| Seward, Alaska
Last night after we got back to the campground from our cruise, we met our friends Jan and Don Dewitt, who had driven to Alaska with a camping caravan. We had planned ahead to meet here when their caravan got in. This morning they went on a tour of Seward with the caravan group, and we cleaned house in the camper and grocery shopped. Then this afternoon, we four went into Seward for the rest of the day together. We were all searching for gifts and souvenirs; it was our objective for the day. We strolled along the waterfront boardwalk, watched some professional fish cleaners at work, then got down to the serious business of shopping. When we had done the shops near the wharf, we drove downtown and continued. By six o'clock we were shopped out and ready to eat.
Dewitts had heard of a good restaurant that advertised “cheap beer and lousy food.” We found it on a side road out of town, and it was unique. An Alaskan cache, the little log cabins built on top of long legs to keep bears and critters out of stored food, marked the restaurant and it had the sign nailed to it, “Cheap beer and lousy food.” The restaurant was a log cabin in the woods - what isn't a log cabin in the woods up here - that specialized in salmon bakes. Bob ordered reindeer sausage; the rest of us had various kinds of baked salmon, all delicious. The food was good, but the beer wasn't cheap. We each paid four dollars for a pint of draft stout.
By the time we had finished the meal, it was after eight and we were all tired. So we just came back to the campground and called it a night. Tomorrow they'll go on the boat tour, while we do some things in Seward. We stopped at the top of Overlook Trail. A slope of lateral moraine fell steeply from the edge of the trail to a roaring stream of meltwater tumbling down the moraine from Exit Glacier. The blue wall of the glacier was right in front of us. It seemed like it would be a simple thing to scramble down the slope, go to the glacier, and climb around a bit on it. There was even a faint trail across the gravel, probably used by park scientists. But ropes and warning signs of slide danger and falling ice restrained me. I took lots of photos instead.
When we first got to Exit Glacier, part of Kenai Fjords National Park, we took a walk with the ranger across historic terminal moraines. Those are areas where the shrinking glacier used to end, from 1951 when they started measuring, until we arrived at the present foot of the glacier. Then the ranger turned us loose to explore at will. We climbed up the Overlook Trail to get as close to the glacier as possible. While we lingered at the top, we got to talking to a couple from North Dakota. We told them about where we'd been in North Dakota, and they suggested some back roads to try as we go back towards Florida. We took their picture for them in front of the glacier, and they took ours for us. Then they walked on down the trail and out of our world. It's these chance contacts that enrich our travels and our lives.
Eventually we made our way down to the bottom of the glacier where the many meltwater streams flowed out to join, divide, and join again as the braided Resurrection River. Broad gravel flats divided the channels of the river, and some children played in the icy streams and buried their feet in the glacial mud.
Populations of sea otters, harbor seals, and sea lions have eroded for a number of years now. The Sea Life Research Center is trying to find out why. They are studying black oyster catchers (a bird), sea anemones, and salmon, among others. Large tanks of Dungeness crabs were under close scrutiny to understand their reproduction cycle, and they have a fund-raising campaign right now to build a special tank for jellyfish for study.
We listened to whales, guessed the answers to marine questions, and watched video clips. Huge viewing tanks held harbor seals and an immense Steller sea lion. I had no idea they were so big! At the touch tables I petted four kinds of sea anemones, a sea cucumber, and various sea stars. It was a neat experience, especially the sea anemones. Their waving tentacles were so soft I could hardly feel them. There were sea urchins, too, but I already knew they were prickly. The water was so cold that my hand ached from just dipping it in to feel the animals. The staff member overseeing the touch tanks caught my Mackinac Island hat, and cheered for Michigan. She is from Grass Lake, and working out an internship from Michigan State University. She was proud to tell us that her internship had been renewed for an additional two months; however, she was just a tiny bit homesick, too. But Alaska! What a great experience for a small town Michigan girl to have.
