YUKON RIVER DAY 8

In the early morning hours of day 8 it began to rain again. As you can imagine we were getting a little tired of the rain by this point. The only good thing is that it stopped raining long enough each evening to get everything dried out again. We got into the canoes and I hit the proverbial wall. I was cold, wet and miserable. My hands were completely cramped up and aching up to my elbows. I just sat in the front of the canoe crying and feeling sorry for myself. Brian was a saint - he just comforted me and told me to rest. He would have paddled the whole day himself for me. I was pretty pathetic. Eventually though, I began to toughen up, grabbed my paddle in my gnarled hands and dug in. Once the rain let up we stopped for another fire. Then the cameras came out again.
Giving the thumbs up - all is o.k. I will survive.Still trudging on. This was the day Brian was positive we would get pie. Maybe it was the thought of this that kept everyone going on this dreary day. In the distance we saw this sign. As signs on the Yukon river are few and far between, we had to check it out.
Upon closer inspection here is what it said:So, we naively paddled as hard as we could toward the pie.
What we found was a little bit disturbing. It is what Brian now refers to as "Hill billy pie". We reached what we thought was the "bakery," there were no signs marking the place, only a couple boats pulled up to shore. It was pouring rain once again and no one was too anxious to get out of their canoes and step into the mud to see what was over the rise. However, Brian wanted pie so bad at this point, and had been raving on about pie for so long that everyone else now wanted pie too, that we were elected to see if it was the place. There was also a campsite here. We were all imagining a nice campsite, with a cute little bakery and showers. Needless to say that is not what we found. We knew we had stumbled upon the campsite only because there was a big oil drum with "garbage" painted on it. There were some fire pits and picnic tables, but the ground was very uneven - rolling hills with no flat spots to pitch a tent. Then we looked farther and saw a few buildings, a man peering around the corner, and 3 dogs charging toward us. As we bravely came nearer to the buildings the man began to frantically look around for someone else to talk to us as we was clearly not comfortable talking to people. Finally a woman came into view carrying a large basket of laundry which she was washing in an old machine outside and hanging to dry in the rain. She grunted to us before yelling at her kids to get their grandmother. These 2 chubby little girls came running and went to find her. While this was going on we signaled to the others to come up. Finally we had found pie! Brian bravely asked "what kind of pie do you have?" Answer: "apple!" Okay then. When we had finally all received our pie and homemade rootbeer we crammed into a very small gazebo to eat in relative dryness. We made the hasty decision to find to a different campsite. Brian decided that it was reminiscent of the movie "Deliverance." Maybe it's a good thing that we have no pictures. It is an event better left in our memories.

On to other things...we saw a lot of bald eagles on the trip.
The case of the disappearing campsite: After the bakery fiasco, we were on the lookout for a good camping spot. We came across this island with a nice, although rocky, point. We checked it out and dragged our canoes around from where we had landed to where we wanted to be. Then we set up camp as usual.
Ray built the latrine, as usual, complete with lots of mosquitos.
Brian dried out the tents. Apparently he had a lot of extra energy (probably from the pie) today and put it to good use drying the tents. Kendra and I were laughing so hard while watching him. Somehow she managed to get both pictures and a video. (She has also been writing a blog you can follow here.) You will highly enjoy the video - make sure you have the sound on as the music is perfect.



After supper we all took a dive in the icy cold river while holding soap. It was at the point in the trip that we all smelled so bad that being in an enclosed tent was beginning to get unbearable. The men all dove right under the water and came up feeling very refreshed. None of us women were quite so brave - splashing water was enough.
It was around this time that we looked at the area we had pitched our tents and noticed some streams starting to flow near them that hadn't been there earlier. So, we made the wise decision to move our tents and canoes to higher ground. This proved to be a very good decision. In the morning our original area was under water, as was our fire pit from the night before too. I guess all the rain caused the river to rise just enough to flood that part of the island.