The ExploreNorth Blog

What a day that was! While not quite suntanning weather yet, it felt like Spring. The temperature hit +1°C here in Mary Lake, and I saw +3 on a Whitehorse report.

We started really noticing the change in the light about a week ago – this is when most people’s moods dramatically improve, with Mother Nature adding almost 5 minutes of light per day. Sunrise today was at 09:03, sunset at 17:26.

The sunlight even has some warmth to it now – this is the first wet decking I’ve seen in a very long time (how’s that for easy to amuse? ). The snow got very sticky, though, and Cathy’s ski around the property this afternoon wasn’t as easy as it usually is.

The Yukon Quest sled dog race has just started, though, and the warm temperatures will be just plain awful for the dogs and mushers on that trail when they get near Whitehorse. Luckily, the trail in Alaska is excellent and as far as Dawson high temperatures are still in the minus-mid-teens.

We enjoyed the first barbecue of the year this evening, with some wonderful caribou sausages on the grill.

Even at 6:18, there was still lots of light in the sky.

Whitehorse is a dramatically different community than it was when I arrived 20 years ago, but the changes have come fairly slowly. Yesterday I took an hour and recorded some of the little changes happening now.

One of the larger construction projects is the new medical staff residence at the hospital. The old residence, seen on the left, appears to be about 50 years old and from the look of the exterior can’t be a very pleasant place to live.

The new residence, with it’s wonderful location above the river, may help with the chronic medical staff shortage.

Shipyards Park is slowly evolving, slowly getting better. I hope that the next improvement will be demolition of the bridge to Kishwoot Island, seen on the right – it’s simply a place for druggies and drunks to hang out, and nothing good ever happens there.

One of the business to shut down in the past year is the SuperValu grocery store, seen in the foreground. Lower prices (sometimes dramatically lower) at Extra Foods and The Real Canadian SuperStore always made me wonder why anybody shopped there. The yellowish building behind it is the Whitehorse Elementary School.

Another business that’s closed is KFC – rumours continue to circulate that this will become a Burger King soon. Staffing is a huge problem in Whitehorse and was reported to be one of the factors that closed both Dairy Queen and KFC.

Here’s a business that should close, for the same reason the bridge to Kishwoot Island should be demolished. A few years ago I talked to a tourist who spent a night there – his stories are not exactly the sort of thing we want to hear from visitors

In the broad view, though, Whitehorse hasn’t changed a whole lot in the past century – a few low buildings on the bank of the eternal Yukon River. I need to get out and do this sort of shooting more often – as well as being enjoyable in its own right, it’s a good way to keep track of my community.

For the past week, Cathy and I have been babysitting 2 dogs while my son and his partner prepare to move. It’s made for a very busy house! Yesterday morning before heading to the cruise office, I took them all out for a walk/play to put them in a better mood – Monty in particular hates being left alone for the day.

Gracie, in the foreground, is a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever – while she sometimes plays with the big dogs, she more commonly goes off and does her own thing. Kayla often gets into the fray but sometimes just barks at Leah and Monty who are the really active ones.

When Kayla and Leah start playing…

…Monty always jumps in!

Gracie apparently found something that might be interesting, bringing the other 3 full-speed!

With the dogs pooped out, I could enjoy a nice calm walk – I love the way the corral looks in the winter.

Off to work – this was sunrise as I approached the Alaska Highway (shot with a 300mm lens).

Now the sad part of yesterday. Five hours after these photos were shot, another family member came to pick Leah and Gracie up – 2 hours after that, Gracie was hit by a semi-trailer on the Klondike Highway and is now fighting for her life. We are so sad….

About an hour ago, my son posted a link on his Facebook page, to this story:

Being a veterinarian, I had been called to examine a ten-year-old Irish Wolfhound named Belker. The dog’s owners, Ron, his wife Lisa, and their little boy Shane, were all very attached to Belker, and they were hoping for a miracle.

He said, “People are born so that they can learn how to live a good life– like loving everybody all the time and being nice, right? The six year- old continued, “Well dogs already know how to do that, so they don’t have to stay as long.”

I have never found a better salve for the wounds inflicted by emotional trauma than heading off into the mountains. After a difficult weekend of second-hand trauma, I was blessed today by as spectacular a day as I’ve ever seen on the South Klondike Highway. Here’s a brief look at some of the 96 images I shot.

The first was shot at 09:30, 5 minutes before sunrise, with the temperature at -21°C.

Gray Ridge.

Spindrift obscures the peaks surrounding the White Pass.

This block of granite towers over Goat Lake. You would think that a mountain this dramatic would have a name, but like the vast majority of other mountains in this region, it doesn’t. I know some tour guides who just make up names because many people from Outside think that the mountain does have a name but the guide doesn’t know it and so says that it’s unnamed.

This cloud over Mount Hetty is one of the most unique ones I’ve seen!

The ice-coated streets in Skagway may be there for some time yet – the temperature only got to -4°C today and it will be a few weeks before the sun hits Broadway again.

The Canadian and Yukon flags flying at Fraser, British Columbia.

There were a few trucks on the highway today but it was nowhere near as busy as last week.

The historic Bobby Watson cabin at Carcross.

