Racing with the Ghosts on the Yukon River Quest
By Tim Hodgson, Whitehorse, Yukon Territory

When you start the Yukon River Quest in downtown Whitehorse you tend to think physical. You wonder when your shoulder muscles will fail. You are attempting a 740-kilometer canoe race through sub arctic terrain to Dawson. You discover the biggest challenges are in your own mind. This is the longest canoe and kayak race in the world, the record is just over 52 hours (including rest stops) and 60 hours is a good time. You don't sleep – you just paddle.

Competitors quickly get strung out and far apart along the mighty waterway. Soon except for the distant shout from a boat behind or in front the only sound is rushing water and wind through stunted pines. The paddler is alone with his thoughts. The river braids and winds like pig tails. Sometimes it rushes with the sound of water through a sluice box and is it is not hard to imagine the river traffic of another time. After all, the Yukon River was a highway for war parties, explorers, gamblers, gold grubbers, steamboats, dug outs and now Kevlar canoes and sea kayaks.

Competitors face challenges – you can dodge swimming moose, avoid grumpy grizzly bears and the danger of deadly cold water. What I wasn't prepared for was the unexplained: the visions coming from an exhausted mind and body. It is a threat of poor decision making and hallucinations.

It comes gradually...brought on by lack of sleep, cold evenings and hot days 24 hours of daylight and paddling long hours at 50 to 60 strokes a minute. In the later stages of the race several competitors have been rescued doing very strange things like paddling the wrong way upstream, and mistaking a trapper's cabin with no roof and a decrepit outhouse for the town of Dawson.

The tactics, head games and other assorted misadventures make fascinating stories. Strange things have been seen in the land of the midnight sun, especially after paddling non stop for 30 hours. I was sure I saw two old guys in a dug out canoe drifting through the early morning mist, and then it became the canoe of the leaders.

I excitedly pointed it to my partner.

"It's the lead canoe we are gaining!"

He looked hard into the mist. "It's a log."

My tired eyes and brain had turned tree limbs to paddlers and branches to paddles. My brother-in-law and teammate Paul Pageau later pointed out a canvas wall tent with several people dressed in bright coloured clothing wearing traditional masks. There was nothing on the sandbar but sand.

Last year the second place team reported seeing two first nations dancers just a few kilometers downstream from Hootalinqua. They described the pair right down to the ceremonial robes-blankets they were wearing. Nobody else saw them. The dim light of the darkest hour of the midnight sun and the physical exertion can create all sorts of images for a tired mind.

A Scottish team, suitably named Whiskey Galore, saw "hordes of little people". Now, their vision of tiny folks may be explained by both fatigue and the fact that their travel diet seemed to be mostly Scotch whisky and potato chips as they paddled through the wilderness. But they were genuinely spooked by their visions of ghosts and little people in far, far north.

Your tired mind can cause a competitor to dramatically misinterpret another racer’s actions. We had paused just upstream from Five Finger Rapids – a class 2-3 rapid that can be intimidating to sleep-deprived paddlers. We had learned early on in the race that if you want to be competitive, you don't leave the canoe at all. So we hunched over for a real call of the wild – peeing into our designated bottles.

One of our rivals caught us at this point but chose to remain a respectful distance behind us. Usually these two pounced on any chance to pass us or to paddle with us.

But not this time.

They explained after the rapids, "Wow, you guys were pretty worried about those rapids. We saw you praying and we didn't want to disturb you."

Later this same crew would catch us coming into Dawson. This is where our decision-making became very scattered. We decided to take the fast appearing channel on river left. It wasn't fast. It cost us the race. We took the wrong channel and our rivals didn't. After 740 kilometers they beat us by two canoe lengths. We knew the back end of their canoe wasn't a hallucination.

Another race begins at the end of June, and once again we will be back with the ghosts of the Yukon River, looking for the fast channels.