Can't really capture a photo, but more than once during the Yukon River races, when paddling through "nighttime hours" (it never really gets too dark to see), there are strange sights to see, partially due to human psychology, partly due to Hallucinogens due to being awake, dehydrated, and paddling for 24+ hours straight.
There are two types of river bank images commonly seen by the overtired paddler. On eroded clifside talus slopes, I (and others) often will see or imagine figures of people, with shapes commonly seen as grizzled heads of woodsmen, or voyageurs of old, including bearded rough faced men with knit toque caps. There is one rock and talus formation that every time I have been by, it is the exact full head formation representing a buffalo, with horns lowered toward us.
In other areas with steep basalt rock vertical cliffs, anywhere that there are two nearby side by side dark spots in the rock with one or more spots below, then a face with eyes, nose, and mouth appears to be staring back at you. Particularly just downriver and on the eastern shore below Fort Selkirk, there is a several mile long section of such a prominent cliff with numerous cartoonish like characters watching you paddle by. One time I saw a full profile image of Albert Einstein, compete with wearing a rumpled suit and wing tip shoes. I call that rocky segment “Faces of the Yukon”. I dream that I would someday like to paddle by with camera and capture those that are capturable when I am well rested while drifting by at other than race speed. In another wishful case, where subsurface colliding river currents often cause upward boils of water breaking the surface, one of my paddling partners swears she saw “plates of breakfast food appear to becoming up at her.
I know that my race team and I are not the only Yukon paddlers to experience these strange mind effects. I discovered a local Dawson artist, (Nathalie Parenteau) who has captured her same experiences on canvas
View attachment 141242View attachment 141243.
Robert Service may have also experienced the "spell of the Yukon" in his own way:
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
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.
From "The Creamation of Sam McGee"
BY
ROBERT W. SERVICE