So I left off in Whitehorse, Yukon. Here's a little known fact about Whitehorse. It doesn't snow that much there. I had naively assumed that up in the Yukon Territory there would be snow 24/7 - 365 days of the year. Apparently, Whitehorse is in a pretty dry location, so they hardly get any precipitation, which was interesting to me. Granted, they still get MUCH more snow than I'm used to, but even though the weather had been warming up, we had seen snow throughout our entire trip so far. There was still some snow on the ground in Whitehorse, but no where near as much as anywhere else we visited during the trip. Also, it was cold in Whitehorse, but it was a dry cold, so it was actually a somewhat comfortable cold.
So Whitehorse was a "real" town in my mind. I wasn't expecting to see a Walmart, Starbucks, McDonalds, KFC and a Tim Horton's (a Canadian Dunkin Donuts-type place that I absolutely love) in the Yukon Territory, so I spent most of my time in this "city" amazed by the fact that people live there. Granted, anything a person could need was in this town, and I understand that the town exists in the first place because of the Gold Rush, but I still can't wrap my mind around why people decided to stay there forever. Everything you need might be in the town, but once you leave the town there is absolutely NOTHING for hundreds of miles. Maybe I'm just weird, but that actually seems a little scary to me. Its basically like living in a real town, yet completely cut off from the entire rest of the world. Its odd to me, but hey...people seem to love living there so more power to them I suppose.
So we spent our first day seeing the local sights and attractions. We started at the MacBride Museum of Yukon History where Mr. V got to see some Northern Lights (He was really bummed that it was cloudy for the majority of the time we were up there...except during the day when you clearly couldn't see any Northern Lights. Apparently the Northern Lights would have been really pretty and visible if it wasn't cloudy every night, so he had to settle for some fake ones at the museum.)
I was fascinated by Sam McGee's actual cabin which had been moved to the museum location (google Sam McGee if you've never heard the poem - apparently he was a real person, which I didn't know).
I was also fascinated by these things:
We had been seeing these everywhere throughout both Alaska and the Yukon and we had no idea what they were. Since they were all over the place - large ones, like in this picture and small decorative ones - I figured that they had to be something important. So thanks to this wonderful museum I learned that they are food storage things (they had an actual name that I can't remember offhand). Basically its like an outdoor refrigerator, raised up high so bears and other wildlife can't get into it. This was actually a highlight of the trip because it truly drives me insane when I see something over and over, yet I have no idea what it is. I was so excited to finally learn what these things were so of course I had to get a picture by one.We spent some time walking around town, and thought that this was pretty cool - The Yukon River, which we had seen completely frozen back at the Arctic Circle, was starting to break up and melt and turn back into a flowing river. According to some local people that we talked to, the melting process isn't very gradual - its actually a pretty fast process. It literally just starts to crack one day, and within a few hours turns back into a normal river . So it appeared that the river decided to start functioning as a river again the first day we were in Whitehorse.
We checked out the SS Klondike, which is one of the original steamboats that carried passengers up the Yukon River to the town of Dawson during the Gold Rush.
Some other pictures from Whitehorse:
(the side of our hotel - the Best Western Gold Rush Inn)
(the view from our hotel room, which wasn't anything spectacular...I just wanted proof that it actually looked like a real town...)
(me inside the hotel lobby)
(the elevator at the hotel)
(me with my Royal Canadian Mounted Police moose friend)
(the front of our hotel)On our second (and final) day in Whitehorse we checked out the Yukon Brewery, which was something that Mr. V wanted to do. I could really care less how beer is made, but after the free tour of the brewery we had the chance to sample all of their beer. And when I say "sample" I mean that they gave us pretty decent sized glasses of each type of beer. I got through 3 glasses and had to give the rest to Mr. V because I was pretty sure I was going to be pretty drunk, at 1:00 in the afternoon, if I kept sampling the beer. I decided at this point that American beer really sucks. I'll drink beer, but its not something that I drink a lot of on a regular basis or particularly love. However, when I was in England about 10 years ago and Paris a few years later, I absolutely loved some of the beer that we drank there. Well, I also loved the Yukon Brewery beer, and have been slowly savoring the case of it that we brought home with us. They don't use preservatives in the beer from this brewery, so its not shipped all over the world. You can only get it in Western Canada and in some parts of Alaska, but I highly recommend if you ever have the chance to try it, then try it...because its good stuff!
On our way out of town we stopped to see the World's Largest Weather Vane, which is made out of an old Canadian Pacific plane. It was a little odd, because I'm not sure what kind of person sits there thinking "Hey! I think I'll make a weather vane out of an airplane!" but I love stumbling across weird things like this. It was a little hard to get a good picture because it was windy and the plane kept moving, but this one was pretty decent. We were trying to get one of us in front of the plane so you could read the "Canadian Pacific" on the side of the plane, but the wind wasn't letting that happen.
