Watson Lake, Teslin, Whitehorse
(posted from Backerei Coffee House, Whitehorse, YT)
(this post covers 30 June- 2 July, 2008)
----------------------------------------------------
Wednesday, 2 July-
We started off our day picking up a few items from the Wal-mart and then went into town for a walk. The weather was perfect—sunny and cool- about 60 degrees and a gentle breeze of dry northern air. Whitehorse is small enough to be walked end-to-end and we took our time, looking in the art shops, book store, downtown visitor’s center, etc. We then spent much of the afternoon in the MacBride Museum of Yukon History, learning about the historical facts of the Gold Rush of 1898.
After all the walking and standing we needed a break, so drove our south of town to Miles Canyon, where the mighty Yukon River squeezes between rock walls. This is historically the site of the Whitehorse Rapids though the Rapids were calmed quite a bit by the construction of a dam downstream. At the time the Rapids were so violent they were streaked with white tops resembling the flowing manes of many white horses, thus the town name. We took a short walk and were happy to have few bugs.
On the way back to town we toured the Yukon Government Fish Ladder but it’s too early for salmon… they’re in Alaska and headed this way but it will be a few weeks yet until they show up here. We saw a few grayling pass the viewing windows but otherwise we just checked out the facility.
We had supper in the parking lot of Rotary Park, enjoying a wonderful breeze flowing through the van. We drove downtown and thoroughly toured the streets, this time going on back into the residential neighborhoods surrounding the business district.
We then drove to the downtown visitor’s center parking lot for the evening and a nice view of the Yukon River and the shadows slowly filling the valleys of the stone hills to the north of the city. We spent the evening blogging and reading before returning to the Wal-mart for the night.
We’ve found Whitehorse a very interesting town. It’s small (about 24,000 residents) but it’s at a crossroads and there are many interesting people. Just today I saw three home-built truck campers and a home-built houseboat—you don’t see those very often.
----------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, 1 July-
We continued west and north today, bound for Teslin. The country continues to be pretty but we’re not seeing the wildlife along the roadside anymore. Gas was running low so we stopped at one of the gas station/restaurant/lodge/RV parks. As we had heard in Fort Nelson, these are somewhat cheaper than Watson Lake and BC. I enjoyed talking with the owner. His ‘hydro’ (electric power) is on the fritz, he says—something going on with the genset — his diesel generator. He didn’t have ice because his ice machine was caught in the fire when his gas station burned down last year. Seems there’s no lack of excitement. But he and his wife seemed very upbeat and were very friendly.
Teslin is largely a 189-resident Tlinget community lying on 78-mile-long Teslin Lake. The Tlingets are generally known as a coastal-Alaska First Nations people but historically there were two groups who moved inland and began a nomadic life of trapping, hunting, fishing, and berry-picking. Teslin is the home of the George Johnston Museum. George was a Tlinget man who brought the first car to Teslin in 1928 after he had a good year trapping. There were no roads at the time and George had the 1928 Chevrolet touring car barged in on one of the semi-annual steamboat runs. George had friends help him clear road in the bush and would take friends and neighbors rides for a dollar or two and then use the money to pay others to help him make a road. Eventually he had three miles of road completed. In winter, George would drive on the ice of Teslin Lake. He did have a problem getting enough fuel, though, and would sometimes fuel his car with naptha. George is best known, though, for his photography. As a young man he mail-ordered a camera, film, and processing supplies. He took his camera everywhere and made a remarkable record of ordinary Tlinget lives from the Twenties to 1942. In ’42 the Americans came in as they built the Alaska Highway. Disease decimated the tribe, the Americans treated the Tlingets badly, and George lost interest in photography. But his legacy lives on in the museum. His photos are wonderful as are the stories of George and his car.
While in the museum we heard sirens and our host said it was the town’s Canada Day Parade going to the local park. After our visit we drove to the park
We also visited the Tlinget Heritage Center in Teslin and there saw an excellent documentary on them as well as fantastic examples of their artwork… particularly masks and totem poles.