From the Sea Life Research Center we went down to the Kenai Fjords National Park Visitor Center on the Seward wharf. Our express purpose was to see their video show. The show we saw, White Winds, journaled the trip of three people, two men and a woman, across the Harding Ice Field. The ice field covers most of Kenai Fjords National Park and spawns myriad glaciers, like the Aianak Glacier we saw on the boat trip. Their journey on cross-country skiis, pulling pulks, took seven days. The snow was compact enough to dig blocks for a wall to protect their tents at night from the wailing winds. What an adventure! They left the ice field by way of the Exit Glacier, where we were this morning. They said that the glacier was the hardest part of the journey because of the dangerous crevasses.
Glacial crevasses are scary. They can be miles deep. I am reading John Muir's (founder of the Sierra Club) journal of his travels in Alaska to study glaciers in 1897-1890. The man walked all over glaciers. He led a charmed life, and had the constitution of an iron man. He carried only his notebook, no mountaineering gear, and a few biscuits in his pocket.
We went back to the campground for supper and to meet our friends, who had done the Kenai Fjords boat tour that we did two days ago. Before they got back, we sat for a quiet half hour by Stony Creek, a glacial silt-loaded rushing stream that bordered the campground, and contemplated the infinite. Our friends returned, and a glass of wine and pleasant time visiting carried away the rest of the evening. The drive on Seward Highway from Seward to Anchorage is another scenic overload. Ranges of green and gray mountains frame both sides of the way. Each turn of the road is a new vista. Often long lakes lie or deep river valleys plunge between road and mountains. Spruce and aspen forest lines the road, rims the lakes, blankets the valleys and creeps up the lower mountain slopes. Green brush and grasses above the timberline disappear into the brown and gray rock Alpine summits.
Fifty miles south of Anchorage we turned off for the Portage Glacier Visitor Center in Chugach National Forest. We drove from sunlight into a low overcast that hung just over the snowy mountains ringing glacier-fed lake Portage Lake. Glaciers flowed down several mountains, while cirque glaciers filled bowls on others. Meltwater streams were white streaks down the mountains on their way to the glassy lake. It was sixty degrees, but the icy winds swooping down off the glaciers breathed a deep cold. We put on warm coats to walk from the parking lot to the visitor center. The visitor center is a fortress-like building of unadorned cement. The whole world was gray again - and cold with a wild icy beauty.
The visitor center was quite busy. There were a number of interactive exhibits we played with for a while. The theater was elegant, like a commercial movie theater. White Winds, the movie, was shown on a wide screen, the width of a wall of the room. At the end, the screen rose and the red theater curtains behind it parted to reveal a window wall filled with the outside mountains and glaciers. The effect was stunning.
The sun was out, but it wasn't particularly warmer when we left the visitor center. We had lunch with a mountain view in the parking lot. The camper was cold inside, so we warmed up some leftover coffee from breakfast to have with our kippered herring and crackers.
The Portage Glacier is nearly at the terminus of Turnagain Arm, a forty-mile long narrow bay of the sea that extends from Cook Inlet clear inland to Anchorage. You have to go through Anchorage to get anywhere on the Kenai Peninsula, just as you have to go through Tok to get in and out of interior Alaska if you are driving. I described Turnagain Arm when we drove it a couple of weeks ago, and it still was awe-inspiring.
Again we arrived with the tide out, and mud flats ran miles from the mountainside road we drove to a range of peaks on the other side of the arm. Other areas were flooded still, but the mud flats were more interesting with pools of water and gravel bars. I said we were on a mountainside road. That is not quite correct. The road twists and winds almost at sea level along the foot of a mountain range. There are myriad pull-offs and camera op spots along the way where you can stop and get a good look at the scenic flats and farther mountains.
Just beyond Anchorage we turned onto the Glenn Highway, which will take us back east. Thirty miles down Glenn Highway is Palmer, where we are camped tonight, at the same campground we stayed in some weeks ago. Molly Musk Ox, all of five inches tall, furry and soft, has found a home on top of our microwave. I say she's Molly because she has no horny plate on her forehead. Bob insists he's Muskie Musk Ox and is just a baby, so the horny plate hasn't developed yet. That could be true. We petted a one-year old musk ox today, Sparky, and he had only soft hair on his forehead. At one year old, he was the size of a Shetland pony. Sparky lives with forty-six other musk oxen on the Musk Ox Farm, one of just three domesticated musk ox farms worldwide. The other two are research facilities. This one near Palmer is a private business, though I suspect it is government subsidized. Thousands of musk oxen roam the circumpolar Arctic regions of northern Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and Asia, where subsistence hunters depend on them. The farm raises the musk oxen for the quiviat (pronunciation), the soft insulating underhairs that can keep an animal warm down to a hundred below zero. Quiviat is softer than vicuna and warmer, eight times warmer, than wool. The quiviat is hand-combed off the oxen in spring and sent to a mill to be spun. The spun yarn is sold to an Eskimo Co-op headquartered in Anchorage. The yarn is then sent out to knitters in remote Eskimo villages, who sell their finished item to the co-op. It's a program designed to give the Eskimos some cash income for things like eyeglasses, tools, and foods to supplement their diet of seals and fish.
