In July 2010, we planned to do a four-day, three-night backpack trip in Tombstone Territorial Park, Yukon. We ended up adding an additional day. John was 57 and I was 56.
We headed up the Grizzly Creek Trail. We got a late start that day but weren’t concerned about losing daylight. It was the middle of summer and in the far north. We had not seen it get completely dark.
I got a rare photograph of the photographer.
Yukon’s tagline “Larger than Life” is no overstatement …
The sky became unsettled as we approached Grizzly Lake, our destination for the day.
It was chilly and windy, but fortunately, it never rained.
Tombstone had designated camping areas and provided a cook shelter and bear box a good distance away to avoid attracting bears to tents.
The next morning, we were joined in the cook tent by four twenty-something backpackers. We talked to them for a while. As we prepared to leave, one of them told us that we were an inspiration to still be backpacking at our age. We were taken aback, as we thought of ourselves as young.
There had been some drizzle that morning, but it cleared up by the time we got going, although it did remain windy. Our route would take us over Glissade Pass. The way up from Grizzly Lake was steep and grassy.
We had been warned by a ranger that when we first arrived at Glissade Pass and looked down, it might not look possible to descend, but he reassured us it was quite doable.
It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Plunge stepping worked, much like when descending a deep snow slope.
Still, it was a relief to finally reach the valley below.
We intended to camp that night at Talus Lake and see Tombstone Mountain. But the route and terrain proved to be more challenging and slower than we had expected.
We decided to stop and camp at Divide Lake.
That evening, we did some hiking and got views of Tombstone Mountain and the surrounding mountains.
We were disappointed to not have gotten as far as Talus Lake. We decided we could stretch our food and stay out an additional night in hopes we could do a day hike to Talus Lake the following day.
Unfortunately, we woke up the next morning to very windy rain. We had the choice of spending the next 24 hours huddled in our small tent or hiking to Talus Lake as planned in hopes that the weather would break. We chose to hike and hope.
We didn’t have a map, but the route was quite clear for long stretches. However, later in the day, it would frequently vanish into thick brush and marsh. This day became our standard of comparison for misery. Once we got to the lake, we stopped briefly and sought shelter in the cook tent in order to eat, but we were both cold and needed to keep moving.
I had been able to stay relatively dry, but John became quite wet. Once back at camp, we ate a quick supper. John was shivering, and we thought he could be in danger of becoming hypothermic. We retreated into our tent and zipped our sleeping bags together. I knew I had to help warm him up. We had read that in this situation, skin-to-skin contact was most effective. So, we both stripped. It was like cuddling with an icicle, but it did work, eventually.
The next day, the weather had settled down and was dry and less windy.
We considered hiking back up to Talus Lake before heading out to see what we had missed. But we decided we just didn’t have the time. As I had suspected, it was time-consuming to get back over Glissade Pass. Hiking up the loose scree involved a lot of two steps forward, one step back.
Once we got over the pass, I was happy to see Grizzly Lake, where we would camp for the night.
The weather became quite lovely that evening, and we thoroughly enjoyed our last night out.
Three months earlier, we had started living and traveling full-time in a motor home. We left the Seattle area and headed for Alaska. This was the first backpack trip of this new adventure, so it occupies a special place in our memories.
All photos from this trip are on Flickr.
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