Late in the afternoon we drove on to Whitehorse, hitting town about 1700. At the Visitor’s Center we saw a poster for a film program by the local film society tonight. We saw ‘River of Life’ a nationally-funded, locally-produced documentary about a team of middle-aged breast-cancer survivors who participated (and did well) in the Yukon River Marathon, a three-day canoe race. Afterwards the film’s producer/director, Werner Wacher, and one of the women, Dawn, took questions. After the film there was a break while the next portion of the program was being set up so Labashi and I chatted at some length with Werner and Dawn. Werner has a local film production company and told us of the challenges of getting the film made and his disappointment at the lack of interest by well-known networks like Discovery Channel. He said they had lots of interest in the race and about the women participating in the race but as soon as he said the team consisted of breast-cancer survivors the reps said they couldn’t use it. They said they are an entertainment medium, not an education or inspiration medium.
Dawn and Labashi hit it off well. Dawn is a local nurse and was very interested in the work Labashi has done in breast-cancer awareness.
The second portion of the film festival was a national touring program called “Re-Generation”. The Canadian Filmmaker’s Distribution Centre commissioned seven films based on seven historic avant-garde films covering 40 years of Canadian filmmaking. Unfortunately for us, we’re not fans of the genre. While there were a few interesting moments, the program took us back to our college days of watching experimental films and failing to get the point or believing they’d have no lasting value. Same with ‘Regeneration’, for us at least.
When we exited the Old Fire Hall after the program, it was 2300 and the sun was still well above the horizon. The light was in the ‘magic hour’ but not yet sunset. Incredible.
The Visitor’s Center had told us the local Wal-mart allows overnight parking so that was our plan for the night. We were surprised to find dozens of RVs jamming the outer lot—there must have been 35 or so, by far the largest gathering we’ve seen. But we found a spot and settled in for the night. Since the Canadian Wal-marts are not open 24 hours, you don’t have the customer traffic and the forest of RVs was eerily quiet. We did have some idiot muffler-challenged buzz-bomb-kid repeatedly zooming between the RVs a few times but then things settled down.
----------------------------------------------------
Monday, 30 June-
We awoke in the night at about 0230 and realized it’s not dark outside. It looks like a moonlit-night without the shadows. Thank goodness for our blackout curtains. Our little digital thermometer said the temperature was 38 degrees (F) but we were quite comfortable.
Labashi wanted to wash her hair in our remote campsite this morning so neither of us was in any hurry to ‘stand up’ (arise) on this cooler morning. But by 0830 the temperature was in the mid-Forties and rising so we got on with a backcountry shampoo party. I warmed up a few cups of water with our little butane cooker and that worked great but came up a little short (I TOLD her we need to buy that spiffy-cool little Lodi portable on-demand propane water heater but NO we don’t need it, she said). Ever the trooper, she rinsed with icy-cold water. “That was refreshing!” she said through her blue lips (just kidding about the blue lips—but she did say the cold water made her numb).
We pulled out onto the Alaska Highway and immediately saw eight bison. They had been feeding less than 75 meters from our campsite but we hadn’t seen them because of trees.
We drove for an hour and a half, crossing from British Columbia into the Yukon Territory. As we neared Watson Lake, we opted for an early roadside lunch around 1100. In town we stopped at the ‘Signpost Forest’, a Watson Lake landmark. The town planted hundreds of posts for passers-by to put up signs, preferably signs about their home towns and at last count (2006) there reportedly were over 61,000 signs in the ‘forest’. Cool idea.
The visitor’s center was a good one. We enjoyed talking with a woman behind the visitor’s desk who had come to the area in the mid-Sixties and stayed. She was a University student here for a summer job. She and her girlfriend ended up falling in love with the area and with two local boys. They married, raised kids, now have grandkids, and both have recently lost their husbands but say they will never leave the Yukon.
Our friend gave us tons and tons of good maps and handouts. We then toured an excellent museum display about the building of the Alaska Highway in 1942, all accompanied by fresh photos we’ve not seen before.
We then did a bit of shopping at the local supermarket. We had been told prices were very high in Watson Lake but they didn’t seem that bad for many things. Water was one exception—a gallon of bottled drinking water is $5 and ice was $3 for what was supposed to be a five-pound bag but looked like two handfuls of motel-ice-machine cubes.
We visited the Northern Lights Interpretive Center and saw an hour’s worth of programs about the massive distances of space travel and about the Northern lights, all in a large planetarium setting. The show wasn’t badly designed but could use an equipment update as well as newer and sharper photos of deep-space objects and high-def video of Northern lights.