Quiviat garments are all a pale chocolate brown, the natural color of the hair. They are thin, soft, lacy, unbelievably warm - and very expensive. A knitted cap is $75, a scarf, $200.
We viewed the shaggy oxen, who have no musk gland and are more sheep than bovine, through heavy wire fences. They tend to be snappish, especially the nursing mothers. The mothers are not even nice to their calves. The bulls, well, they're bulls. They are always looking for a fight and have to be penned away from the rest of the herd. The steers are docile, but they want to play and have broken parts of their herders in their enthusiasm. Sparky was in a pen with two others, another one-year old and a small two-year old. Sparky and the other one-year old were rejected by their mothers and had to be hand fed. So they think humans are mothers. We could pet him and scratch him behind his ears. He liked that. The small two-year old was taking too much of a beating in the pecking order, so was separated from the others for his own safety. Sixty degrees is Hot! Hot! Hot! for a musk ox. They are penned during the day where they can rest and have lots of water. At night they are released into large meadows where they wander at will and pretend they are back roaming the night tundra under waves of boreal lights.
Lunch was at a Subway with about half the people in Palmer. Then we went shopping in a Salvation Army Thrift Shop for that elusive aluminum drip coffee pot. We came out with a new computer bag, sandals for Bob, a sweater for me, and a Zip Disk storage rack, but no coffee pot.
After all the fun and games, we toughed out the real world of grocery shopping and laundry for the rest of the day. Today we made the run from Palmer to Tok, 290 miles. “Two hundred and ninety miles?” you say. “That's not far.”
Ah, but this is Alaska. Alaska is steep, winding mountain roads, stretches of gravel and road construction, and two lanes all the way.
Even though we drove Glenn Highway before from Valdez to Kenai, it was more scenic than we remembered. For miles it follows the King River, a huge braided river on a moraine that is sometimes miles across. The way climbs up a ledge carved out of the mountainsides far above the river, then winds down to river level, only to climb again.
We eventually moved away from the river into a high plateau. Spruce spires were scattered across the tundra, and small lakes reflected the morning sunshine. Granite cliffs, long scree slopes, and sharp mountain peaks outlined the horizon. Twice we saw cabins off in the distance on the tundra, homes surrounded by surreal beauty and in true isolation. The slope down from the tundra was so gradual we hardly realized it, but we could read the altitude along the road. The spruce along the way got more dense until we were in a taiga forest. Farther along willows appeared, and fireweed. Then finally there were aspen making a yellow show among the dark pines. Fall is coming. It's mid-August and the aspen on the mountainsides have already turned color. The fireweed blossoms are gone, and the grassy meadows are yellow. It's time for Florida sunbirds to turn south to America.
Alaskans, particularly those born and raised here, do not call the contiguous states the “Lower Forty-eight” very often. They call it, curiously, “America.”
“Someday, maybe, I'll go down to America.”
But not many do. The travelers on the Alaska Highway are from “America” and the world. Few are Alaskans. They stay close to the land.
We pulled into the campground in Tok at four in the afternoon in eighty-plus degree temperatures. It was in the eighties when we were here in mid-July. This is the only place that has had temps above seventy-three since we left Ohio in early June. Nearly everywhere we've toured has been in the fifties and sixties during the days. Tok has to be the hottest place in Alaska this summer.
