Seeing other boaters on the Yukon River is an odd experience. First they appear as a mirage on the horizon; a flash of color, or some barely discernible movement a mile away. Only after a long and tantalizing period do they get close enough for conversation, and sometimes they vanish forever, leaving you to wonder if you ever saw anything at all. When the mirage I spotted clearly took shape into a packraft, I rowed against the current to see who they were, and what the hell they were doing out here in their tiny boat.

Beneath a floppy hat came a French accent. His name was Alex. He was living in Lyon, France (home of Kayak Session), and he was on his way to Alaska. The river was just a novel way to get there.

Later, Alex introduced me to his friend Pierre, another Frenchman who had sailed across the Atlantic and driven across North America to reach the Yukon. I would spend the next 9 days with my French friends, drifting with the pace of the current, finding the rhythm of river life.

I was somewhat embarrassed to introduce my home country through the humble outpost of Eagle, Alaska. Welcoming us to the USA was a comically convoluted set of instructions from U.S. customs. It only took two hours of phone calls (with the assistance of the National Park Service) before reaching an agent who could validate our entry into the country.

Despite profligate Trump banners, my faith in Eagle was restored momentarily when I discovered a monument to the great Roald Amundsen, who sent news of his successful Northwest Passage traverse to the world in 1905, from the telegraph line right here in Eagle. When I noticed that the monument had misspelled Amundsen’s first name, it felt like time to get back on the river, and leave Eagle only as a humorous memory.

Over 180 wildfires burned across Alaska for a period in late June. On the smokiest days, the summer sun was dimmed by a pungent fire-fog.

A smokeless calm evening led us to choose a bug-free island for camp. An hour later a storm approached. My tent was flattened, never to fully recover. We stood around a resolute campfire in a dry pattering rain until 11 pm, when the storm finally moved on, allowing a civilized dinner in the afterglow.

The Yukon Flats are a 200-plus mile stretch of meandering, island-filled river woven into a tangle of twisted channels. In many ways, I viewed this section as the crux of the trip; a flat, buggy, windy, vacant place that had me a little tense. It turned out to be all of that, but also perhaps my favorite part of the entire Yukon.

Early in the Flats, we arrived at Fort Yukon. Alex would fly out from here. Pierre and I would split too, he in his canoe and me with my motor skiff. I intended to quickly top-off my gas and travel onward from Fort Yukon. It didn’t exactly work out like that.