North to Alaska: Day 6

Day 6

Whitehorse to Dawson City

August 29, 2011

I awoke with two missions in mind. One was to go running on a path along the Yukon River that I saw when we drove into town yesterday. The second was to stop at a Tim Horton’s on the way back and surprise Kris with coffee and a bagel. I was successful at only one. Having not done any running since the treadmill on the cruise, it felt great to run outside. Unfortunately, my VISA card was not accepted at Tim Horton’s and I returned empty handed. What a backwards country Canada is. I made a second trip before the bus, I mean coach, took off, this time armed with US dollars, which were happily accepted.

This was a long day on the coach. Luxury or not, there is nothing wonderful about sitting on one’s butt for 8 hours, even if it’s on a plush leather seat. My cross country bike trip didn’t quite prepare me for this. The trip was broken up by a couple of stops along the way. One was to Braeburn which advertised the world’s largest Cinnamon Buns, about 2 pounds each, selling for $8. The second was to Five Fingers for lunch, which was a site where ‘the Klondikers’ had to navigate over some dangerous rapids on their way to Dawson until someone decided to change it to Three Fingers with the help of some dynamite. The Canadian EPA apparently had not yet come into existence yet. As we drove into Dawson, we saw more environmental mayhem, miles and miles of gravel tailings piled 20 feet high along the riverbank, the resultant excrement of last century’s river dredges. These dredges were riverboat sized mechanical behemoths that scooped shovelfuls of river bottom into their front, extracted all the gold out of that dirt in their middle, and spit the tailings out their back. These beasts were reportedly so loud that you could hear them 20 miles away. This was gold panning on steroids. They were quite profitable until being shut down around 1960 due to concerns that perhaps this might just not be the best thing for the environment.

Dawson was a fun place to see. There’s been great effort to preserve the town the way it looked 100 years ago. All the storefronts have a very authentic look to them. We took a walk around town and ate at the hotel restaurant. Before bed, we notified the front desk that in the event that the Northern Lights were visible we wanted to be woken up. Sure enough at around 2AM we got the call, and went out to see them. We wandered around a bit to find a spot shielded from streetlight and sure enough we could see bright white vertical beams in the Northern sky. It was not quite the iridescent multicolored spectral flowing robes of light that I had seen photographs of before, but it was the Northern Lights on this particular day and we had seen them. With a profound sense of satisfaction we went back to sleep and slept until 10 AM the next day.