Two legendary Yukon fishing lodges are long closed. The pike and lake trout don’t seem to mind

There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons,

And I want to go back—and I will.

English-born Canadian poet Robert Service composed that verse in “The Spell of the Yukon,” and it rings just as true today as when the Bard of the Yukon first published it back in 1907—at least for me. I first discovered the territory as a 20-year-old, and its magnetic pull has repeatedly drawn me back, long after my wife and I packed up our family and departed the capital, Whitehorse, in 1989.

I thought I’d finally broken the spell after my last visit in 2019, but when my good Whitehorse friend John Firth dangled the prospect of another fishing trip in front of me two summers ago, I took the bait. Joining us would be my brother-in-law Ted Vandenberg, a retired doctor from London, Ontario, and Al Clapp, my canoe trip partner of 45 years. Our plan was to rendezvous with Gunter Ermert, the gregarious 85-year-old former owner of Yukon Pioneer Wilderness Camp on Stewart Lake.

I first met Gunter in the mid-1980s during my first visit to Stewart, when I was escorting a fishing writer for an American outdoor magazine. A one-time paratrooper, proctologist and Iron Curtain smuggler, Gunter had been a Stewart Lake stalwart for almost five decades. On that last trip in 2019, we celebrated his 80th birthday together, but this time, his declining health would not allow him to make the arduous trip from his native Germany.

On June 21, the longest day of the year, we arrived at John’s home in Whitehorse to get organized for the trip. A former Whitehorse Star reporter, John is also a published author, and he’s soon completing a three-year term as the Yukon’s Story Laureate, tasked with representing the territory’s literary arts. He’s also been a Stewart Lake regular since 2006, so who better to anchor our group?