One contributing factor is the wildfires. They are still burning just northeast of here and we can see the columns of smoke in the sky. In fact, there is a wall of visible smoke all around the east and north of us. But we get very little smell of it, because the winds from the south are keeping the smoke away from Tok. We went to hear the fellows in the Holstein hats play and sing again tonight, and they said two days ago you could hardly see or breathe here. May that warm south breeze just keep on blowing! Of course, for the fire fighting, no wind at all would be better. I yanked t-shirts, sweatshirts, pile jackets, and pile vests back and forth on hanging racks and pawed through piles of them on shelves. In Bob's eyes, it is de rigueur to have a souvenir t-shirt from each place we visit. I hadn't got an Alaska one yet. This was our last day in Alaska; it was now or never.
There are four souvenir/gift shops strung along the Alaska Highway in Tok. We spent the morning rambling around in the two biggest ones. One of them had a novel incentive, fifteen minutes on their computer if you purchased something. I did and I did. I purchased some moose Christmas tree ornaments and checked my email.
After lunch in the camper, I walked up to the campground office to pick up some postcards. I smelled smoke when I stepped out of Little Moby. By the time I got back into the camper my chest was burning from inhaling it. The wind had changed. Someone outside the camper called, “Shut everything and turn on the air conditioners.” We did that tout de suite.
Bob finished writing his postcards and is curled up in the bench seat across the table from me for a nap. I don't know how he can be comfortable all scrunched up on that seat, but I guess a determined napper can sleep anywhere.
My earlier game plan for the afternoon was take an hour's walk at four o'clock, followed by a splash in the shower. We are going out for dinner for our last evening in Alaska at six. We picked the restaurant while shopping this morning, and I even decided what I was going to have - smoked salmon Caesar salad. Well, scratch the walk. That isn't going to happen. I wrote this journal, finished some email responses, and wrote postcards yesterday afternoon. It grew darker outside. The sun disappeared into the smoke. The campground, as far as I could see out the trailer window, was deserted of people. Gray haze blurred the RVs; the only sounds were the roar of air conditioners. My chest pain got worse and my throat got sore from the amount of smoke still leaking into Little Moby. We were imprisoned in the camper and conditions were getting worse. I woke Bob at four o'clock. At four forty-five we pulled out of Tok and headed for the Yukon border, ninety miles away. We didn't know where we'd end up, but we were getting out of Tok while we could. Visibility on the road was a quarter a mile or less. The world was wrapped in cottony gray. Bob had on both the car radio and the CB radio hoping to get wildfire updates. I heard a faint voice say “smoke” and “border” on the CB. Bob turned up the volume. There was nothing, not even static. Then finally someone said, “We'll just have to battle our way to the border.” After that, there was silence.
We already had nerve ends sticking out and quivering from trying to drive in smoke conditions much worse than we expected. That little comment was helpful. I had tied a wet handkerchief over my face so I could breathe better. Bob didn't want to do that; he just sucked on hard candy to keep his throat moist. The van air was conditioner running on recirculating air.
We crept along through the strange, smoke-enveloped world. The sun was a small red disk that gave off little light. Roadside spruce lines faded off into grayness, and mountains were completely lost.
Fifty-two miles from Tok we were stopped and warned that there were firefighters and equipment in the road ahead for the next three miles. We crawled past trucks and a few firefighters. One fellow had dropped his yellow coat on the ground and stood at the roadside eating his supper out of a black metal lunch bucket. He waved as we went by. We waved back to him as we carried on into the endless gray.
When we finally made it to Canadian customs, we assured the official-looking fellow at the kiosk window that we weren't carrying firearms or related to any terrorists. He waved us onward. We bade farewell to Alaska and hello to Yukon Territory, still enveloped in gray clouds. I was disappointed. I had assumed that by the time we got as far south as the Canadian border, the smoke would be gone. Wrong. It had traveled with us and now was being joined by smoke from wildfires in the Yukon. We determined to press on until we were free of it.
Not far from the border we rolled out onto the first stretch of a couple of hundred miles of road construction in the Yukon. Dust blew up behind us in huge clouds. There were no lane lines, and you had to guess where the edge of the road was. They do have orange flags on washouts, though, so you won't end up in a lake or the muskeg.