We had asked the visitor’s center lady about wi-fi and she had directed us to the Belvedere Hotel coffee shop. We had a great veggie wrap (for $7.50—not bad) while I updated the blog and Labashi made a Skype call to her Mom.
We drove out of town to Liard Recreation Area for a walk. The mile-plus trail winds through sandy-floored pine forest (which we joked looks just like parts of the New Jersey Pine Barrens), then descends to the wildly-running river. Everything went well until the descent took us into mozzy territory. We had just come upon a full moose skeleton when we started noticing a few, then a half-dozen, then a dozen mosquitoes around each of us, mostly around our legs. We had just bought some repellent at the supermarket so hurriedly put that on and it worked pretty well. But by the time we reached the river we were both taking some bites, me on my arms, Labashi on the back of her head, but we were fine. Nevertheless we didn’t tarry on our way back until we were up out of mozzy canyon.
After a break back at the van we headed west out of Watson Lake. The government of Yukon Territory has built campgrounds around the territory which charge a flat fee of $12. They have primitive campsites (no hookups), outhouses, hand-pump for water, and some have a screened-in kitchen area.
We stopped at Big Creek Government Campground to look around and it seemed quite pleasant. But with gas over $6.00 a gallon we need to save where we can (and so far we’ve not paid for camping). After we left the visitor’s center, I had walked back in to ask about Territorial rules on dispersed camping and camping in roadside pull-offs. Unlike most of the US, it’s ok to stop overnight in most roadside pull-offs and picnic areas. One of the clerks suggested several other possibilities, typically sited near rivers or creeks where fisherman stay when the fish are running. One was near a ‘transport rest stop’, i.e., a rest-stop for truckers who need to rest before exceeding their allotted maximum hours. If the informal area proved a bust, we could retreat to that area as a backup.
We found the informal area handily and it was fine for us- we were all alone in a field of wild-flowers with views of mountains- one with remnants of snow on it--- to both sides. We had a late supper and spent the rest of the evening reading and blogging. We pick up so much material at visitor’s centers that our work is cut out for us.
=========== end of post ==========
(posted from Backerei Coffee House, Whitehorse, YT)
(this post covers 30 June- 2 July, 2008)
----------------------------------------------------
Wednesday, 2 July-
We started off our day picking up a few items from the Wal-mart and then went into town for a walk. The weather was perfect—sunny and cool- about 60 degrees and a gentle breeze of dry northern air. Whitehorse is small enough to be walked end-to-end and we took our time, looking in the art shops, book store, downtown visitor’s center, etc. We then spent much of the afternoon in the MacBride Museum of Yukon History, learning about the historical facts of the Gold Rush of 1898.
After all the walking and standing we needed a break, so drove our south of town to Miles Canyon, where the mighty Yukon River squeezes between rock walls. This is historically the site of the Whitehorse Rapids though the Rapids were calmed quite a bit by the construction of a dam downstream. At the time the Rapids were so violent they were streaked with white tops resembling the flowing manes of many white horses, thus the town name. We took a short walk and were happy to have few bugs.
On the way back to town we toured the Yukon Government Fish Ladder but it’s too early for salmon… they’re in Alaska and headed this way but it will be a few weeks yet until they show up here. We saw a few grayling pass the viewing windows but otherwise we just checked out the facility.
We had supper in the parking lot of Rotary Park, enjoying a wonderful breeze flowing through the van. We drove downtown and thoroughly toured the streets, this time going on back into the residential neighborhoods surrounding the business district.
We then drove to the downtown visitor’s center parking lot for the evening and a nice view of the Yukon River and the shadows slowly filling the valleys of the stone hills to the north of the city. We spent the evening blogging and reading before returning to the Wal-mart for the night.
We’ve found Whitehorse a very interesting town. It’s small (about 24,000 residents) but it’s at a crossroads and there are many interesting people. Just today I saw three home-built truck campers and a home-built houseboat—you don’t see those very often.
