“I’m in Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory,” Mingo told me this afternoon when he called. “I finally made it out of British Columbia. Boy are these providences big!” Other than being long, the drive is going well. “There’s not much out here but it’s beautiful territory.” Mingo was glad to be back in a major town, if only for a half hour. “Whitehorse is a decent sized town. I have cell reception and they even have a Walmart!”

Mingo has been getting a lot of stories about the Yukon River this year. “All the truckers are telling me the river is a lot higher than normal. I’m ready to see the water to see just how high. I don’t want to be out there if it’s moving too fast but I can only postpone the trip on this end a few days. I don’t want to get into a dicey position on the Bering Sea.” The anticipation in his voice is getting stronger as he gets closer to the Alaskan border. He’s ready to see the river and get out there into it.

According to Google maps, he’s about five hours away from the Alaskan border. Once he crosses over, he’s only about five hours from Fairbanks. “I’ll probably camp again tonight then get a hotel when I get to Fairbanks to recharge everything. Hopefully the campground tonight won’t be underwater,” he chuckled. The tent area of the campground he stopped at last night was literally under a foot of water so he ended up pitching his tent in the RV section which was on higher ground. “I still got a decent night’s rest through.”

“It’s still raining,” was one of the first things Mingo told me this morning as he chomped down on one of his “last real breakfasts” before he leaves. “Then I’ll be eating MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat) for 60 days. At least they’re better than C-Rats,” he joked between bites (or whatever he was having; I forgot to ask).

Mingo made it to Boise, ID yesterday in the early evening, checked into his hotel, and began pouring over the maps again until he crashed. “I think I’m going to spend two extra days in Yukon Charley. I want to do some 20-mile radius hikes out from the river. It’s supposed to be gorgeous country. Then I’m going to push to Galena, 100-mile days on the water. It doesn’t look like there is much between Yukon Charley and Galena but I could get out there and be surprised.” Mingo then went on to tell me that he plans on taking a full rest day in Galena to see the town, pick up and organize his resupply packages, and just generally relax before heading out into Yukon River again. His voice has a mixture of unbridled excitement and some anxiousness: “I’m still unsure of what I’m going to find when I get to the Bering Sea. It could be a calm sea or it could be nasty.”

As we finish up the call (the first of many short ones today), he says that he’s going to get as close to the Canada border as possible tonight. Later in the day, he decides he’s going to stop in Okanogan for the night. I hop online and find him a hotel in Omak (a few miles north of Okanogan).

My phone rings again as he gets just outside of Ellensburg, WA to check on the hotel reservations. “It stopped raining for awhile, but now it’s starting to cloud up again,” he tells me. I relay the hotel info to him and we chat for a few more minutes about mundane things. I hang up with him thankful that I’ve gotten to talk to him so many times today - if only for a few minutes. In a few short days, I will get just a few precious minutes to find out what he’s doing, what gorgeous territory he’s seen, and how balmy the Yukon water is that day.