We knew that construction was there. We drove through it last June on the way up, and turned Little Moby and BlueVan into dust statues. It was worse this time. More asphalt had been torn up and made into a gravel wasteland. We not only had smoke to deal with, but also the billows of dust and ricocheting gravel stones from oncoming traffic, sparse through it was.
At seven we pulled off the road at a restaurant, the only one for miles. It was a local place, rather trashy looking inside and out as many of the roadside “lodges” are up here. This is because they have to keep on hand anything that might be useful for makeshift repairs, replacements, or just the business of living. You can't run over to the hardware store out here when you need something. But, as also happens, the food there was hot, fresh, and good. We needed that pick-me-up. Bob had two cups of black coffee to keep him going. I was sailing on nerves and allergy inhalers.
We bounced and banged at thirty-five miles an hour over miles and miles of washboard, slugged through new gravel, and swooped over rolling frost humps where there was still asphalt. The gray world around us darkened into night. We couldn't pull off the gravel path; there was no way of knowing what lay beyond the range of our headlights. Finally, after midnight, we spied a sparkle of light ahead of us in the unremitting darkness. Whatever it was, we were stopping.
Begorrah, if it wasn't an all-night gas station with people on duty and campsites in back. We could have hugged the bearded, potbellied fellow standing outside an open service garage door, we were so happy to find a secure place for the night with communications (radio) for fire and road conditions. There was still smoke, but not as strong as farther north. We had driven 190 tough miles, one step at a time. We knew it was morning because it was light out, though still smoky gray with a faded sun. Winter had slid in a teaser again overnight, for it was only thirty-six degrees when we pulled out of the campground at seven o'clock, after a quick bowl of oatmeal.
The ride down to Whitehorse, capital city of Yukon Territory, was more pleasant than yesterday's. The landscape was still hazy, and there were long, rough sections in the road. One part, along Kluane Lake, was the roughest of all, and seemed to go on forever. There were rocks sticking up, myriad potholes, and corduroy in between. There were no recognizable edges to the road again, and certainly no lanes. We just drove where the going looked easiest, and when we met someone else, both vehicles had to move over into the really rough surface in order to pass each other in clouds of dust.
The smoke wasn't as dense as yesterday, and the hazy sunlight was brighter. Though the mountains were hidden or shadowy silhouettes on the sky, we could enjoy the small braided rivers we crossed, the meadows and muskeg, and the autumn colors of the aspen along the way.
We stopped at a little old bridge that was built in 1927 over Canyon Creek on the first road to Alaska in that part of the Yukon, long before the Highway. Interpretive signage told the story of the bridge. Along the Alaska Highway and in Alaska there is a wealth of interpretive signs in pullovers and rustic rest stops. There is no way a person could stop at all of them, but we did read as many as possible, all very interesting.
Another rest stop we paused for today had a little deck and several signs. It overlooked burned-over land from a fire in the fifties. The land there was recovering very slowly. In fifty-odd years there were only a few mature trees that had regrown. Black spires of burned trees still rose like skeletons from the low brush.
Whitehorse, even though it is the capital of Yukon Territory, is a pleasant small town along the great Yukon River. Most of the government offices are in one building. Another building houses the justice department. The Yukon runs long to frozen wilderness; Whitehorse is a remote frontier of civilization.
We got into Whitehorse around noon hoping to get a campsite at our campground of choice. I had made reservations for August 16-18, but we were a day early, and it is a popular campground. However, we were rented a site with no problem. The first thing upon getting into the campsite was to reorganize the camper after the rough roads. There were spills in the refrigerator and cupboards; the microwave had bounced half out of its holder; knives, plastic glasses, books and other oddments had fallen out of racks onto the floor.
I had bought a summer sausage some time ago, one of those that don't need refrigeration, like I used to take backpacking. You don't see them much any more. I tucked it away in the camper, I thought, to have on hand if we ran low on food. We were low today, as we purposely didn't shop at Tok, knowing we were coming to Whitehorse and large market stores. Tok has only one quite small food market. Today was the day to have the summer sausage. It was gone. We tore the camper and car apart, and cannot find that sausage. I did have a can of tuna fish. That was lunch.
