Sun in Dawson, Stuck in Whitehorse

Dawson City was a welcome relief after our unsettling drive on Top of the World highway. The campground was muddy from all the rain, expensive and not particularly pleasant, but the day after we arrived, the sun showed up and the temperature got up to the low 60’s. 

We liked Dawson. It’s small, very walkable and perched on the swift, muddy Yukon. They have tried to retain the flavor of the original boomtown with restored period buildings, dirt streets and national historic sites. The visitor center has helpful information, videos and exhibits. The National Park service does a wonderful job interpreting the town and various sites. 

We visited the SS Keno sternwheeler, a national historic site. 

We went on an interesting walking tour of the town in which the guide told us "weird and unusual stories" of Dawson and let us inside several historic buildings not open to the public. 

We went on a tour of the Palace Grand theatre and learned its history and stories. 

We visited Dredge No. 4, which is located eight miles out of town in an active gold mining area with maybe 90 claims being worked. Huge piles of rocks called “tailing” piles line the road from when the dredge was operational. Many of the piles have bird houses on wooden poles stuck in them. 

During the hour-long tour we walked through all four levels of the dredge. The dredge stopped working in 1960 when it sank in the mud of Bonanza Creek. It was eventually recovered in the 1990’s. 

A mile or so farther down Bonanza Creek road is where it all began at the Discovery Claim National Historic site. Plaques along a short trail describe early gold-mining methods and how the Klondike Gold Rush got started. 

Robert Service cabin

We were lucky to be in Dawson for a free “authors” event, which started with a presentation in the cabin where Jack London lived. The presenter talked about the year Jack London was in the north, and how it inspired many of his stories and novels. After that was another entertaining presentation at the nearby Robert Service cabin about the poet’s life and years spent in Dawson. 

We drove five miles to the top of Midnight Dome where we got a great view of the entire town, the Yukon and surrounding mountains. 

After two days in Dawson, we headed south to Whitehorse, where we planned to get our flat tire fixed, so we’d have a spare. It’s about 335 miles away, so we stopped halfway for the night. There was quite a lot of gravel road, some patches, some for a few miles, the rest asphalt or sealcoat. We were surprised at the amount of traffic headed north, presumably to Dawson. It was Friday and the first day of an annual event called “Discovery Days”. 

When we got to the bridge before Selkirk, we stopped at an overlook. A bicyclist was there, smoking a cigarette. He looked like he’d seen a lot of sun. We said “Hi” and then proceeded to the campground. It had no facilities of any kind. Even the trash hadn’t been emptied, but it was late and there wasn’t really a good alternative. We picked a spot as far from the other campers (tenters) as possible (because of our loud generator). The bicyclist we had just met showed up, and I talked with him a bit more. He was from Holland and over a period of three months had ridden from Vancouver up the Alaska highway to Alaska and pretty much the same places we had been and even more and also Top of the Highway. I asked him if he was enjoying himself. He said yes, otherwise he wouldn’t do it. He wasn’t doing it for any other reason than the enjoyment, and if he got tired of it, he would just catch a bus back to Vancouver. 

The next day the rain returned, more or less. Each time we stopped to take a hike, it was raining. We stopped at a viewpoint of Five Finger Rapids, one of the rapids the Klondike stampeders had to run. 

At another turnout we looked at the ruins of the Montague roadhouse and interpretive plaques about conglomerate rock (or puddingrock). 

We got into Whitehorse on Saturday around 4 and immediately went to a tire store. They told us our flat tire was unfixable. So we went to another one. They said they could fix it (based on David’s description) but not until Tuesday because it was a three-day holiday weekend. We went to a third store, and they said they could fix it if we gave it to them immediately. David got the tire out from beneath the truck. They examined it and decided it wasn’t reparable (because it was a large lateral tear), but they could sell us two new tires. 

We left and went to WalMart and parked. David decided the tire probably wasn’t reparable after all. He walked back over to the second tire store to price their tires. They didn’t have any in stock but told him to go to the first tire store we had gone to. David returned, unhooked the truck and drove back to the first store. They had a tire that would work and would open at 7:30 am on Tuesday on a first come first serve basis, so we had to wait two more days. 

Whitehorse isn’t a bad place to be. It’s Yukon’s capital and largest city, with a population of about 26,500 and has plenty of facilities. It’s a pleasant town on the Yukon River that we had visited on our way north. It gave us a chance to catch our breath, stock up on groceries and find a place to get online, (which actually was a bit difficult). At the visitor’s center we learned that Discovery Day is a holiday (celebrating the discovery of Klondike gold in the Yukon) in the Yukon only, not the rest of the country, and that the festivities were happening in Dawson, not in Whitehorse. (Perhaps we should have stayed a couple extra days in Dawson.) 

On Monday the rain stopped for awhile, and we walked a couple hours on the Millennium Trail, a pleasant path that follows the Yukon river from the Klondike sternwheeler to the fish ladder, across a couple footbridges and also to a small island loop trail through berry bushes. 
Tuesday morning we dashed over to the tire store and were second in line. They were doing construction on the road next to the tire store. It was very muddy. The parking area was muddy. We bought one truck tire, and they mounted one trailer tire, which we had brought from home with us. (Total cost was $360, about $80 more than what we would have paid at home.) So then we were on our way. It was about 46^o and raining. It rained most of the day, was foggy and got down to about 43^o. A guy at the gas station working on his car said it had been a cold and wet summer. We hoped for better weather south.