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Juneau paddlers Dorn and Nelson compete in Yukon River Quest
- Klas Stolpe
- 2 hours ago
- 8 min read
Justin Dorn and team ‘Bucking The Tide’ 7th; Eric Nelson and ‘Skagway Swinging Sixties’ 27th
By Klas Stolpe
Juneau Independent
Juneau residents Justin Dorn and Eric Nelson recently participated in the “Race to the Midnight Sun,” more formally known as the Yukon River Quest — an annual 444-mile paddle race on the Yukon River from Whitehorse, the capital city of the Yukon Territory, to its distant historic neighbor Dawson City.
Dorn’s team finished seventh in the race, which took place June 17-20. Nelson’s team was 27th.
“I experienced a broken seat, lightning storms, rain showers, waves coming over the sides of the boat, whiteout fog, arms so tired I couldn't lift them, mosquitos, blisters, etc.,” Dorn said. “I haven't had a lot of experience with races that involve sleep deprivation so I would probably have to say that one. I did have a moment where I started to nod off a couple of times and told my boat mates. One guy is an EMT/firefighter and decided I needed caffeine, stat. I made a weak excuse about generally not drinking much caffeine, and he said if I nod off and go overboard, we're all going for a swim in the middle of the night — in the middle of nowhere with the shore often a quarter mile away. It was a pretty compelling argument.”
The race is open to solo and tandem canoes and kayaks, solo stand-up paddle boards (SUPs), and bigger C4 (four-person) and voyageur (six to 10 people) canoes. The voyageurs were historically used during the 18th and 19th centuries by French-Canadian fur traders.
Dorn paddled on “Bucking the Tide,” a C4 canoe with Colorado’s Harlan Nimmo, John Seelig and Seth Mason. They placed seventh overall and were the top U.S. team with a time of 57 hours, 31 minutes and 29 seconds.
“Our team worked really well together,” Dorn said. “We thought a lot about personalities in setting up our team. Our fourth member John was presented as ‘a guy who can put his head down and suffer, but also is still a pretty great guy after not sleeping for 24 hours.’ We heard of some other teams having breakdowns over disagreements in the boat, and we were grateful to have been able to deal with all of our struggles as a unit. We told a lot of stories and jokes. We would frequently check in on each other if anyone went quiet for a while or seemed like they were struggling. Individual struggles were treated as a team issue, recognizing that we were all going to have times we felt strong and times we were falling apart.”
Nelson competed with team “Skagway Swinging Sixties” in a voyageur canoe with Skagway paddlers Jeff Brady, Tim Bourcy, Michael Yee, Dennis Bousson and Mike Korsmo. Each member of the team was in their 60s. He could not be reached for comment.
"We didn't have the oldest person," team captain Brady, age 69, said. "But we had the highest average at 66-and-a-half. It was great in terms that we all knew the river really well and it was a pretty fast river this year. So old guys didn't have to paddle as hard. We still had a couple physical challenges towards the end but we got through it all and we did win our open division which was cool. We did that by powering through a storm about five hours from Dawson."
Originally, the race was a centennial celebration called the Dyea to Dawson, a reenactment of the route traversed by prospectors during the 1897-1898 Klondike Gold Rush. It involved hauling a 50-pound pack (with historic gear and grub) up the Chilkoot Trail to Lake Lindeman, where canoes awaited. The wear and tear of racers on the Chilkoot Trail resulted in the event being changed to just the water paddling portion after the 1997 and ’98 races.
“There were a lot of trees floating down the river,” Dorn said. “We thought a lot of these were animals. There was one at night that I was convinced was a dragon. I was coherent enough to know it was not, but I could not see it as anything else. One racer described seeing the light glinting off the water in the morning turn into dolphins jumping out of the water, then into a cage that slowly ascended out of the water with a woman in the cage beckoning him to join her in the water. He said he asked his teammates if they were seeing this, and they said, ‘Yeah, it is beautiful,’ thinking he was talking about the sunrise.”
“I had a timer set to 30 minutes and had it repeat for the whole race. We would go down the line from seat one to four, drinking and fueling as needed. If we needed to pee or bail, we all had a bailer we would use for both. We could fuel or drink any time we wanted, but we tried to keep in on the 30-minute schedule. This was a chance to take a quick break to rest the arms and eat and drink. I fueled with a lot of gels, sports drink, peanut butter and honey sandwiches and baked sweet potatoes. Our firefighter/EMT on our team seems to have an iron stomach and was over the moon with his meat and cheese sandwiches.”
The gear list has changed for the modern canoe adventure: firestarter, lighter/matches, emergency bivvy, whistle on a flotation device, tent for the team, sleeping bags, change of clothes and rain gear, among other items in the largely unsupported race.