We spent the afternoon at the visitor center planning our stay in Whitehorse, then doing grocery shopping and errands. The big item was olives. We had looked forward to olives in Whitehorse. We knew the Safeway here has a wonderful Mediterranean Olive Bar, a luxury we don't even have at home. Bob stuffed three containers with a mixture of green and black olives, and one with Italian gardineria pickled vegetables. When we came through Whitehorse on the way headed north over a month ago, we had stocked up on the olives. They were long gone. I'm not sure that three containers will get us home. We may have to pick up another one.
Whitehorse sports a pale smoky haze. The campground is on a rise, so the smoke smell is almost unnoticeable. But down in town and along the river, the smoke is obvious and the scenic views along the river are almost obscured. After our experiences, it didn't seem so bad to us, but locals we talked to all complained about it.
Later Bob put Little Moby up on a jack and crawled under to try to discover why the tires are wearing in an erratic manner. He didn't learn anything, so tomorrow Little Moby goes to a garage for help. BlueVan will have its tires rotated at the same time. Gold was discovered in northwestern Yukon Territory on August 17, 1896. The discovery of placer gold on Rabbit Lake - later known as Bonanza Lake - touched off the great Klondike Gold Rush. The date is still celebrated in The Yukon as Discovery Day. In the modern way, in order to have a three-day holiday weekend, today, which is a Monday, is Discovery Day. We drove into town and discovered that businesses were not open, including service centers and tire garages. Little Moby and BlueVan will have to wait for their tire work. I need to amend that. Wal-Mart was open, and so was Super Mart, a grocery store. We picked up a few items we didn't get yesterday at the grocery store, stopped into the tourist center for information, and strolled around Whitehorse for the rest of the morning.
For lunch we found our favorite restaurant, the Talisman, after some hunting around Whitehorse and arguing about whether it still existed or not. It certainly was not where we left it in June, when we stumbled onto it in the rain in desperation of finding a place to eat. We liked it, and so it became our favorite restaurant in Whitehorse -as well as the only restaurant we had ever had a meal at in Whitehorse.
Talisman was hard to find because it had moved into a hotel. But we did find it, thanks to Bob's perseverance, and the food was just as we remembered it. We mowed through a great Mediterranean plate of falafel, couscous salad, hummus, pitas, tsatsiki and sliced tomatoes - with diet Pepsi for a real cultural mix. We dined on an outdoor fenced patio replete with flowers, sunshine, and temperatures near eighty degrees. Is life wonderful, or what?
Whitehorse is on the Yukon River, the fabled water route for Gold Rush miners struggling to get to Dawson and the Klondike gold fields. As you come into town, a beached paddle-wheeler, the Klondike, towers over a small park along the river. The Klondike is a National Historic Park being restored by the Canadian Government. It was the queen of the Yukon River at the turn of the century. Three-fourth of the restoration has been completed, and can be toured with a guide. We parked on the far side of the parkland, and followed a path along the river and under a bridge to the Klondike. It's a monumental ship, three decks high.
First the guide showed a movie of the history of the ship, then we made the tour. The restoration has been faithful to the original, including the typical freight of the time tied down on the lower deck. The first class passengers had a beautiful Victorian observation saloon and dining room. I wished I could have stuffed one of the period wicker chairs into my backpack. But they might have noticed. At 7:15 a.m. Bob backed the trailer up to the garage door of the Yukon Tire Company to be sure he would be first in line when the place opened at 8:00 a.m. I jumped out, adjusted my backpack, and headed into town. I had a town map in my pocket, and it was a good thing, because I did get a bit confused. But I was on the right track, and in a half hour I was into the downtown shopping district.
While Bob and Little Moby and BlueVan did tire things, I walked and walked. I went down all the major streets of town and up again. I discovered more little parks along the riverside, and many murals on buildings around the town. Whitehorse calls itself a City of Murals, and with justification. I came upon murals on very public and very obscure walls, all well designed and a pleasure to see. There are a lot of flowers in pots and planters around. In all, Whitehorse is a lovely town.
Why the name Whitehorse? There used to be some rather nasty foaming rapids near the town, which reminded someone of the manes of white horses. They became the Whitehorse Rapids, and then the town took the name. The rapids are now gone, lost to a dam that provides power for Whitehorse and six other settlements along the river.
