The pilot's voice crackled over the intercom: “Please don't be alarmed by the smoke you smell in the cabin.” The plane was just beginning its descent into Whitehorse when I noticed the distinct odour. The good news was that the smoke was outside the plane, caused by several forest fires burning throughout northern B.C. and the Yukon from an unseasonably hot summer. The bad news was this is exactly where I had come to go mountain biking. Looking out the window, I saw only thick grey fog. I hadn't even arrived, yet I knew this trip was going to be an adventure.
The Yukon has been ranked as a top new destination for mountain biking. Recent reports in mountain-bike magazines hail Canada's North as the next Moab. About 800 kilometres of steep downhill chutes, fast-flowing single-track and epic cross-country trails whip and wend through the Whitehorse wilderness, with seldom another rider in sight. Keen to check it out, I booked a five-day trip in mid-August with Boréale Mountain Biking, a Whitehorse-based outfitter specializing in guided rides from yurt lodgings set in the pine forest overlooking town.
The next morning, I met Sylvain Turcotte, Boréale's owner and lead guide, a fit and friendly 31-year-old Quebec transplant who, along with his partner, Marsha Cameron, has been operating Boréale since 2008. After unpacking and assembling my bike, which I brought on the Air North flight from Vancouver, I was soon pedalling with the group through a pine forest bathed in yellow light. The sun was a golden orb in a sepia sky. The forest fires were distant, but the smoke was not. I rode trails called Hula Girl, Magnusson and Boogaloo: broad sweeping loops, interconnected with short ups and long fast downs with switchbacks and berms. The ride finished about three hours later at Schwatka Lake, a tranquil body of water that was formerly a fierce section of the Yukon River. The rapids here were said to resemble the manes of charging white horses, and gave the city its name during the Klondike gold rush of 1898. A dam built in 1958 flattened the white water and created the Schwatka Lake reservoir. Many of the prospector's wagon trails are now mountain-bike tracks.
That night at the camp, the group discussed whether to continue riding. A story in the local newspaper warned against physical activity with the smoke surrounding town. By morning, my worries were replaced with elation, as I walked out of my yurt into a brisk breeze and cloudless sky – winds had come in overnight and blown the smoke away.
Turcotte was beaming, “I think we will go to Carcross today.”
A few hours later, I was high on Montana Mountain, 75 kilometres south of Whitehorse. I was bouncing in the cab of a four-wheel-drive truck up a steep road of football-sized rocks, passing Arctic lupine flowers and dwarf willows. I stepped outside into a treeless, glacier-scrubbed landscape. Bikes were unloaded, backpacks sorted, and the group was soon pushing farther up a road too rough to drive. It snaked up and down for miles; I pedalled past fields of fireweed and splashed through gin-clear streams. Far below, Tagish Lake glistened in the midday sun. Above, a lone caribou stood on a snowy slope, a dark motionless figure, cooling itself from the boreal summer. Startled, it began charging downhill, hoofing up snow, until reaching the rocky slope below and bounding out of site.
The Mountain Hero Trail, one of the Yukon's signature rides, is named for a former silver mine and begins on a barren knoll just shy of the 2,205-metre summit.
“All right, let's go riding,” Turcotte said.
Seats were lowered and the group descended over loose rocks and spongy lichen. The trail was difficult to discern, marked only by knee-high rock cairns. I rolled past huge wooden trestles, remnants of the tramline built in 1905 to haul silver ore down the mountain to Tagish Lake. Silver was discovered in Carcross after the Klondike gold rush, but the mine went bankrupt before delivering a single load. Picking up speed, I dropped through the mountain's climactic zones; from the sparse summit, I was soon pedalling past waist-high shrubs and finally into a forest of alpine fir and black spruce. The ride was fast and furious and the smell of burning disc brakes filled the air on trails built for packhorses more than a century ago. “Nice of them to build this for us,” Turcotte yelled careening through one of the corners.
