester of grade 10 and ES (Experiential Science) is offered in grade 11. Also at the school is the MAD (Music, Art, and Drama) programme which is attended by students with much different interests. In fact, the dichotomy of the students at the school is quite interesting. As we returned from 8-days on the river all smelly and dirty and not looking too pretty, the MAD students had to share the same sidewalk with us in their skinny jeans, short skirts and leggings, make-up laden faces, carefully styled hair, and, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen myself, pink high-heeled shoes. I even heard one MAD student comment, “Why would anybody want to paddle to Carmacks? I’d much rather be dancing†as he squeezed by being careful not to touch our grimy clothes. I can’t really blame him though; I didn’t want to touch our clothes either.
The ACES trip took us from Whitehorse to Carmacks, a journey of around 350 km over 8 days in the last week of September. It’s really unfortunate that we didn’t go a week earlier because the poplar trees would have been in colour and hills would have been covered in glowing gold. At the same time, I’m thankful that the trip was moved up from the first week of October (its original date) since there is a blizzard warning for the Dempster Highway this week and this morning’s freezing rain was less than pleasant. As it was we were fortunate to have some beautiful Indian summer weather until about Day 6 when it turned foul and I was thankful to be near the end of the trip.
The lake was brilliantly calm and sunny once again (I think I might be a good luck charm) except for one morning when we had a small headwind that died down by noon and left the lake calm. The calm sunny days though, meant the clear nights were quite cold and in the mornings our tents were covered in heavy frost. Still, we couldn’t have asked for better weather as we crossed the 50 km long lake and visited historical areas such as barge wrecks, First Nations villages, and telegraph stations. These buildings were in remarkable shape given the harsh conditions of Yukon weather and it was fascinating to travel with an instructor who knew so much about the river. I think the other TAs and I were more fascinated by the lessons than the students. But they took notes diligently and had a number of questions to fill out and answer in their daily journals. Along the 30 Mile River (this particular section of the Yukon River) there were even more abandoned bits of history including old wood camps used to stock the stern wheelers who travelled the river at the turn of the century, telegraph cabins, trapper cabins, barge and sternwheeler wrecks, and shipyards. Hootalinqua was one of my favourite spots because you’d pull up on this beach and walk through some brush only to come out into a clearing with a giant boat in the forest! It was like an episode of Lost or something! There were historical plaques all along the river and it was just so neat to be paddling through seemingly endless wilderness and then come across a wagon wheel, a wooden wheelbarrow, or an interpretation sign. It was also amazing to think that Hayley and I paddled past all this stuff and had no idea it was even there…
We were also fortunate to see some wildlife. We caught glimpses of 2 otters on the lake and a flock of at least 3-dozen Trumpter swans. The trip started off with an immense Golden eagle circling the launch area right in downtown Whitehorse. We lost count of the Bald eagles by about 2 hours into the trip, and some of the students even saw the tail end of a moose. Unfortunately we heard two loud bangs soon thereafter and a couple of hours later saw pieces of a moose being hauled up river in a powerboat, but, we all have to eat! The most amazing wildlife sighting was 2 days straight of flocks of hundreds of Sandhill cranes flying overhead on their migration southward. All through the howling wind and wet snowy day and night we could hear these enormous flocks go past. We must have seen more than 4,000 birds pass over in those 2 days. I couldn’t help but remark how the birds were flying south and we seemed to be the only idiots going north into this crappy weather!
There were so many opportunities for learning on this trip that there is no doubt in my mind about the value of such a programme. The lessons learned by the students on this trip will stick with them for some time. It has been shown year after year that when they administer the BC provincial science exams the ACES student all score far above the average grades. They carry a library of identification and information books in a giant Pelican case and are constantly bombarded with lessons in plant and wildlife biology, history, geography, climatology, geology, and obviously, geomorphology. There were no free answers on the trip and we helped the students use a variety of resources to solve their questions. It was such a great experience for a class of 15-year-olds and I can’t think of a better way to learn all these lessons.
On Sunday, however, the weather turned foul. We woke to cloudy skies that were trying to clear in the south but a strong north headwind picked up and later blew wet snow and rain in our faces all afternoon. It was just determined to be miserable. We found a great site at Twin Creeks and set up group tarps to help dry out some hats and mittens and watch the huge snowflakes fall on our tents as we gulped down pasta and hot drinks. Monday was better only because it wasn’t raining but there was still a cold north wind and I was thankful to get close to the fire that night. As we snuggled down in our tents that night I heard a strange noise and said “That sounds like snow.†Sure enough, the next morning had us shaking off about 4 cm of snow from our tents and scooping it out of our boats. No matter, we stuffed all of our gear away and sprinted off to Carmacks to meet our bus and warm ride home.
We pushed the season to its end and managed to sneak in a nice trip after a short, wet, and disappointing summer. The kids enjoyed it and I can’t believe they paid me to do a trip like that!
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