WriteBiz Communications - Travel Writing

With several years experience as a travel writer, Katherine Gibson has hiked the Great Wall of China, cycled the back roads of Montana and roamed the vineyards of the French countryside. Her travel articles have appeared in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and in-flight magazines in Canada, Britain and South Africa. Whether it’s a spa resort, a restaurant or hotel review, or a destination adventure, Katherine brings the experience to the reader with enthusiasm and vigour. A sample of Katherine's travel writing appears below. To read more of Katherine's stories visit: www.travel-wise.com/writers/gibson/main.html.


Chasing History on the Great Yukon River Journey from Whitehorse to Dawson City retraces gold rush route By Katherine Gibson Special to The Vancouver Sun (an excerpt of a 1400 word article) Saturday, July 19, 2008 “The Yukon is a cleansing experience at forty below,” quips Ted Harrison, one of Canada’s most celebrated artists. He ought to know. For more than 25 years he lived there, painting the people, the old-time buildings, the mercurial landscape and its dancing skies. I am in Whitehorse to experience the Yukon for a book I am writing about him. Fortunately, it is summer. While the night temperatures are bracing, I am spared Harrison’s “cleansing experience.” The sun is breaking the horizon when I join six others at the jetty in Whitehorse to begin a five-day journey down the Yukon River to Dawson City. Our route will retrace that used by swarms of fortune-seekers in the 1898 Klondike gold rush. This trip also recalls a similar journey Harrison took in 1977, 10 years after he immigrated to Canada from England. Where better to understand him than among the emerald lakes, wild night skies and untamed landscape that inspires his paintings. Rather than mimic the early adventurers who challenged the river in canoes or on makeshift rafts, we travel in first-class comfort aboard the Shakat, a European-style, glass-topped riverboat. Thanks to a partnership between four First Nations, whose lands we will pass through, and private businesses that created The Great River Journey, each day will take us deeper into Yukon wilderness and further back in time. “There are two moose for every person in the Yukon,” says our guide Chris as we chug toward Lake Laberge, an hour or so away. “Calcification from shellfish turns the river a deep green colour. And those holes in the cliffs?” he adds, “are nesting sites for swallows. Been there forever.” The chalky cliffs cast champagne shadows on the water as we glide through a still life painting of river, forest and a cloudless sky. No moose on these shores. But we see bald eagles and ravens scavenging for breakfast. Except for a small party of canoeists, we are alone in a hushed setting, floating by unseen wildlife in the forests that flank the shore. As we enter Lake Laberge, I recall the lines from Robert W. Service’s poem The Cremation of Sam McGee: “The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,/ But the queerest they ever did see/ Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge/ I cremated Sam McGee.” Service penned his famous poem (in which he uses a different spelling of the lake) in 1907 in Dawson where he worked at the Bank of Commerce. Eighty years later, Ted Harrison added his bright, playful pictures to Service’s verses, a brilliant combination that rekindled a romantic interest in the Yukon. © The Vancouver Sun 2008 To read the complete article, CLICK here.