“The lightning overhead was unbelievable! We had only minutes to decide. Should we keep paddling into the storm, or camp early and waste precious hours?”
It’s July 5, 2022. Ben Lott and his teammate Scott Worthington are racing in a kayak down the Yukon River. Flowing almost 2000 miles through Canada and Alaska, it covers some of the planet’s wildest, most remote real estate. Fed by innumerable tributaries, the Yukon is half the size of the Nile and damn near twice the length of New Zealand. Yet just four road bridges cross it.
Spruce trees tower over both riverbanks as far as the eye can see, but tonight the storm renders them almost invisible. Dark clouds boil above the distant mountains, crowding out the midnight sun. A vicious wind whips the water. Lightning bolts arc and flash — 3000 of them, according to the next day’s news reports. Thunder blankets all other sound. “We thought, nah, let’s get off the river,” Ben remembers. “We’ll waste energy going into that. We got our tent up in record time; two minutes later, it was pouring with rain.” It’s the right call. Just 200 metres ahead, another duo is invisible in the gloom. “They were soaked and hanging onto a tree, scared they would lose their boat. They never fully recovered the energy lost that night.”
Each arctic summer, a hardy few challenge their stamina and skills in the Yukon 1000, currently the globe’s longest unsupported paddle race. Teams of two kayak, canoe, or manoeuvre stand-up paddle boards one thousand miles from Whitehorse in Canada to Alaska’s Dalton Highway Bridge.
Racers take everything with them on those narrow craft, including days’-worth of food, clothes, meds, shelter, and bear spray. Black bears and grizzlies flourish in this wilderness. So do moose. (A panicked moose tearing through your campsite is almost worse than a bear sniffing around, I’m told.) Paddle for 18 hours, then perch your tent on the riverbank or a sandbar for the compulsory six hours’ rest. It’s a grinding race routine that lasts for anything up to ten days: eat, inhale coffee, launch, paddle, repeat. Repeat despite increasingly raw skin, twisted backs, blistered palms, cramped fingers. Endure, survive, repeat. The Yukon 1000’s one helluva race.
Ben and Scott had launched their kayak onto Yukon’s Lake Laberge at Whitehorse, Canada alongside 20 other teams. Six days and 15 hours paddling later, they were the fourth kayaking team to finish, and eighth overall. For Scott, it was a poignant moment in a lifetime of adventure racing. For Ben, it marked the end of four years of hell.
New Zealand’s Best Holiday Reading
SUBSCRIBE NOW
Taking the fall
“Next thing I know, I’m lying on my side, screaming, ‘Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!’” My team tried to help, but I wouldn’t have a bar of it. I didn’t recognise these people. Couldn’t even remember my own name for a while.”
GODZone is a multi-day non-stop mountain bike, kayak and trekking team race, entirely off-grid and off the map. It was March of 2018, and the Wairaurāhiri River track was a relief after days and nights off the beaten paths in southern Fiordland’s mountains. Tree ferns lined precipitous flights of wire-covered steps, filtering green light, dripping water from every perfect frond. But Ben didn’t notice the beauty that day. He may not have even registered the steep stairway because, standing on the top step, he was almost asleep on his feet. Days of route finding through rugged Fiordland bush— his team depending on him as lead navigator — had taken their toll. With his feet now on an actual trail, Ben sent the others ahead. He relaxed, and lost concentration.
“Was I out to it, or did I simply miss my step?” Ben will never know for sure. He stumbled and fell, knocking his head on the stairs and rolling to a stop on the landing below. If Ben had been playing for the Highlanders, he’d have been off for a Head Injury Assessment (HIA) at this point. But he’s not a rugby player. And like most elite athletes, he comes with more than his share of stubbornness. In other words, he hates to quit. “I was complaining of a sore neck and tingling feet, but taking no notice of anyone who tried to stop me. Insisted on keeping going. We got all the way around to the end of the Hump Ridge Track, and then I got on a bike and started riding.”
Eventually, the fall-induced adrenaline rush gave out. Ben collapsed. Not long after, Scott Worthington’s team found him lying in the middle of a firebreak. They decided to abandon their own race chances and help get Ben and his team to the finish line intact. No one guessed what was coming.
According to ACC, approximately 35,000 New Zealanders suffer some form of brain injury every year. Ninety-five per cent of those are mild traumatic brain injuries, or concussions. With proper treatment and rest, many will resolve within as little as two weeks. A serious TBI (traumatic brain injury) is different.
Ben returned to ordinary life after the race, but before long things were falling apart. “I stopped riding, I was angry, grumpy, confused; couldn’t get out of bed. I just shut down,” Ben says. The words “I stopped riding” are especially heavy with meaning. Horses were Ben’s life. A top eventer and show jumper, he’d competed for stables on the professional circuit in Canada and the US, with numerous wins to his name. Back home, he rode on the New Zealand circuit and had a successful side hustle breeding and selling horses. Add to this a passion for adventure racing and a full-time job, and Ben was the last person you’d expect to be staying in bed.
“Eventually, my brain couldn’t hang on anymore. I literally unravelled. Two months after the accident, I lost my speech. I couldn’t string sentences together, my words were disjointed. No one could understand me.” Coordination went next, along with Ben’s balance. Walking was difficult, riding impossible and the headaches constant. Light made everything worse, so he hid behind dark glasses day and night. With everything falling apart, Ben moved back to his parents’ farm outside of Fairlie. The job went next (“Mum resigned for me because I couldn’t”) and, one by one, people began to leave, his partner, colleagues, some friends. Devastated, he sold his beloved horses and wondered if he’d ever ride again. Specialists prescribed all the standard treatments with little success, and being rural made it much worse because “we had to travel for everything.”
