After a couple of days without internet access finally: 11 Mbit/s WiFi! Time for an update. The recent days were mainly characterised by Canadian and Alaska gold rush times. Sounding names like Yukon, Klondike, Dawson City, Whitehorse, Skagway, White Pass, Yukon Navigation Company. These and others which played a major role in those days.
Only a few of our hours here had a different focus: hot springs (but unlike our thermal water pools – read on why) and cold Beringia (how the American continent was first populated)
Read on for the details
Dawson City
Dawson City – at times the largest town north of San Francisco and west of Winnipeg. 1897 and 1898 brought soaring numbers of inhabitants. Just figure this:
- Spring 1897: 1,500 population
- Summer 1897: 3,500
- 1897: 17,500
- 1898: 60,000
- 1899: 25,000
- 1900: 9,152 (ah, here they started detailed counting)
- 1911: 3,013
- 1981: 697
- Today: 2,000 (over the winter, approx., 50% natives)
Today it is overcast again and Dawson’s mud streets are still wet from the recent rainfalls. Later on we are to learn that it has been unusually wet this year (well, we thought so…)
In Dawson itself it looks like the main clothing for your feet are gum boots. Hardly anybody wears something else (at least not in terms of functionality). However even the local people seem to be fond of dry shoes and feet, so we benefit from the traditional wooden boardwalks as you all know them from various western movies (if you have seen such).
And they fit the picture! Dawson doesn’t look like “the old western movie town”, it IS the old western movie town, if not the mother of all western movie towns. Saying so, it means that Dawson really celebrates this image. Check in at the local visitor centre? People are wearing 1890s outfit. Going for a tour? Your tour guide is dressed in a heydays suit, head covered by a bowler hat. Sitting in front of a cafè on the boardwalk, watching local and foreign folks? You can bet there’s someone playing the guitar on one side and an old gold mine factotum sitting on the other side, bent over his burger and wedges. Speaking about burgers: here I have the best burger in my life so far. Completely made to order with all ingredients and with swiss cheese! And it is delievered to the table, by a really friendly waitress.
One of the views to enjoy is the S.S. Keno. She is one of the largest sternwheelers in this area and definitely the one first in the water each spring and the last out of the water each autumn, thanks to its hull travelling even shallow Steward river. One wouldn’t believe, how skilled staff onboard such ships had to be without being told. Of course, lot’s of obstacles were to be mastered: river rapids, ever changing sand banks, “Grashopping”, keeping the boiler and pressure system working, landing for new fire wood …
High point of today: the Fishweel native boat tour. Annie, our lovely guide (her grandparents are Austrian) and her friend Dana, introduce us to the environment of Dawson, the Yukon river, life in the wilderness and Tommy’s sleigh dogs (Poky, Silver, … I have to contact them again for the names of the others). Annie leads us around and Dana is so kind to take care of the sleigh dogs and have a cup of tea and some sweets for us as well. 🙂 Ladies, thanks for the tour, your explanations and for making me feel really welcome as a visitor! You are indeed the great guides that we told Tommy 😉
On Tommy’s grounds we even see a guest cabin, erected by another Austrian guy, Andreas Steindler, who had been living here for some years as well.
Dawson – Whitehorse
Unfortunately we leave Dawson City all too soon after this river ride. No Saloon, no show, no nothing, but “eating kilometres” to make for Whitehorse. Overnight stay at Moose Creek State Park, nice, the usual barbecue and steak for dinner. And sometime somebody has to explain me what exactly is the vital role of mosquitoes in the wildlife and why nature and the world can’t do without them – I just don’t see it 8-(
Whitehorse really surprises me: For the local circumstances really a big town but with much of the old atmosphere in downtown. It feels like Dawson, but bigger, grown up and it already has black paved streets! Situated nicely at the Yukon Surprisingly the town is said to have been like this for only a few years, like a once-again boom town. Funny to be here at last, after for many years having heard about it only in the weather forecast as being one of the coldest spots in Canada.
What to do in Whitehorse? We visit
- The world’s longest wooden fish ladder: impressing: they can count which type of fish of which gender passes when and so forth),
- Mile Canyon – once a major obstacle for prospectors for its rapids, nowadays much less dangerous, since Yukon Energy built a dam further down the stream.
- Takhini Hot springs: low point of the day – a complete rip off in my view: camp ground charges for everything extra, promised internet access isn’t available due to “late running renovations”, entrance in hot springs is not included for camp ground guests. And the thermal baths: oh boy, in Austria government officials would have closed down the business on the opening day for sanitary and water quality reasons. Conclusio: if you don’t visit it, you don’t miss anything.
- Beringia: a must see information centre about “Beringia”, a massive land mass now covered by the Bering sea and during ice age a giant icecold “steppe”, habitat for the wolly mammoth, lions (yes, lions), the big short nose bear (just 25% bigger than today’s grizzlies) and a few other similar big animals. And it provided a safe path for people from Asia/Siberia coming over to interior Alaska and the Yukon Territory, at that time for some reason being ice free. Don’t miss this, you should really see it!
Transport Museum: a good insight in transport along the gold rush trail from the very beginning up to WW2: the obstacles, the challenges, the means …
Whitehorse – Skagway
Hm, somehow Whitehorse feels a nice place to be, at least as a tourist. There would be still more to see, more to wander around, more to talk to people. But time seems somehow to be pressing, so soon we are again on our way forward, this time to Skagway.
The path leads us up to White Pass, one of the (in)famous mountain crossings here. On the way we pass by the world’s smallest desert. A pieceful sandy spot, a little sand desert, scarcely covered by pine trees and shrugs. Strangely enough, a few hundred meters away forests and mountain lakes dwell in their most scenic looks.
The scenery though is constantly changing now. The more south we come the more clouds we have again. The higher we rise on the road, the closer come fog and clouds. At last you would think the RV scratches the clouds already, and causing them more than just a ticklish feeling. Finally the pass, the source of the Yukon. A vast field of stone, leeches and small plants, sometimes a tree. Lakes so colourful I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen for myself. There’s blue and there’s green in all sorts. Somehow two wishes grow inside: to hike the pass one day and to scuba dive the lakes here!
Crossing the pass and the border
A few more metres and we get soaked in the fog, visibility is down to a few metres. We get a first insight of what it must have been like travelling this route 100 years ago, maybe in much worse environments, like in winter. Then we are over the mountain. The fog lets us go, as quickly as the caught us just minutes ago.
Over steep and narrow roads we follow the path to the border again between Canada and the US: a small outpost in the middle of nowhere again, this time not on the very top of the hill but down this long valley, travelled by the better of, since the White Pass & Yukon Rail had finally set up their tracks here. The not so wealthy chose the “hike” over Chilkoot pass, right behind the mountain to our right. Not so high, but also steep and long. By the way: White pass also carried the name of “Dead Horse trail” for more than 3000 horses dying here on the dangerous path and under the heavy loads and sometimes inhuman treatment of their owners.
At the mountains foot: Skagway, one of the entry points for the gold rush trail. And gold rush it still is! While the town is sleepy on the day of our arrival it get’s sort of bustling the next day. Four (4) big cruise ships find their port of choice over night and deploy their “freight” for bus tours, heli and flightseeing, hike & float trails etc. Although not big, there’s lots to do even here. But more about this another time.