----------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, 1 July-
We continued west and north today, bound for Teslin. The country continues to be pretty but we’re not seeing the wildlife along the roadside anymore. Gas was running low so we stopped at one of the gas station/restaurant/lodge/RV parks. As we had heard in Fort Nelson, these are somewhat cheaper than Watson Lake and BC. I enjoyed talking with the owner. His ‘hydro’ (electric power) is on the fritz, he says—something going on with the genset — his diesel generator. He didn’t have ice because his ice machine was caught in the fire when his gas station burned down last year. Seems there’s no lack of excitement. But he and his wife seemed very upbeat and were very friendly.
Teslin is largely a 189-resident Tlinget community lying on 78-mile-long Teslin Lake. The Tlingets are generally known as a coastal-Alaska First Nations people but historically there were two groups who moved inland and began a nomadic life of trapping, hunting, fishing, and berry-picking. Teslin is the home of the George Johnston Museum. George was a Tlinget man who brought the first car to Teslin in 1928 after he had a good year trapping. There were no roads at the time and George had the 1928 Chevrolet touring car barged in on one of the semi-annual steamboat runs. George had friends help him clear road in the bush and would take friends and neighbors rides for a dollar or two and then use the money to pay others to help him make a road. Eventually he had three miles of road completed. In winter, George would drive on the ice of Teslin Lake. He did have a problem getting enough fuel, though, and would sometimes fuel his car with naptha. George is best known, though, for his photography. As a young man he mail-ordered a camera, film, and processing supplies. He took his camera everywhere and made a remarkable record of ordinary Tlinget lives from the Twenties to 1942. In ’42 the Americans came in as they built the Alaska Highway. Disease decimated the tribe, the Americans treated the Tlingets badly, and George lost interest in photography. But his legacy lives on in the museum. His photos are wonderful as are the stories of George and his car.
While in the museum we heard sirens and our host said it was the town’s Canada Day Parade going to the local park. After our visit we drove to the park
We also visited the Tlinget Heritage Center in Teslin and there saw an excellent documentary on them as well as fantastic examples of their artwork… particularly masks and totem poles.
Late in the afternoon we drove on to Whitehorse, hitting town about 1700. At the Visitor’s Center we saw a poster for a film program by the local film society tonight. We saw ‘River of Life’ a nationally-funded, locally-produced documentary about a team of middle-aged breast-cancer survivors who participated (and did well) in the Yukon River Marathon, a three-day canoe race. Afterwards the film’s producer/director, Werner Wacher, and one of the women, Dawn, took questions. After the film there was a break while the next portion of the program was being set up so Labashi and I chatted at some length with Werner and Dawn. Werner has a local film production company and told us of the challenges of getting the film made and his disappointment at the lack of interest by well-known networks like Discovery Channel. He said they had lots of interest in the race and about the women participating in the race but as soon as he said the team consisted of breast-cancer survivors the reps said they couldn’t use it. They said they are an entertainment medium, not an education or inspiration medium.
Dawn and Labashi hit it off well. Dawn is a local nurse and was very interested in the work Labashi has done in breast-cancer awareness.
The second portion of the film festival was a national touring program called “Re-Generation”. The Canadian Filmmaker’s Distribution Centre commissioned seven films based on seven historic avant-garde films covering 40 years of Canadian filmmaking. Unfortunately for us, we’re not fans of the genre. While there were a few interesting moments, the program took us back to our college days of watching experimental films and failing to get the point or believing they’d have no lasting value. Same with ‘Regeneration’, for us at least.
When we exited the Old Fire Hall after the program, it was 2300 and the sun was still well above the horizon. The light was in the ‘magic hour’ but not yet sunset. Incredible.
The Visitor’s Center had told us the local Wal-mart allows overnight parking so that was our plan for the night. We were surprised to find dozens of RVs jamming the outer lot—there must have been 35 or so, by far the largest gathering we’ve seen. But we found a spot and settled in for the night. Since the Canadian Wal-marts are not open 24 hours, you don’t have the customer traffic and the forest of RVs was eerily quiet. We did have some idiot muffler-challenged buzz-bomb-kid repeatedly zooming between the RVs a few times but then things settled down.
----------------------------------------------------
Monday, 30 June-
We awoke in the night at about 0230 and realized it’s not dark outside. It looks like a moonlit-night without the shadows. Thank goodness for our blackout curtains. Our little digital thermometer said the temperature was 38 degrees (F) but we were quite comfortable.