“Usually in a four-person boat you have the best river navigator in the stern, or four seat,” Dorn said when asked to describe the crew assignments. “The bow, or one seat, sets the tempo. The two and three seats are supposed to be where you put your power paddlers, or as one team put it, the ‘shut up and paddle’ seats."
"I was seat two. We had the issue where all three of the other guys in the boat would be great navigators and were all phenomenal paddlers. Harlan Nimmo is an EMT/firefighter from Colorado. He has done a few long-distance canoe races and grew up paddling canoes and doing various endurance races. John Mark Seelig and Seth Mason both competed on the U.S. national whitewater rafting team and made an attempt on the downriver record on the Grand Canyon that was stopped only by a punctured tube on their boat. That attempt required overnight paddling through serious rapids. They both had dreams of doing the Yukon River Quest for years."
"I started looking at this race years ago with my godbrother Seth. I call him my godbrother because he grew up in Juneau and was like a brother to me. His dad (my godfather, also in the race this year with a team from Colorado) was the reason my dad came up to Juneau. They grew up across the street from each other and spent their youth climbing mountains in Washington and Oregon. When my godfather got a student teaching position in Juneau, my dad bought a round-trip ticket to Juneau and never got on the plane to go home.”
The race calls for a mandatory 10-hour layover in Carmacks, where they are allowed support. There are checkpoints along the route where racers must call out their entry numbers to officials, and time limits to hit these checkpoints.
“My broken seat was really unfortunate,” Dorn said. “It broke in a way that it was still attached, but if I leaned back at all the seat started to tilt backwards. I spent the first half of the race perched on the front of the seat. The broken seat meant it tilted downward, so it was producing a lot of shear force on my sit bones. I also had the issue of sliding my seat side to side. The middle seats are on sliders, but my front slider broke. This made transitioning side to side extra difficult and often dangerous for the stability of the boat as it would either slide smoothly, or get caught on the broken part."
"By the time we reached the halfway point, my left sit bone was killing me. I got about four hours of sleep during our 10-hour layover, but when I woke up I could not sit down at all, and had a hard time even lifting my left leg. There was a moment where I was pretty concerned I would have to drop out. Luckily, my PT brain kicked in, and I took a large pad and cut out a giant hole for my left sit bone so that it was suspended in the air. It felt great the whole second half. We had a lightning storm chase up for an hour or so on a particularly wide section of river. We had about 30 minutes of whiteout fog on the last morning, but luckily it resolved before we had any big concerns. We stopped for a pee break and got mauled by mosquitoes. They stayed with us for the next two, three miles down the river.”
Aside from those hardships, the most difficult segment is the Five Finger Rapids, the only whitewater stretch that teams paddle through. They are named for the five channels, or fingers, that pass through four basalt columns and teams must aim for the right finger to ensure safe passage through the rapids.
"We were in a good spot of the river when we hit a big storm," Brady noted of their most dangerous encounter. "We could change into our rain gear really quick and we were buffered by this rock wall. Other teams were kind of stuck out in the middle and some had to pull over it was so windy and had thunder and lightning. We were protected and could keep going. That was just luck of the draw really. It was a typical outing with a little bit of everything. It started in the rain but luckily the lake was good. We had a following sea but not too heavy so that pushed our voyageur down the lake in, like six hours. And the river was great from then on. The river was high at Teslin which was good. There was an erie fog at Fort Selkirk, but we, being old and wise, kind of took a shortcut and missed all that. The old guys know their shortcuts."
The race had been cancelled at Carmacks two years in a row, 2024-25, due to forrest fires.
“I love taking on new challenges that require diving deep in a subject I know next to nothing about, especially something involving exercise and movement,” Dorn said. “I also really enjoy competing as a team. This race checked all of those boxes…I had been training for this for about a year. It was a big departure from the types of training I am used to. We did the race two years ago when it was cancelled due to wildfires. During that race I noticed that my cardiovascular system never really felt stressed, probably from all the endurance training I have done. The limiters for me were my shoulder strength to lift the paddle 150,000 (the calculated number of paddle strokes necessary to complete the race), and back strength. I made both of those a focus in my training, doing a lot of bent-over, single-arm rows, low-back strengthening and shoulder raises. I also borrowed a rowing machine my dad had sitting in his garage and duct taped a paddle to it. I logged most of my winter hours on that, minus one trip in Fritz Cove around Christmas that got pretty dicey.”
Dorn, a physical therapist, competes in activities including the Auke Man and other triathlons.
“I am not sure what I am known for,” he said. “A number of people might answer that I am known for soccer, others for triathlon. I am mostly famous in my family for making good popcorn. I am not sure any helped me with this race except being willing to be humble and ready to put in some work.”
• Contact Klas Stolpe at sports@juneauindependent.com
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