Yukon River

A contemporaneous and remarkable shrinkage of a vast stretch of territory may be instanced in the Northland.

From its rise at Lake Lindeman, the Yukon runs twenty-five hundred miles to Bering Sea, traversing an almost unknown region, the remote recesses of which had never felt the moccasin foot of the pathfinder.

At occasional intervals, men wallowed into its dismal fastnesses or emerged gaunt and famine-worn.

But in the fall of eighteen ninety-six, a great gold strike was made, greater than any since the days of California and Australia.

The interior of Alaska and the contiguous Canadian territory was a vast wilderness.

Its hundreds of thousands of square miles were as dark and chartless as darkest Africa.

In eighteen forty-seven, when the first Hudson Bay Company agents crossed over the Rockies from the Mackenzie to poach on the preserves of the Russian bear, they thought that the Yukon flowed north and emptied into the Arctic Ocean.

Hundreds of miles below, however, were the outposts of the Russian traders.

At the Seward Skills Center, 17-year-old Megan Emrick was finishing a routine chore in the dormitory laundry room.

She was a student from the small town of Delta Junction, a girl who grew up hunting and fishing on the Yukon River.

The vocational school she was attending in Seward was a step toward a more independent future.

But at some point that evening, Megan walked out of that laundry room and was never seen again.

It is a soft, mellow whistle ending in a cluck-cluck.

Mr. Nelson states that the surf scoter appears in the vicinity of St. Michael's, Alaska, about the middle of May, and nests commonly in the marshes of the delta of the Yukon River.

It also nests in large numbers on the Atlantic coast from Labrador northward.

Dr. Kuis, speaking of these birds as he observed them in Labrador, says, They are tough birds and remarkably tenacious of life, and require a heavy charge to kill them.

It became its own territory in 1898, split off from the Northwest Territories during the Klondike Gold Rush.

Whitehorse, its capital, sits on the Yukon River, on the traditional territory of the Kwanlin Dun First Nation, surrounded by mountains and boreal forest.

Now, Yukon's crime rate is one of the highest in the country.

In 2024, the territory recorded more than 11,000 criminal incidents, a rate of over 21,800 per 100,000 people, well above the national average and lower only than Nunavut and the Northwest Territories.

Brody, Yukon.

The correct answer is the Yukon River.

That was easy.

I literally had Yukon.

[laughs]

Marge.

The Yukon River is just shy of 2,000 miles long, making it about 300 miles shorter than the Mississippi and 100 miles longer than the Rio Grande.

It is home to the world's longest salmon migration.

Okay.

The Yukon River runs through which U.S. state? The Yukon River, um, Wyoming? Here's your money question.

Which Italian chicken dish, the name means Hunter's Chicken?

Um...

Adam West portrayed which superhero on television?

Batman.

The Yukon River flows through which state?

The Yukon River? Alaska?

sure do.

We're so thrilled you're here, Landon, so... we got landon maybaum i'm saying it in the german way probably my bomb would be german but uh so landon is a wild firefighter and uh my boys know him because they fight fire and they said you got to talk to this guy landon he's full of stories full of adventures and uh once uh once we met and chatted there we were at a fishing event this summer and i was like oh man we got to get this guy on so i know you were done your term here and you raced up from canmore to come visit us today so i'm stoked very very honored you're here so

no i appreciate you having me on this is awesome so no that's great i can't

yeah i can't wait to dive into it so a bit of background about landon he is a base jumper Skydiver, avid scuba diver who also dives for sea urchins, sea cucumbers in the so-called off-season here.

yeah

oh this has been great man i love i love the stories i love too that like i think a lot of people listening to this too is like maybe you grew up in the city and you didn't like you didn't start really getting action to like what 22 sort of thing yeah and now you're just like fully embracing it and like yeah i'm gonna go uh float down the yukon for a few days and Yeah, it's inspirational.

You are definitely living on the edge, Landon.

It's exciting.

Indigenous life is what's going on there.

So at any rate, this whole business of gold, they did bring people in transiently and they would come in uh by riverboat up the yukon river and the yukon riverboats would take them all the way up into what became fairbanks and fairbanks was formed uh the the yukon river the the china river would pour into the tanana which is and then the tanana into the yukon now the tanana is a significant river.

I mean, it's a big river.

The Nenana, I think, empties into the Tanana.