Once we were out of Whitehorse, and the last of any real civilization in the Yukon, we headed south on the Klondike Highway on our way back to Alaska, once again enjoying the beautiful scenery the whole way there.
On our drive back to Alaska we discovered another little known fact about the Yukon. We had already learned that we were in a somewhat dry area of the territory, but there's also a desert here! I never would have known that if we hadn't drive right past it. It turns out that its actual the remains of some lake from millions of years ago, that now functions much like a desert. There was a little bit of snow there, but not much, and apparently for most of the year it looks mainly like a desert. So we stopped for pictures because I loved the idea of a picture of me standing in a patch of snow, with sand dunes behind me, with snow covered mountains behind the dunes. This was something we definitely hadn't expected to see up in the Yukon.
We stopped for a picture of the Yukon Welcome sign on our way out of the territory because this sign had a prettier background, of snow covered mountains, to it than the one we took pictures by on the way into the territory. I especially love the avalanche warning sign, behind the Yukon sign in the second picture...
Then we drove through British Columbia for about an hour, until finally ending up back in Alaska.
I think this next picture is a pretty good way to describe how much "fun" it was to drive on this particular road. Aside from the insanely bumpy and uneven road, this was another beautiful part of the drive. However, there was a storm coming and we were driving into the sun, so while it looked pretty to my eyes, my camera didn't do a great job taking scenery pictures this time. I only got one or two sort of good pictures.
We were heading towards the town of Skagway, Alaska, which was one of the two starting points for the Gold Rush of 1898. The other starting point was the town of Dyea, which has been completely abandoned, except for a few scattered houses and the cabins that we stayed in for the night. Both towns were next to each other, but there was an inlet and some mountains separating them from each other. Today its easy to drive between the two towns, but during the gold rush years each route offered something different for the gold seekers. Skagway offered the trail via White Pass (which I'm about to post pictures of). Dyea offered the shorter and more well known Chilkoot Trail, but it was steeper and much more dangerous. However, both trails were incredibly dangerous in their own way and even with modern transportation today, they're still pretty scary. Now the main highway runs through White Pass, but the Chilkoot Trail is still a hiking trail. Pictures don't do these trails justice though. I think its one of those things you have to see in person to understand the insanity of it. We stopped briefly at an overlook area in British Columbia on our way to White Pass and took a picture of this sign because the quote describes both options pretty well:
The next few pictures are of our drive through White Pass. At the very top of White Pass is the border of British Columbia and Alaska, where we stopped to get some VERY quick pictures because it was colder than you can possibly imagine up here, and keep in mind that we were here at a time when the weather was starting to warm up in this whole area. To put it simply, even driving the White Pass trail was a little insane, and its a main road today. It turns out that we took this trip at a perfect time. Had we gone a week or 2 earlier we would have had to change our plans because White Pass was closed due to numerous avalanches. It had only reopened a few days before we got there. So as I said before, the pictures don't do it justice, but its the best I could do to capture the insane wind, the freezing temperatures and bad road conditions. The white out conditions aren't the result of a bad camera. It was snowing AND the wind was blowing pretty hard, so it made the road almost impossible to see at some points. Driving into the whiteness was a little scary even before we got to the worst part of it. I can't even begin to imagine hiking this trail back in 1898. When you look at the pictures of the Canada/United States border, take note that we don't have a picture of the "Welcome to Alaska" sign. Why? Because an avalanche had knocked it down and it was buried under several feet of snow.
(This next picture is of the remains of one of the avalanches that had recently been cleared away)
(the next picture is of some of the snow drifts on the sides of the road)
Some of these pictures of White Pass actually make the area look a little flat. So like I said, the pictures don't do it justice. We're actually at the very top of the mountains at this point, and I wish I had a picture to portray exactly how high up we were and how completely insane the weather was. Since this is the best I could do though, here are more picture of our White Pass crossing (I was seriously afraid that this camper in front of us was going to tip over at a few points on the road.):
During the Gold Rush, the border of the 2 countries was drawn at the very top of the mountain ridges on White Pass and the Chilkoot Trail. I think my pictures going down the mountain into Alaska show the steepness of the road a little better than my pictures going up the mountain to the border do.
I mentioned in my first post about the trip that we were on vacation about a week before the true tourist season begins up here. So when we got to Skagway they were testing the train that runs from Skagway to Whitehorse, through White Pass. At some point in history, a train route was laid on the White Pass Trail to make transportation easier and now that same train is used as a tourist attraction. People can ride the train on the same route that people looking for gold traveled.
So we had arrived in Skagway, and once again I'm going to have to stop typing for a while. I'll write Part 3 as soon as I can...which will hopefully be tomorrow!
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