Whitehorse, Yukon Territory – Tok, Alaska

Whitehorse is a city of approximately 25,ooo situated on the banks of the Yukon River and not far removed  from its days as a gold rush hub.   Here’s a photo of what passes for a skyscraper in Whitehorse.  We never did figure out the traffic – the town fathers have not wasted a great deal of money on traffic lights; if memory serves, there are two.  We noticed a lot of chipped and cracked windshields and car parts held in place with duct tape, all testimony to the extreme weather, poor road conditions and poor driving habits.

 

It is becoming more and more obvious that, at this time of year at least, the Yukon Territory lacks a sufficient darkness to provide a good night’s sleep. With 19 hours of daylight plus  a hour each of dawn and dusk, there’s only three hours left for darkness – and it’s not all that dark.  One’s Circadian clock is severely over-wound.  Although it seemed a little frivolous at the time of purchase, I’ve got some good use out of the sleep mask I bought a few  years ago to compensate for an over-bright campground.

 

As is our routine, we dropped in at the Visitors Center for some helpful hints on what to see and do in the area.  After collecting a lot of brochures and some very good advice, we headed off to wander the downtown shopping area with its heavy emphasis on First Nations arts and crafts and gold jewelry.

 

 

We stopped by the Government Building for a tour,  Whitehorse being the territorial capital.  A security guard kindly showed us around with a visit to the legislative chambers, pointing out the artwork displays along the way.  The main lobby is dominated by an acrylic stained glass mural depicting Yukon history from the days of the wooly mammoth into an unspecified future.  A lounge area is decorated with five 7x13’ tapestries depicting various aspects of a Yukon woman’s life.  The 3000 volunteer “stitchers” had just eight weeks to complete the project.

 

We made a stop at the Rotary Park for a quick peek at the S.S. Klondike, an old stern wheeler and then went a bit further upstream to visit the Whitehorse Fish Ladder where we heard the incredible story of the life cycle of a chinook salmon.  They are spawned in the freshwater of the Yukon and its tributaries, spend a year maturing and growing and then make the long, long journey up the Yukon Territory, across Alaska and out into the Bering Sea where they live for five or six years until they get the urge to head for home, spawn and die.  The fish ladder is meant to help them past the power plant.  They don’t eat at all during the homeward trip and have little strength left by the time they reach their spawning area.

There’s also a fish hatchery here.  When the youngsters, known as fry, weigh about three grams a computer chip is inserted in their nose and a small fin is clipped off before they are released into the wild.  If and when they are caught, the missing fin will identify them as hatchery-born and the nose chip will provide evidence of their migratory “route”. 

Skies were another mixed bag as we left Whitehorse and began our 280 mile trek to Beaver Creek, also in the Yukon Territory.  From Destruction Bay on to Beaver Creek the road was rough with very slow going for  long distances.  We shook, rattled and rolled across gravel patches, over frost heaves and into potholes and through mini-dust storms thrown up by passing trucks.  Again, we saw very little wildlife.

 

For some distance, the highway follows the shoreline of Kluane Lake.  Somewhere I read it’s pronounced clue-WAH-knee; a mountain range and river share the name as well.  We stopped at a pull-out for lunch and to admire the scenery. 

 

Scenery was in no short supply on this leg of the trip but one of the most memorable sights was of a giant rainbow arched across a big bald mountain with roadside flowers reflecting the rainbow’s colors.  Trying to grab the moment with a camera while bouncing down the road proved to be impossible…or nearly so.

Speaking of wildflowers, the official flower of the Yukon is the fireweed which only appears following a forest fire or in clearings along roadsides.  The pink flowers we were seeing along the highway turned out not to be fireweed but are instead either the edible bear-root (aka Indian potato) or the northern sweet-vetch which is poisonous.  The difference between the two is very subtle but apparently grizzlies have no trouble differentiating between the two.  I believe the pale yellow flowers we’ve been seeing are northern yellow locoweed. 

After passing Burwash Landing, we began to see the icefields of the St. Elias Mountains.  The Milepost, quoting from an interpretive sign, notes that some of the glacier ice is 2200’ thick and has been hanging around for over 29,000 years.  And it was just about here that the road began to get really ugly.  Dealing with frost heaves is an on-going problem and there are experiments being done which essentially air-condition the area beneath the road to keep the underlying permafrost from melting during summer months.  It’s the freezing and thawing that causes the pavement to buckle, causing the heaves and potholes.

We spent the night at Beaver Creek but were so exhausted from the long difficult drive that we just dragged into the campground, checked our email, had left-overs for supper and headed off to dreamland.

 

It was only a short drive on Thursday morning when we reached the Alaska border.  There’s a turn-out just before going through Customs which affords a good view of the 141st Meridian  marking the U.S./Canada border.  It’s a favorite stopping place and so we all took turns photographing each other for our scrapbooks.  Upon pulling back onto the highway the road was blessedly smooth for quite a distance, lulling us into thinking the U.S. was once again ‘way ahead of the pack when it comes to building and maintaining roads.  We soon learned otherwise – frost heaves do not observe border crossings and there were some pretty rough sections all the way to Tok.

Our campground at Tok has a vehicle washing facility (for a fee, of course) and by then we were sorely in need of it.  It seemed we’d get a little spritz of rain every time we got to a dusty patch so the coach, and especially the car, were coated in mud.  The car had little tar-covered stones from fresh pothole patches stuck to the windshield and looked particularly dis-reputable.  As luck would have it, we got sandwiched between rigs from a  caravan which had come down through Chicken.  They had 18 rigs to get washed and they ganged up and set what must be a vehicle-washing record.  Rather than watch us eat up the clock trying to wash the rig by ourselves, they wielded the brushes and hoses and got us cleaned up in a jiffy.  And what nice folks…they sure seemed to be having a grand time.

In the evening there’s a free concert in the campground meeting hall with music provided by a local musician, Dave Stancliff, and his two young associates playing fiddle and banjo.  Dave does a lot of his own compositions and some C/W standards as well, recites some Robert Service poems and tells some tales about life in Alaska.  The program provided a nice relief from the summer re-runs on television.

It didn’t take much time at all to tour Tok on Friday.  Because Tok is just about the first town of any size as you enter Alaska, the visitors center is especially well equipped with brochures from all around the state.  We collected the information we needed for the places we expect to visit and returned to the coach to look them over and to get ready to hit the road for Fairbanks.