feature story on the Snake River - Fritz Mueller Photography

With their canoe and gearunloaded, trippers watchon shore as the Otterdeparts Duo Lake in soupyweather on its way toanother rendezvous.A striated outcrop greetspaddlers on the upper SnakeRiver (RIGHT). It is a familiarsight to Blaine Walden(BELOW), a wizened, 20-yearveteran of trips on the Peelwatershed’s six major rivers.Weather perpetually threatens in the Yukon, soit was no surprise that our pilot had to make this secondattempt in two days to drop us off at Duo Lake. In the tinycommunity of Mayo, some five hours southeast of DawsonCity, we had loaded gear into the high-powered Otter,lashed canoes onto pontoon struts, taxied onto the turbidand historic Stewart River and put the hammer down. Aviridescent quilt of forest and moss quickly fell away, rivenby the blue of serpentine rivers, their bends bracketed bysandbars and parenthetic oxbows. On higher ground, geometricpatterns testified to the meta-processes that precededthe forests. Dendrites of former drainages fell like dark veinsbetween muscled ridges. Trees grew in fractal scallops on thehalting deposits of glacial retreat. Arrays of circular lakes tolda <strong>story</strong> of leftover ice chunks buried beneath rubble.Now, as calm plateaus give way to bucking humps andsharp ridges, we encounter the same lowering wall of cloudthat turned us back yesterday. Only this time, we squeezethrough a mountain pass just as the curtain drops anddescend in a slow spiral onto Duo Lake. In no time, ourgroup — a Whitehorse-based crew consisting of photographerFritz Mueller and guides Blaine and Mary Walden ofWalden’s Guiding & Outfitting — plus our tonne of gearand pair of canoes are all on shore. The plane is reducedto a faint whine that tails off like the last note of a song,leaving us to the silence of a huge and dramatic landscape.Before we have time for contemplation, the drone of theplane’s engine is replaced by the buzz of mosquitoes.It is said that the Snake gets its name from a Gwich’in term(literally translated as “large hairy worm”) and refers to amyth about a giant serpent that swallows all the river’s boulders.Like the Wind and Bonnet Plume rivers, the Snakebegins its northward flow in the Wernecke Mountains, anorthern extension of the Rockies and part of the MackenzieMountains Ecoregion. Remote and rugged, the river carvescanyons through sub-range after sub-range, bisectingmassive rock slides and braiding out into long gravel flats.Any doubts about who these waters belong to are put torest when we begin portaging to the river. Twice, we trudgeloads one hour over alpine scrub, ford a creek, beat througha maze of willows, struggle across a hummocky wetland,burrow through another strangle of willows and land onthe flood channels of the Snake. Mountains soar on bothsides as we hump over the abundant tracks and dung of46 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC JUNE 2011CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC 47