At noon I met Bob at the Yukon Visitor Center. Moby and BlueVan were all fixed and ready to hit the road again. We went to, where else, the Talisman for lunch. Today we both had quiche. The owner said she was a Wolf, that is, she belongs to the Wolf moiety of the area Indian tribes. The logo design of the restaurant is an Indian talisman, a personal rendition of traditional designs by a local artist who is a Raven. The McBride Museum of the Yukon is housed in log buildings with sod roofs. There are a lot of sod roofs in the Far North, and it is a fitting structure for an historical museum. We spent the afternoon there. Not only did we view the exhibits, but we attended a dramatic reading of “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” Sam McGee's cabin, where he lived for about seven years, is on the grounds of the museum. The first paragraph of the poem is often quoted:
There are strange things done in the midnight sun The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service After the museum hours, we did a quick supper and cleanup, and went back into town for the Frantic Follies, a Gay Nineties Gold Rush song and dance show. It was a great way to spend the evening. The comedy was funny, the costumes were spectacular, and boy, could those girls dance. All the people in the show had school degrees in some sort of theater and dance, and they all could play several different musical instruments. It was a talented crew. Sam McGee haunted us today, though. One of the acts in the show was a dramatization of The Cremation of Sam McGee. Old Sam was never cremated, of course. He was a friend of Service whose name fit the rhythm of the poem, and that name brought him dubious fame.
The girls sat along the edge of the stage after the show and posed with anyone who wanted to have pictures taken. I pushed Bob up between a couple of them and took some photos. He didn't mind too much. The old fellow ahead of Bob stuck his souvenir program between his knees to have both hands free, put his arms around two girls and squeezed them up to himself for his photo. He enjoyed it a lot! Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada We slept late and dawdled over a leisurely breakfast this morning, so it was 10:00 by the time we drove into town. Bob dropped me at the Saan clothing store at the edge of town. He went on to the hardware store and then to the transportation museum out by the airport. I shopped a little in Saan, then spent the rest of the morning walking around Whitehorse again.
Along my way I discovered more wall murals and smaller wall paintings, and two more little urban parks. Whitehorse is a pretty town, as I've said, and they're working on making it even more attractive. Empty gravel lots along the river in town will be developed into a park and boardwalk connected to the existing riverside walk. The Canada Games come to town in two years. Already work has begun on a huge sports complex up on the ridge in back of town.
Bob and I met at noon at the Yukon Visitor Center and walked back to a Subway on Main Street for lunch. We whiled away the hour after lunch at the Fireweed Bookstore, then drove out to the landing dock of the M.V. Schwartka for a ride on the fabled Yukon River. For an hour we boated upstream on the river, following the way of the Gold Rush miners and years of prospectors and traders before them.
The Schwartka worked hard getting through legendary Miles Canyon on the downstream run. The current crashed against the canyon walls and threw itself into whirlpools. The White Horse Rapids used to be north of Miles Canyon, so small boats and rafts had to portage around the rapids and canyon. But impatient stampeders tried to run the canyon and rapids, often losing their gear, and sometimes their lives.
The captain/narrator of the Schwartka was personable and entertaining. There were just sixteen of us on board, all on the upper outside deck. The lower deck was empty. The Schwartka is down to one trip a day, and in another week will close for the winter. The day was warm and sunny. The smoke haze had thinned and we couldn't even smell it on the river. Bob stood beside the captain all the way. The rest of us took turns on the tiny bow deck, chatted, and watched the boreal world slip by.
People on riverside trails and at fishing holes waved and we waved back. The “first mate,” a girl about twenty, brewed and served complimentary coffee, which we sipped as we glided along. It was a pleasant afternoon's outing.
The unseasonable warm weather was our friend for supper, too. We dined al fresco at a small corner table on the porch of the Klondike Rib and Salmon BBQ, a quaint restaurant in a cobbled-together small historic building. Flower boxes lined the rail next to our table, and beyond them we had a view of the sidewalk. We were, in fact, practically hanging over the sidewalk. Dinner was bison steak for Bob and caribou stew for me, with Yukon draft red beers. We took away a slice of wildberry pie for future consideration. |
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Getting Started Michigan Canada |
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Alaska |
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