Labashi wanted to wash her hair in our remote campsite this morning so neither of us was in any hurry to ‘stand up’ (arise) on this cooler morning. But by 0830 the temperature was in the mid-Forties and rising so we got on with a backcountry shampoo party. I warmed up a few cups of water with our little butane cooker and that worked great but came up a little short (I TOLD her we need to buy that spiffy-cool little Lodi portable on-demand propane water heater but NO we don’t need it, she said). Ever the trooper, she rinsed with icy-cold water. “That was refreshing!” she said through her blue lips (just kidding about the blue lips—but she did say the cold water made her numb).
We pulled out onto the Alaska Highway and immediately saw eight bison. They had been feeding less than 75 meters from our campsite but we hadn’t seen them because of trees.
We drove for an hour and a half, crossing from British Columbia into the Yukon Territory. As we neared Watson Lake, we opted for an early roadside lunch around 1100. In town we stopped at the ‘Signpost Forest’, a Watson Lake landmark. The town planted hundreds of posts for passers-by to put up signs, preferably signs about their home towns and at last count (2006) there reportedly were over 61,000 signs in the ‘forest’. Cool idea.
The visitor’s center was a good one. We enjoyed talking with a woman behind the visitor’s desk who had come to the area in the mid-Sixties and stayed. She was a University student here for a summer job. She and her girlfriend ended up falling in love with the area and with two local boys. They married, raised kids, now have grandkids, and both have recently lost their husbands but say they will never leave the Yukon.
Our friend gave us tons and tons of good maps and handouts. We then toured an excellent museum display about the building of the Alaska Highway in 1942, all accompanied by fresh photos we’ve not seen before.
We then did a bit of shopping at the local supermarket. We had been told prices were very high in Watson Lake but they didn’t seem that bad for many things. Water was one exception—a gallon of bottled drinking water is $5 and ice was $3 for what was supposed to be a five-pound bag but looked like two handfuls of motel-ice-machine cubes.
We visited the Northern Lights Interpretive Center and saw an hour’s worth of programs about the massive distances of space travel and about the Northern lights, all in a large planetarium setting. The show wasn’t badly designed but could use an equipment update as well as newer and sharper photos of deep-space objects and high-def video of Northern lights.
We had asked the visitor’s center lady about wi-fi and she had directed us to the Belvedere Hotel coffee shop. We had a great veggie wrap (for $7.50—not bad) while I updated the blog and Labashi made a Skype call to her Mom.
We drove out of town to Liard Recreation Area for a walk. The mile-plus trail winds through sandy-floored pine forest (which we joked looks just like parts of the New Jersey Pine Barrens), then descends to the wildly-running river. Everything went well until the descent took us into mozzy territory. We had just come upon a full moose skeleton when we started noticing a few, then a half-dozen, then a dozen mosquitoes around each of us, mostly around our legs. We had just bought some repellent at the supermarket so hurriedly put that on and it worked pretty well. But by the time we reached the river we were both taking some bites, me on my arms, Labashi on the back of her head, but we were fine. Nevertheless we didn’t tarry on our way back until we were up out of mozzy canyon.
After a break back at the van we headed west out of Watson Lake. The government of Yukon Territory has built campgrounds around the territory which charge a flat fee of $12. They have primitive campsites (no hookups), outhouses, hand-pump for water, and some have a screened-in kitchen area.
We stopped at Big Creek Government Campground to look around and it seemed quite pleasant. But with gas over $6.00 a gallon we need to save where we can (and so far we’ve not paid for camping). After we left the visitor’s center, I had walked back in to ask about Territorial rules on dispersed camping and camping in roadside pull-offs. Unlike most of the US, it’s ok to stop overnight in most roadside pull-offs and picnic areas. One of the clerks suggested several other possibilities, typically sited near rivers or creeks where fisherman stay when the fish are running. One was near a ‘transport rest stop’, i.e., a rest-stop for truckers who need to rest before exceeding their allotted maximum hours. If the informal area proved a bust, we could retreat to that area as a backup.
We found the informal area handily and it was fine for us- we were all alone in a field of wild-flowers with views of mountains- one with remnants of snow on it--- to both sides. We had a late supper and spent the rest of the evening reading and blogging. We pick up so much material at visitor’s centers that our work is cut out for us.
=========== end of post ==========
posted by Bezabor&Labashi | 23:59
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home