They did a good job on it, though the support and film crews made it a lot easier on them than some of the footage portrays. The large 'whip saw' (manual, 2-person cross-cut) they used to cut trees to build the raft, is no where to be seen as they hiked up the 'Golden Staircase' to the summit of Chilkoot Pass; support crew 'sherpas' no doubt carried that for them; likely by mechanized transport, but it didn't hurt the film overall. They pulled their weight.. Pun intended.. Same-same for that giant, now-very-valuable wood-fired cook stove they had on the raft.)..
It also occurred to me that they likely would've had to disassemble the raft to get past the Alaska Hwy bridge at Marsh Lake, where the pavement out of Whitehorse ended back in 1977, which is the headwaters of the Yukon River.
The place where they collided with the large rocks cropping up out of the River at 5-Fingers Rapids, where the film resumed after the Bennet Lake footage, is up near Carmacks, Yukon Territory; a good bit north of Whitehorse, off the Mayo Rd. that leads up to Keno YT, Mayo YT, Dawson City YT, Pelly Crossing YT, Inuvik NWT, etc.. Gives some idea as to how much of the journey was omitted in the documentary
For the closing celebration of the Hippie School, June of 1979, when the School closed for good (June 29, 1979, a sad memory, really) I and 3 other then-US Forest Circus employees out of SE Alaska's Islands (the 'Panhandle'), and a friend of one of them from Georgia, hiked over the Chilkoot Pass with a 1/4-lb. of Colombian in a smaller bag of dog food, my old Norwegian Elkhound, Missy, and had an amazing time, though at the old ghost town of Bennet we hiked out the railroad tracks to the then-recently-completed Carcross-Skagway Highway, as there was no need to take the water route.
Had freeze-dried Mountain House strawberry milkshakes at the summit, sitting atop the estimated 20 feet of snow, outside the survival shelter that was up there, just to say we did.
We first went to Dawson City for Summer Solstice that trip, where, up on top of the 'Dome' (a tall rounded knoll or small rounded 'bald' mountain, the place where that event was most celebrated) there was live music in numerous small enclaves (though no stages), and some folks from the Eastern Maritimes had brought up a 1-ton panel van with a reefer unit loaded with frozen Eastern Canadian lobster, but their reefer unit crashed, and they were giving away lobsters. I was eating peyote, and had no appetite, but my Norwegian Elkhound, Missy, was treated to a lobster that day.
That documentary is a remnant of a time of dreams and youth, 'hawk.
Last edited:
i'm waiting for the completely re-mastered "Apocalypse Now" that is supposedly coming out, a full hour and a half longer than the released version. this better not be a hoax...
