Yukon River
— — the long brown muscle of the north.
Not only on a wall.
“Three thousand kilometres of water moving one direction. The Yukon rises off the Llewellyn Glacier in northern British Columbia, gathers itself at Whitehorse, slides past Dawson where the gold rush ran aground, and crosses Alaska to the Bering Sea. In summer the canoes go. In winter the river holds still under a metre of ice and the dogsleds use it as a road. The colour is silt and tannin and old light. Nobody on the bank says much about it.
Yukon River, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Yukon River runs about 3,190 kilometres from headwaters in the Coast Mountains of northern British Columbia to its mouth on the Bering Sea, draining a basin of roughly 832,700 square kilometres across Yukon territory and Alaska. The accepted source is the Llewellyn Glacier feeding Atlin Lake. The river passes Whitehorse, threads Lake Laberge of Robert Service verse, and turns north past Dawson City before swinging west into Alaska. It is the third-longest river in North America.
The colour is silt. Glacial flour from the Saint Elias range and the Llewellyn Glacier travels the length of the river, mixed with tannin from boreal muskeg, so the surface reads brown in summer and pewter on grey days. Discharge at the mouth averages around 6,400 cubic metres per second, ranking it among the larger North American rivers by flow. Freeze-up at Dawson typically arrives in late October; break-up, watched by the Yukon River Quest racers, comes in May.
Outside Whitehorse and Dawson the bank is mostly spruce and willow and nobody. The river was the highway of the 1896-99 Klondike Gold Rush, when an estimated 100,000 stampeders attempted the route and around 30,000 made it through. The Han, Northern Tutchone, and Gwich'in were on it long before. Today the Yukon River Quest paddles 715 kilometres from Whitehorse to Dawson, billed as the longest annual canoe race in the world, and most of those hours pass with only the sound of the paddle.