Happy New Year!
I've been looking back through photos from the past few months and it has been a very rich fall. The image above is from a show I played in Haines Junction, YT with Keitha Clark in August. I guided a couple of canoe trips in August on the Teslin and Yukon Rivers, then headed to northern Saskatchewan in September to paddle the Paull and Churchill Rivers. This was a new experience for me. The landscape was Canadian Shield with lakes connected by portages and rapids. Most of the paddling I've done has been on mountain rivers in the Yukon, it was interesting to try a new kind of tripping. The route we traveled is on the map below. We paddled past pictographs and ate as many cranberries and blueberries as we could - there were so many! I played a concert in La Ronge before leaving on the trip and really enjoyed connecting with the community there.
I spent October, November and December in Whitehorse, YT. I was teaching guitar lessons and finishing up a diploma at Yukon College in Northern Studies. I will graduate in May, wahoo! I traveled to Watson Lake and Teslin with Yukon Women in Music to perform a couple of concerts.
Keitha Clark, Boyd Benjamin and I have a trio called Home Sweet Home. We've just finished recording an album together and will be releasing it in the next couple of months. I wanted to put a couple of original tunes on the album and spent alot of time working on my writing this fall as a result. Its been a great time in my life for creativity and I look forward to kicking off the new year with a trip across Canada, performing on Via Rail's 'The Canadian' from Toronto to Jasper. After that, I am spending 3 weeks at the Banff Centre for the Arts for a winter musician's residency. From there I head to BC for a Home Routes house concert tour with Keitha Clark. I'm looking forward to all of it.
All the best and see you somewhere out there in the big wide world!
Kate
