Yukon is great as always and I've been putting in some big training in this great land. I do a lot of training on my own which I feel is very
beneficial. I just get in “the zone” and go. I’m not blabbing to teammates
about what I’m doing later tonight or thinking about how much I don’t like
classic roller skiing, at least I try not to. I think Colin and myself are
making some huge gains technique wise. Eric Flora helped us out a ton on the
Eagle glacier and we picked up a few things from following around the
APU guys and watching how they ski. Coach Pav (Pavlina Sudrich) has also been
doing video work with us, which has been awesome. Along with Graham Nishikawa
making our training plan and giving us all sorts of advice, I’d say our
coaching quality has been top notch. Having so much input from different
perspectives is great. I’ve worked with a lot of coaches over the years and
everyone has a different way of getting stuff across. I’m lucky enough to pick
and choose from many different sources rather than picking the same berry patch
year after year.
The Yukon Elite Squad has also been doing some coaching of their
own. The Yukon Ski Team has some very promising up and comers and a couple
weeks ago we led a training camp in beautiful Haines, Alaska to pass on some
of what we’ve learned to the new generation of skiers. Needless to say, The
Yukon is going to clean up at nationals again next year.
In Haines we stayed with legendary outfitter Paul Dueling. His grandson Marcus is on the Yukon Ski team.
Colin marvelling at the trophy room
World's record Mountain Caribou
Annah Hanthorn of the Yukon Ski Team puts the Eilte Squad to shame in the gym. All other junior girls should be scared.
Not totally training related but still a brutal effort
none-the-less was mushroom picking with my good buddy David Gonda. In an effort
to strike it rich in the Yukon’s morel mushroom rush this year I spent a
weekend searching for the prized mushrooms that sell for 12$ a pound. These Mushrooms grow after a forest fire
so I’d scoped out a last years burn on google earth and figured we could haul
some shrooms out of there. We spent the first day scrambling up and down clay
cliffs and bushwhacking through a mosquito-bush-swamp-thicket from hell… And
back with mushrooms. We saw a few other footprints in there which made me think
there must be a trail because nobody would or could go through what we did the
first day to haul out mushrooms. Poking around the next day we found the trail
in about 5 minutes of looking. We had paralleled the trail all the way to the
burn! We gave ourselves a clonk on our noggin and carried on to the mushroom
patch in half the time. We had pack rafts with us and planned to make this day
even easier by rafting back to our car. We had a lot of rain the week before
and the river was raging. We pounded through some big rapids with our precious
mushrooms and made it back to the car without too much problem. I just had to
run another few kilometers from the takeout to the car. I must have picked
close to 120lbs of mushrooms, worth nearly 1500$. The real heartbreaker of this
story is that they all went moldy in one day. >Zero
dollars of mush.
morels like to grow under deadfall
Dave at the Burn
It's worse than it looks
A couple days ago we biked into Cantlie Lake with our pack
rafts to try and catch some Arctic Char. We were told it’s a two and a half
hour ride in so we were pleasantly surprised when we arrived at the lake in
only an hour. We must be in shape or something! It didn’t take long to find the
fish and before long we had our limit of 5 char. They were on the barbeque
about 3 hours after coming out of the lake.
First time fishing for arctic char!
On another note, Colin and I have decided to not waist our time salmon fishing when you can pull trout like this out of the lakes. Colin caught this lunker while fishing for grayling with a spinner on 6lb test.
I've always got a couple side projects on the go to keep me busy.
My latest is to restore this beautiful old freighter canoe. It will be beautiful when I'm done with it. I need to strip off all of the old canvas and fiberglass, take out and replace any rotten wood, scrape all the old paint and varnish off, sand it, put wood presevative and revarnish it, recanvass it, paint it, and carve a new yoke.
the old man making sure i don't ruin his boat
the longest part was the "scraping off the old varnish" step which I've finally completed.
It will all be worth it when I Im cruising down a lake with a boat full of moose meat this fall.
looks good with the first coat of varnish
We went for a nice day hike up up Watson ridge the other day. Another peak to check off the list.
going for a dip in Watson River falls after our hike
Hunting season is now upon us so I held a smorgasbord last week to finish off the last of my meat. I spent the whole day in the kitchen making meat dishes and pies. the whole crew got together and drank home brew and ate wild meat. It was awesome.
I'll be heading into the mountains next week for an epic solo bow hunt looking for this guy
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