YOLO Whitehorse to Dawson City May-June 2022

Jason catching a snooze out along the airstrip where we parked for a couple of nights.  No worries, there weren't any planes landing.  This is the Liard Airstrip and we parked at both ends of the 4000' grass runway.

Some pretty golden formations in the silty golden sands of a river.

A porcupine on the side of the road.

The ice along the river's edge below the Nisutlin Bridge outside of Teslin is so clear.

A totem pole across from the visitor center in Whitehorse, Yukon.

Jason showing off the Zen shirt my brother sent him.

A mosaic inside the Kwanlin Dun First Nation Cultural Center in Whitehorse.

Crocuses in beadwork on a stretched moose hide at the center.  Very pretty up close.

We stopped at the park in Whitehorse where the Klondike river boat is now permanently moored as a tourist attraction.  They were used to bring people and supplies up and down the Yukon River over 100 years ago.  This was the last working one.  They burned three cords of wood a day to keep their engines running!  That is a lot of wood.  Crews worked tirelessly cutting down trees to keep them supplied all up and down the rivers.  I also liked the family of Adirondack chairs in the park grass.

The world's longest wooden fish ladder, next to the power plant.  It is meant to provide a way for the Chinook salmon to continue their upstream swim since the power plant dam would've stopped them.

A beaver swimming in the Yukon River below a bridge on a walking path near the fish ladder.  He had no problems swimming against the swift current, but he surely did go fast when he went downstream.

Fox kittens playing in the yard of an abandoned building in downtown Whitehorse.  We parked here on our last night and were entertained endlessly by their scampering and frolicking around.  Since it doesn't really get dark this time of the year, we could watch them until they quit for the night.

Foxes playing in Whitehorse.

Mama fox on the roof of the building.  She'd been lazing in the sun when something got her attention and she sat up to make sure the kits weren't going to get into trouble.

The walkway over Miles Canyon outside of Whitehorse.  We could feel it swaying from the breeze as we crossed on our hike.

View from the bridge back through Miles Canyon.  The riverboats like the Klondike had to squeeze through here, with barely enough room.  They said you could touch the rocks on both sides.  That's why someone built a ferry across before reaching this spot, so people and things could get offloaded and transported around the narrow, dangerous canyon.  We hiked to the old ferry landing.

A metal sculpture pieced together from old metal things, just as you enter Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.

This sculpture of a fire fighter was across the lot, next to the fire station.

Someone also included these whimsical old parking meters, turned into art.

The inside of the old Montague Roadhouse, along the old trail used by miners (now the modern highway) in late 1800s and early 1900s .  These roadhouses were built about every 20 miles or so, and travelers would move from one to the next via horse, cart, sled, etc., sometimes using the frozen river as their road.

I seems they used unpeeled logs to build the roadhouse.  Amazing that the bark has lasted all this time.

The conglomerate boulders that are called The Five Fingers, creating Five Fingers Rapids.  Only that chute on the far left is navigable in a river boat and it had the fastest current and the narrowest clearance, making this stretch particularly menacing, especially if the captain didn't know the nuances of this stretch of the Yukon.

Jason taking a dip in Wrong Lake.  We had the place to ourselves and found it idyllic. Yes, that water is cold.

Cooking beans in beer cans over the fire.  Potatoes in the coals and brats roasted on marshmallow forks rounded out the meal.

Jason doing dishes with the lake water.

My view of Wrong Lake out my window at nearly 11 PM.

Some tiny bright orange-red lichen or fungus caught my eye on a hike.  They supposedly have morel mushrooms up here, too, but I never saw any.  Just like in Michigan.

Our view from another lakeside spot we found down a dirt road off the highway.

We met the half-brother of the famous First Nation carver, Keith Wolf Smarch here enjoying a day off with a friend.  When he left, we took the spot and spent hte night here.

Nearly to Dawson City, we turned off on a side trip to a free gold panning location.  The Claim 33 owner was busy showing a tour bus full of folks how to pan for gold in their cement troughs, so we just borrowed a shovel from her and went up to Free Claim #6, a bit further up the road, where the public can pan for gold.  They still take claim jumping seriously up here and we had to be within the claim stakes to pan for gold legally.

An old bottle collection at Claim 33.

Old dinosaur and mastodon bones and artifacts from the area.

Claim 33 storefront with a tourist panning in their troughs.

Lots of different styles of old gold pans here.

The owner loved collecting old things from the gold panning era and they were displayed all around her shop.  She's closing up the business next year to retire; I wonder what will happen with all this stuff?

Karen panning for gold in the Bonanza River, the one that started the Klondike Gold Rush.  There used to be a town of 9000 on this very site here, Grand Forks, but it was removed and the claim allotted to the public for panning.  It's back breaking work without a sluice or rocker box to get the gold to settle in a pan.  I'm not very good at it or there just wasn't any gold in the scoops I tried.

