Art (“Karts”) Huseonica has called off his canoe trip to the Bering Sea mere days before reaching his goal of padding from Whitehorse to the Bering Sea, a distance of approximately 2,020 miles, or 3,251 kilometres.

Huseonica, 72, of Sun City, Arizona, ended his epic journey Aug. 2.

He started on May 27 from Carmacks, the site where his first attempt ended last year due to dangerous high water conditions.

The Star spoke with him recently about his journey.

Huseonica said his “overall health is really, really good and it always has been the entire trip. I never had any medical problems, no issues. I was really surprised. I never thought about it until my wife asked me and I said, ‘No, perfect health.’

“I lost a lot of weight, about 27 pounds, which is kind of normal on these big expeditions.”

Huseonica was taking in about 5,000 calories a day and burning about 6,000 during the journey, hence the weight loss.

He made it as far as St. Mary’s, a community near the Bering Sea in Alaska.

“I was really depressed before I left St. Mary’s. I never felt depression before but it kind of hit me. Just feeling so bad that I knew I wouldn’t be able to continue the expedition. This is the second weather delayed expedition. It really bugged me because I never quit. I’m not a quitter but sometimes circumstances just push you into a corner and say, ‘Okay, you’ve got to stop. You’re not quitting, you’re just stopping.’”

His stay in St. Mary’s was quite costly.

“You know how expensive those river villages are. Holy cow. This was crazy,” he exclaimed.

“I was staying at a small lodge there. Nothing fancy. I still had my river appetite.”

“The food was incredibly expensive there,” related Huseonica.

His expenses included storage for his canoe, shuttle rides back and forth to the canoe and to the store.

“Somebody asked me, ‘How much money do you need to stay there,’ and I said, ‘You can’t do it. The weather forecast for the next seven days, 10 days – high winds.’ I don’t mind the rain. It’s just the wind; I have trouble just controlling the canoe, especially by myself. I searched around, trying to find somebody. It just never worked out.”

Despite the setback, Huseonica enjoyed the expedition.

“This year’s journey went absolutely fantastic. I started out with three guest paddlers and we had a good time. Two of them went with me as far as Minto. And then the other one, Melinda (Land, 52, of Kentucky), went with me as far as Dawson City.

The whole portion from Whitehorse to Dawson was really good. A lot of good water, the rapids at Five Fingers. Melinda and I hit about three days out of the four and a half of just wind and rain but we just dealt with it. Every night we were cold and wet when we got into our tents, and sometimes it was late at night, as late as 10 o’clock, because it’s hard to find camping spots now on the river.”

According to Huseonica, spring runoff took its toll on the river.

“The ice just destroyed the river bank and reshaped a lot of the islands and built new ones and ripped out other ones.

“The further along the journey went, from Eagle to probably Fort Yukon, the weather wasn’t too bad, the wind wasn’t too bad, I made good progress. But once I got into Galena in Alaska, the weather really started to go downhill. I had a day and a half that I had to sit out because of high, high winds.

“Beyond that, until when I stopped two weeks later, I had several days I had to stop because of the wind, had to pull off several times for several hours, because of the wind.

“And I didn’t see the sun for probably five, six weeks. It was incredible. I threw my sunscreen away. I knew I wasn’t going to need it. It was that bad.

“If it wasn’t raining, it was just cloudy. And a lot of days it was misty, this misty fog on the river made it hard to see far in advance.”

Huseonica was alone on his journey once he left Dawson.

“The gal that was gonna join me at Fort Yukon, she backed out at the last minute because she heard that the weather’s bad, it’s a dangerous river right now.

“I checked with a couple of people who were getting ready to bail that were in front of me and behind me and said, ‘Hey, let’s team up’, but they just couldn’t stand anymore. They were sick and tired of the wind and the mosquitos.”

The elders in the villages told Huseonica the mosquitos this year were worse than ever because of how wet it was.

“The elders also unanimously said this was the wettest, coldest summer they could ever remember. They said I picked a bad year to try to do this.”

Huseonica was asked how it felt to come so close to the end and ultimately have to pull the plug.

“It really sucked,” he replied. “I was gut-punched. I was heartbroken. I was just standing there on the river’s edge, knowing I couldn’t go any farther. I was angry. I was sad. And that’s where depression started setting in. It’s like ‘Oh my God, I just gotta go back. I got to face all my sponsors, all my contributors, all my supporters. I gotta face myself. It’s a failure.’

“A lot of people were trying to convince me, ‘It was a great adventure, you went that far and it’s really good’, but that wasn’t my goal. My goal was to get to the Bering Sea.”

At Emmonak, Alaska, Huseonica got another warning to turn back from a local hunter who was going to escort him out to the Bering Sea.

According to Huseonica, the hunter told him, “The weather’s really horrible out here. I don’t know if I want to be involved in trying to help get you back from the Bering Sea because it’s really, really bad … it doesn’t look like you can make it out there safely.”

Huseonica heeded another warning from a helicopter pilot.

“He advised me that he just came back from two rescues already.”

The chopper pilot told Huseonica, “You’re gonna go home, right?”

“Some people along the river stopped and told me, ‘Hey, you know, we got a really strong low coming in. It’s gonna get really, really bad. You need to get to St. Mary’s as soon as possible’. My wife told me that too. So I pushed it really hard, did an 18 hour day, and a 12 hour day to get there, beat it by a couple of hours and the wind was starting to pick up when I got to St. Mary’s.”

Huseonica was roughly 100 miles away from his ultimate goal, the Bering Sea – about five days away.

When asked if he has any plans of trying to make the third time a charm, Huseonica replied, “No I don’t. My wife says definitely not. It’s gonna take us a long time to pay off the debt that we have from this expedition, the reboot. And my fundraising wasn’t that good. I stumbled on that. Some folks that were saying they were going to contribute decided not to. I just simply can’t afford to do it.

“My canoe’s sitting there. Some of my gear’s sitting there. If I had the funds, I could easily do it. If we had a 10 day window of weather and I had the money I could get up there and finish it, but it doesn’t look like it’s gonna happen, unfortunately.”

Huseonica offered some advice for someone wanting to try the trip to the Bering Sea.

“Make sure you have good gear and good communications to get daily weather reports.”

Huseonica said the weather changes so quickly up north.

“And it usually changes for the worse.

“I had a lot of wolves come through my camp. I never saw them this time. I saw them last year. You could see their tracks all around my camp. Bear tracks, too. Just be aware of all that stuff and don’t get too excited.

“I saw everything imaginable. Muskrats, beavers all sorts of waterfowl, moose, black bear, grizzly bears.”

Among his interactions with wildlife, he had one memorable close encounter.

“I had one grizzly bear mother with a cub come charging out to the shore. I was paddling along the shore.”

Huseonica was about 20 feet away from the protective mama bear.

“She came charging out to the edge there. She wanted me. I knew I was gonna die. I reached down to turn on my GoPro camera, cause if I’m gonna die, I want to make sure it’s on video. But she didn’t jump. I thought for sure she was gonna jump, and she looked back at her cub and decided, ‘Well, okay. We’ll let him go.’ But she was nasty. Growling, snarling, pawing the ground. It was really, really intimidating. She was huge.

“I think she smelled me and was protective of her cub. It was pretty nasty.”

On a brighter note, Huseonica added that his favourite part of the expedition was having guest paddlers.

Besides Land, veteran paddler Bruce Jobin, 44, of Whitehorse and Myryja Friesen, 33, of Compassion Yukon joined him on this year’s journey.

“I learned so much from them. Very, very informative.”