Making headway
TBIs are not one-size-fits-all injuries. Each individual reacts to each therapy differently. “For example, one day they told me to forget about having goals. You don’t tell someone like me to have no goals.” Ben gradually gathered a team who worked with his personality, rather than fighting it. Some helped him speak. (“The first word they taught me was ‘fuck!’, because that’s what I was thinking. Then they taught me all the other swear words as well.”) A physio diagnosed and treated neck damage. A psychologist helped him manage TBI-induced anxiety. His family stuck by him.
We take so much of what our bodies do for granted, but re-learning the basics takes guts. The rehab was relentless. “One fun exercise involved sitting on a ball and bouncing while I worked on my laptop. That’s horrific. You’ve got to keep your eyes on the words, and you’re going up and down thinking, I’m going to be sick, I’m going to be sick. But if I do this, I can ride my bike. If I do this, I can ride my bike. And that was it; I could ride the bike at the end of it.” Horse therapy was more fun. Years earlier, Ben had spent months rehabilitating “one of the bravest, safest horses I ever worked with.” At 23, Spider Pig came out of retirement to teach Ben to ride again. “He gave me something to get out of bed for. It was one of the biggest gifts I’ve ever been given.”
The final piece of Ben’s rehabilitation puzzle fell into place thanks to Scott. There’s not much Scott Worthington doesn’t know about adventure racing. He’s used to being in the wilderness alone for long stretches of time and coming out in one piece. Ben’s brain had scrambled and Scott thought being out in the bush might help. He started taking Ben on backcountry missions.
“We started small — just up Wye Creek, a couple up in the Mackenzie Country, then into the mountains.” Eventually they ventured into Fiordland, hiking and kayaking along its remotest rivers and lakes. Each time they went out, Ben returned a little stronger. We don’t often recognise how loud ordinary life can be, but everyday noise and stress can be overwhelming to someone with a TBI. As Scott explains, “on the first few trips, the light would hurt his brain and then his balance would go. But then there were periods where the sunglasses would come off during the day. And you knew that the pure isolation, the quiet and the lack of stimulation were having an effect.”
Not that they were taking it easy down there, and the missions got harder as Ben’s health improved. “It wasn’t comfortable. We’re going down cliffs. It’s freezing cold. We’re battling through such thick bush it took about an hour to go 40 metres. We would be in the bush for three, four, five days, and within those days you could tell the difference. The improvements stuck.”
Scott didn’t think much of the no-goals advice either. So, when Ben said he’d like to have a crack at the Yukon 1000, Scott’s immediate reaction was, “Where do we sign up?” Hundreds, maybe thousands, of kayaking hours later there was still the big unknown. How would Ben’s brain react to the pressure of such a long race? “With everything we’d done, we still hadn’t duplicated a thousand miles in a single mission. So, we raced it accordingly. We were there to finish, not to win.” But as it turned out, Ben’s brain thought racing along the Yukon was terrific.
“Every hour it changes. Like the top 30 miles were beautiful, typical trees, kind of North America as you would picture it to be. Then, as we got further down, it opened up and we got into bigger almost Sierra-type country. And then into these beautiful canyons. Wow! Parts of Alaska are dead flat, which no one tells you about. We did days where we didn’t see a single hill … We fell into a routine straightaway without talking about it. I made coffee every morning and packed the boat. Scott put the tent up and down. We often wouldn’t say a word to each other until it was all done, and we were sitting down to eat.”
Unless you’ve seen it, it can be hard to imagine the sheer scale of the North American landscape. Those lightning storms triggered forest fires, which meant two-and-a-half days of paddling through eye-stinging, nose-burning smoke. Scott reckons, “We averaged 200 kilometres a day, so we were travelling in smoke and wildfires for around 500 kilometres. If you put that in New Zealand terms, it’s like the country’s burning from Wellington to Whangarei.”
Navigating such an immense river is tricky. Maps mean nothing when the river-road is ever-changing through the seasons. Sandbars come and go. Camping places disappear and reappear, while floods, droughts, wind and rain leave their mark. The Yukon River Flats, a four-mile-wide, twisting maze of channels sculpted by fire, water and ice, were especially daunting. According to Ben, “it was the most intimidating navigation I have ever done. At one point, I had a genuine meltdown. It was so hard.”
Perhaps paddling the Yukon is a little like finding your way through a TBI. The specialists had maps, but Ben’s landscape didn’t follow their paths. Looking back, Ben says, “you have to keep the doors open. Closing them is probably the worst thing ever. Don’t be a victim, be stubborn, and hang onto silver linings because one will be hiding there somewhere. Move on, move forward. Don’t forget, but build a new road.”
The long river
You never fully recover from a TBI like Ben’s. Those headaches still come every morning, and fatigue can hit without warning. “I usually have a nap during the day. You can tell when I’ve done too much; maybe my face drops, or I start limping. Weirdly, none of those symptoms came up during the race.”
These days, Ben’s life is almost as busy as it was before his injury. He’s the Wānaka-based CEO of a digital strategy and content firm — a path he’d never have considered in his riding days — and he still spends hours biking, skiing and kayaking in the wilderness. And Ben and Scott have unfinished business on the Yukon. Last year their aim was simply to finish the race. Now, an itch remains. “If we’d really raced the Yukon 1000 it might have made the difference of 15 to 16 hours,” Scott says. “We’d have been second if we’d knocked 15 hours off.” So, with Scott, now aged 65, and Ben, 33, they’re returning to race again.
“We absolutely love the Yukon and Alaska,” says Ben. “Wide open spaces, the people, the paddling and the river — they’re good for the soul. Being there breathes life back into things again.” The long river with few bridges beckons.
Lyn McNamee
