A chicken, goats, fast food, driftwood: Strange things Yukoners have brought on Air North flights

Chicken Baby took three Air North flights in her six-year life span. 

She was a splash silkie chicken, a small feathery breed, like if a dusty mop grew legs and a beak. Chickens aren't known for flight, but Chicken Baby took to the skies so often that Air North issued her a passport. 

"What are the opportunities that someone's going to say, 'you want a passport for your chicken?' 'Oh sure,' kind of weird I'm flying with a chicken anyway," said Megan Cai, Chicken Baby's owner, who lives in Atlin, B.C.  

Chicken Baby is just the tip of the airplane: Yukoners have flown up goats, hermit crabs, beta fish and ducks — and those are just the things that breathe. Air North has seen people trek up one hundred Big Macs and empty jars of peanut butter, driftwood and bull kelp from Vancouver Island, and bags and bags of corn.

Oviana Wang is a passenger service supervisor with Air North. She says the airline is accommodating because of the territory's remote location.

 "It's very convenient to have a reliable source to travel back and forth, and be able to not feel so isolated," Wang said. 

In response to a call out for stories, CBC received almost two hundred comments, and 124 distinct travel tales. Yukoners were eager to share their experiences bringing up albino corn snakes, pints of olive oil and lilac tree trimmings. The anecdotes fell into five distinct categories — pets, junk food, other food, corn and strange items. 

'Never found an egg roll comparable'

For some, it was food from home that led them to push the boundaries of baggage. 

In a hard shell suitcase from Walmart, purchased for the occasion, Valerie Atkins brought — nestled in butcher's paper, cellophane, bubble wrap and a freezer bag — 48 frozen egg rolls and 500 millilitres of plum sauce from Ottawa's Golden Palace restaurant. 

"I have never found an egg roll comparable to them anywhere, and certainly not in the Yukon," she said.

"They're a good size. They're not like little small little egg rolls that you would get typically, they're open ended and the ends are kind of burnt…They don't taste burnt, but they're a dark sort of colour." 

They're a taste of home for Atkins, who's from Ottawa, and is already thinking about how she's going to get her next shipment of rolls to the North. 

Though more Canadians are leaving the Yukon than coming in, those that do make the Yukon home are often from the southern provinces, looking for a different pace of life. 

For them, a taste of home might mean hockey bags full of summer corn from B.C. and Ontario, or soup from a Vancouver restaurant, or two litres of maple syrup from a hometown sugar shack — all of which have flown Air North.

Fast food frenzy

Other stories painted the picture of a different Yukon, one where it wasn't as easy to get southern 'luxuries' as it is today. Those luxuries were — and are — mainly fast food. 

Plenty of commenters had tales of flying bags of burgers, buckets of fried chicken and trays of Blizzards. The lack of Dairy Queen in the territory between 2007 and 2022 seemed to be a major driver.

Some were flying greasy goodness up from Vancouver to Whitehorse, while others brought fast food further afield, to Old Crow and Inuvik.

Wang, with Air North, says KFC gets flown to Old Crow on "absolutely every flight. I mean, totally understandable. Like, they don't have it right."

Small but mighty

Some stories were more heartwarming than hilarious.

Nataschaa Chatterton lives in Haines Junction and she says Air North flew a hip-lift up for her cow, Tory, that saved her life. After giving birth, Tory was unable to walk, Chatterton said. The community gathered, jimmy-rigging a combination of tractor, tarp and saddle pads to keep her upright.

Chatterton was researching solutions to keep her cow alive, and came across a hip-lift. It's a "simple device," she says, "but we knew we were at the end of our timeline to get it and nobody in the Yukon had a hip-lift." 

Air North was able to deliver it within 24 hours. 

"It was all very timely and dramatic," she said. With the device, Tory the cow was able to heal and is walking around to this day. 

Chatterton says for her, the airline is "a symbol of what northerners are capable of…even though you're little, you're still mighty."

Tory's tale and the people who came together to help her "just shows why the Yukon is such an amazing place to live and why people come here for a month and end up living here for the rest of their lives," Chatterton said.

Chatterton herself thought she'd be here for a year when she came up. Seventeen years and 35 animals later, she doesn't think she's going anywhere.