FOR MONTHS, I’ve wanted it to be hot enough to cannonball into a Yukon lake. Now, it’s mid-July and I’m finally standing at the edge of Long Lake wearing a shorty wetsuit with “Maui Girl” splashed across the chest, staring at a decidedly un-Maui view. Tall, skinny spruce trees line the opposite shore of Whitehorse’s warmest lake, which is flat, green-brown and roughly 17°C. (The water around Maui was 25°C at the time.)
The cars lining Long Lake Road suggested I wasn’t alone in wanting to cool off, but now that I’m wading forward in my neoprene socks, I see 15 people on stand-up paddleboards, a handful of kayakers, dozens of parents planted onshore while their dry-haired kids splash in four inches of water and at least one mobile sauna in the trees. No one is joining me for a wild swim.
When I first heard about “wild swimming” in the Yukon, I was confused. I grew up in Ontario, where swimming in a lake was just “swimming.” I wasn’t sure what made the pastime wild, but I figured someone in Wild Swimmers – Yukon would have the answer.
The Facebook group has 812 members, most of whom are passing through the territory, looking for advice on where to swim. There are roughly 30 Yukoners who post regularly, giving updates on weather and water temperature at any of the Yukon’s hundreds of lakes (never its frigid, fast-flowing rivers), looking for swimming companions and sharing pictures of themselves sipping post-dip tea, watching loons from the dock and sometimes eating cake.
Lis Bari is one of them. She was a regular swimmer at the Canada Games Centre pool in Whitehorse when the pandemic shut the facility down. A friend invited her to the Wild Swimmers group. That May, she joined some members at Kookatsoon Lake, 20 minutes south of Whitehorse. It was Mother’s Day weekend, the water was 12°C and the zipper on Bari’s wetsuit broke, busting open in the middle of the popular family day-use area. “I was really not prepared for that,” she says. “Full exposure.”
The wardrobe malfunction didn’t turn her off the activity, though. In fact, she got even more excited about swimming, something she’d loved as a kid, dropped as an adult and picked up again after a 2017 divorce that left her with a lot of anxiety. Swimming in a pool quieted the constant chatter in her mind. Taking her hobby into the stillness and silence of the outdoors made it even more powerful.
As Bari sits in her office in downtown Whitehorse, a Microsoft Teams message dings on her computer. Her phone sits within reach on her desk. Just five kilometres away is Long Lake, where you can’t always get a cell signal. “Going out there forces you to just be in the moment,” she says, “because everything just stops.”
Sometimes, Bari swims with purpose. In 2024, she trained for a seven-kilometre race in British Columbia’s Okanagan Lake. She tried to hit certain times or distances; she went out in windy conditions to work on breathing patterns; she tested nutrition methods, with her husband following her in a kayak stocked with gels and powders, or she towed a Quackpacker, an inflatable yellow duck with a 13.5-kilogram carrying capacity.
Bari prefers to swim without a wetsuit—“I kind of chase that tingle”—but many wild swimmers in the Yukon wear them. The short summers mean lake temperatures stay chilly, and wetsuits are one way to stay safe in the water. Another way is to swim with a group, though Bari occasionally goes solo to local lakes where she feels comfortable. Chadburn might be her favourite. It’s deeper and colder than Long Lake, with clearer water and where she’ll do most of her training for the “Ice Mile” she’s considering. (According to the International Ice Swimming Association, that’s a nautical mile—1.8 kilometres—in water that’s 5°C or colder, in a bathing suit, silicone cap and goggles.)
Right now, though, Bari’s out in the water for the same reasons she originally fell in love with wild swimming: the social aspect, doing something others think is nuts, the connection to nature and the fact that it’s more fun and interesting than the pool, which has walls to contain you and a black line on the bottom to guide you in a straight line back and forth, back and forth.
The absence of that black line is what I think of as I, a Maui Girl in a boreal forest, tread water, drunk off the nostalgic smell of lake: a mix of damp bathing suit and wet jute rope dock lines. It makes me feel like a kid, free and feral. I realize “wild swimming” is an overwrought term for swimming, one that may appeal to Yukoners because they’re so accustomed to (even masochistically in love with) extremes, they can’t handle saying they do something as mundane as just “swimming.”
With our soft, southern upbringings amid huge populations, Ontarians get endless grief in the Yukon for not knowing real cold or how to be tough, but I do know lakes. I was “just swimming” across them when I was 12 years old in a way I never swam lanes, and floating in Long Lake feels just like that.
Lapping a pool is boring, solitary and singularly focused. It demands that you keep moving forward as quickly as possible in a way that mirrors adult life. No one’s taking the time to eat cake on a recreation centre pool deck after smashing out 40 lengths.
Wild swimming forces you to slow down: sometimes because of weather and waves; sometimes because you want to chat with your friends; sometimes because it’s just too beautiful to keep moving. You could be training for a race or prepping for an Ice Mile, but that’s secondary. It’s not the thing that makes swimming wild. The “wildness” that defines the activity isn’t external. It’s the feeling that you’re a wild, free thing in your own body. And, to me, it doesn’t need to be said.
