Cold in the morning, hot in the afternoon. Long john bottoms, thermal top with wool shirt, fleece, and puffy jacket with hat on top for coffee in the morning, still fingers and toes got cold then later down to shorts and tee shirt barefoot on deck. We had dinner on a sandbar at 8, napped until 9, ran for a couple more hours, and now are tied up in another back slough, it's midnight and the sun is streaming through the back of the tent. I put on the last round of sunblock at 9 this evening. I love it here.
All the villages seem to have a picnic table and a place to drive up to watch the boats come and go. There were about 6 people at the picnic table in Fort Yukon late this morning when we wheeled around the last bend, tried to cut across the sandbar, and got stuck enough that I had to put on the waders and get out and push back into deeper water. While we were struggling with our task the kind folks ashore were shouting advice and encouragement, of course. After we tied up and humbly walked up the gravel slope they were as nice as you could imagine and I immediately got a ride the half mile or so to the store/gas station, after a quick tour of town. Fort Yukon is the biggest of the Indian villages that we go through on the trip, with almost 300 families, a clinic, school, two stores, and cultural meeting house. I got my gas ($6.00 a gallon) and off we went in the truck back to the river. There is cell service here but neither Jeff nor I could connect with our phones, I think it is an Alaska thing. When I asked about a wifi hotspot from the girl in the store she looked either puzzled or confused, still the answer was no. Luckily my friendly driver Tony Carroll came to my rescue again.
Turns out that Tony is the manager of the power plant in town and the electrician and the lineman, for the 280 customers that are served by the giant diesel generators. First we went to the old generator building to his old office there and when we couldn't figure out what the password was we went to the new place. They have just completed a brand new five million dollar building with three new biofuel generators and a nice if not a little noisy office. Tony left me there for 45 minutes while he went back home to check on something. I was in his office at his desk hooked up to his wifi at the control center of electricity for the entire town, had just met him ten minutes ago (he watched us get onto and off of a sandbar) and he leaves me alone for almost an hour. Tony like most of the people in this town are Athabascan people, their name means "People of the Flat", they live largely subsistence lifestyles hunting geese and moose and bears and fishing for the king salmon that will arrive here in a few weeks. They are related to but speak a different language than the native people in most of the surrounding villages.
While we sat talking back at the picnic table, a couple of oddly well dressed and out of place missionaries, Jeff and Jeff, came by to invite us to church at the Arctic Circle Baptist Church, it was a Sunday after all. I gave Tony a couple of the salami beef logs that Truhn had brought up from Texas and I hope he considered it a fair trade, it was more than worth it for me. Truhn had been on the boat the whole time that I was in town (we heard from the village upstream to watch out for the bad people in Fort Yukon) talking to a semi-crazed semi-wise man who sat on shore and wore yellow shooting sunglasses. It was getting hot, we were ready to go, and so we untied about 3 hours after we pulled up. We got a wave goodbye and well wishes along with a caution to watch out for the next village downstream, Beaver, now those Indians are trouble. Right.
Yukon fish camp