This is Dredge #4, the biggest wooden ore dredge ever built.  These mammoth machines scooped out the riverbed in front of them with a chain of iron dredge scoops and the entire inside was a sluice, gathering the gold.  The output was the huge tailing piles of rocks that are everywhere around Dawson City now.  This dredge is now parked and the Parks Canada folks give tours through it.  It's so big, I couldn't really get it into a single shot.

These are the dredge buckets from the Dredge #4.  Once upon a time, there were 12 of these huge dredges up here churning their way around the rivers, digging up the gold, making people rich.

Where I panned for gold, but you'd never know it by my results.  There are holes dug everywhere around the panning sites and you need to be careful where you walk.

The mine shaft at the original Discovery Claim along Bonanza Creek.  Dirt/gravel was hauled up in a square wooden bucket from a well/shaft like this.  The term 'Discovery' was given to the first claim staked when gold was found on a river.  Claims were numbered from there up and down the river.  A typical claim was 450' x 1000' with the start in the middle of the river's 'historic' location.   Miners would (and still do) change the course of the river with their diggings and dredging.

The entrance to a mine, with an ore cart in the opening.  Yukon has turned the Discovery Claim into a tourist information site with interpretive boards to explain the process.

An example of a sluice with wooden blocks as baffles, meant to keep the gold from washing through.  Since gold is 19 times as heavy as water, it was supposed to settle out before it reached the end of the sluice, leaving only useless rocks and gravel to get washed away.

Claim 33 had a bunch of antique trucks from the early 1940s.  This is the dashboard from an old Buick

This old Ford truck once belonged to the Aviation Services.

Moose antlers inside the Dawson City Visitor Center.  They were very friendly and helpful here.  Don't know why the inside lighting make these look blue.

A cute glass house in the Fortymile Gold Workshop.  The owner, Leslie, and her husband lived and raised a family in the bush in the Yukon for decades.  They mine their own gold on the Forty Mile River (hence the shop's name) and built this huge log building to house the gold workshop where she now creates jewelry from their gold.  

Some of her local gold jewelry and a few mastodon teeth uncovered while digging for gold.  The huge mammals used to roam this territory and lots of fossilized bones have been churned up by digging and dredging in the area.

The Spell of the Yukon on the side of a building in Dawson City, Yukon.

The whole town has an Old West feel to it.  Lots of false fronts and frontier style buildings line the dirt streets.

An old boiler, jokingly called 'Curly's Cabin'.  

The false store fronts are interesting.  This one was from the Klondike Thawing Machine Company, a company that made steam and water jets the miners used to thaw the permafrost and frozen gravel down in their mines so they could scoop out the gravel/pay dirt.

The Red Feather Saloon is touted as a good example of a restored building from the gold rush era of the late 1800's.

Lots of the old buildings in Dawson are being restored.

A patchwork of galvanized tin on the back on one building next to a log structure dating back to the gold rush era.

Old iron equipment litters a side yard of an old wooden structure from the late 1800-early 1900s in Dawson City.

Not all the buildings have stood the test of time, at least not completely straight.

Someone's home just a block from downtown.  Tall and skinny, I wonder how they keep it heated in this cold climate.  Leslie from the gold workshop told us their fire alarms go off at -60 degrees Fahrenheit as they aren't build to withstand that kind of cold.  And that isn't too uncommon up here in the winter!

The old Downtown hotel looks just like and Old West Saloon.  Its famous for its Sour Toe Cocktail.  Miners and other folks coming up here for the gold rush were referred to as "Cheechakos" until they had survived their first full winter here.  After that, they could be called "Sourdoughs".  The SourToe is a takeoff on that term.

The Sour Toe Cocktail involves a person drinking a shot of liquor with an actual mummified human toe in the glass.  Really, I'm serious!  The person's lips must touch the toe to earn a certificate.  People pay big bucks to do this and there is a fine of $2500 for biting or otherwise damaging the toe.  It is a spectacle that draws a crowd and is only administered at certain times in this bar and partakers must sign legal waivers and such to try it.  We didn't stick around for the opportunity to witness the feat from 9-11 PM Thurs-Saturday only.  Sounds too gross for me to try, but hey, at 11 PM some folks will be drunk enough to try it.

A mural on one of the buildings in Dawson City, Yukon Territory.

A giant paddle wheel at the Transportation Museum.  They also had a huge plane on a spindle outside, making it the largest wind vane in the area, if not the country.

The Keno paddlewheeler is the sister ship to the SS Klondike we saw in Whitehorse.  This is now a tourist site, too.

The front bow of the Keno river boat.

A huge mastodon tusk of ivory encircles a gold-weighing scale in a tourist shop.

Jason next to a spirit house along the bike path that follows the Yukon River in Dawson City.

The free vehicle ferry that takes people and their vehicles across the Yukon River from Dawson City to West Dawson.  You must cross the river here to follow the road that leads to the Top of the World Highway.  The river was running fast with lots of tree trunks floating down it.  The ferry had to use its mighty engines to just crab its way across without getting swept downriver.  We rode this George Black ferry across the next day to continue our adventure.

How do you go wrong with views like this?  Gorgeous scenery with no buildings, roads or people in the way.  Awesome!