I hiked in to our cabin to check on it, and to get a new “webcam” photo.

I drove down to Skagway on Monday, but I’m so busy that I haven’t had a chance to post the photos until now, 4 days later (and this is being posted at 2am). The weather forecast wasn’t great but I needed to pick up some stuff that’s been sitting in my post office box for far too long and my schedule was full for the upcoming good-weather days. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that Monday was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day so the post office was closed. DOH! But, any excuse to make this drive is a good excuse, and I really needed to “get outa Dodge”.

This photo of Gray Ridge was shot a few minutes after starting down the South Klondike Highway. For a few miles it looked like the day might turn out reasonably nice, but just south of Carcross the mountains disappeared into low clouds.

After dozens of miles of not being able to see much of anything, it was very nice to see this view as I started the descent to sea level.

The Highways camp on the Alaska side of the summit.

The William Moore Bridge.

The main roads in Skagway were salted and in good condition but the side roads were deadly. The glare ice made driving difficult and walking nearly impossible. Watching a couple of guys trying to walk to the ferry terminal made me think of the Kia ad on TV where a man salts his way to the car because the sidewalk is too slippery to walk on, but then drives away easily in his little SUV.

This would be a nice day for a ferry ride down to Juneau or beyond. Well, nice in a winter way at least, with calm seas.

Loading the Malaspina.

There’s not much moving at Shops – the hard ice covers most of the tracks.

I wasn’t sure whether I should drive a hundred yards off the highway to get this photo or not. The sloped glare ice was certainly not walkable. I love my Outback

This was the best visibility I had through the pass. It was one of the days when those poles at the side of the highway were invaluable, because without them the shoulder of the road was invisible at any more than a crawl.

A half-mile north of the border crossing at Fraser. Seeing 2 vehicles at the same time is unusual in the winter, and a few minutes after taking this shot I saw 3 together – a South Klondike traffic jam!

Starting down the hill to Windy Arm. You’d never know it from this photo, but this is a particularly scenic location in good weather.

A look at one of the avalanches that closed the highway for about 3 days in the past week. It’s not nearly as large as I had expected. This is the number 1 spot for avalanches – a narrow chute just above the road focuses slides from a very large bowl. Some day someone is going to get hurt or killed here.

I’m almost finished a few large projects (Web site updates and travel bookings), so hope to take it much easier in a week or so. While I enjoy both types of projects in moderation, there are times that working for a living sucks. It’s now 02:37 – maybe if I go for a soak in the hot tub I can get a bit more sleep before this day really gets going.

Some of you may have thought that I was just being negative with my post “Sucked in by the Weather Office Again?“. Well, the forecast that I was referring to called for temperatures of +5°C and showers for today. What we actually have is -25, high winds and heavy snow!!

Yesterday was the nastiest day I’ve seen in a long time and today isn’t looking much better. I started to drive into town yesterday but drove into the ditch as I was turning off our street onto the main road in Mary Lake because it was all white and formless and I couldn’t tell where the road was. I was hardly moving and and one wheel front of the truck had just started to drop so four-wheel-drive got me back onto the road, but I turned around and went back home.

I spent almost an hour out with the snowblower yesterday but frostbit 4 fingers so cut it back to half an hour this morning, but there’s a lot of work to do yet. I’ll post some photos when the sun comes up in about half an hour (sunrise is at 10:00 today, sunset at 16:17). While this all sounds rather negative, I actually find conditions like this quite energizing.

Edit: photos added…

The upper deck is always a big job by shovel, especially when I start pulling drifts off the roof (I haven’t done that yet).

I got the snowblower up onto the lower deck, which made that job a breeze.

The step down from the lower deck has disappeared into the drifts caused by the high winds yesterday and this morning.

The bulk of the work is now done, in about 1/3 the time it took last year with the truck-mounted plow and a shovel. The huge bonus is that there’s no berm beside the driveway and paths – the snow is just gone, seemingly blown off to Tagish or some other distant place.

I don’t really know why I keep reading weather forecasts. Maybe it’s like buying lottery tickets – you know, “hey, it could happen!!”. Here’s The Weather Network’s 14-day forecast for Whitehorse right now, showing the temperatures shooting up from today’s high of -21°C to +1 by Friday and +5 in a week. Right now (at 4:50am) it’s -28 in Whitehorse, -30 here in Mary Lake, so even minus single-digits looks pretty good. Yesterday’s 14-day forecast was even more radical, showing temps of up to +7. We’ll see….

I haven’t posted in a while due to holidays, work and sickness, all of which I’m buried in. It feels like 2/3 of the Yukon is sick right now – I just have a bad cold that I can’t shake, but there seems to be a lot of flu as well. Another few days and things will be back to normal on all counts (I hope ).

We’ve now fully booked a 24-day Florida/Caribbean trip for November (I’ll tell you about that in the near future). It replaces a Mediterranean-and-Transatlantic-cruise trip that just got too expensive so was put on the shelf until the above-mentioned lottery ticket finds its way into my pocket. The new trip finishes with 5 days on the beach in Fort Lauderdale, though, allowing us lots of free time to to explore southern Florida, and perhaps to meet at least one of the people from that area who follow this blog

Today is the shortest day of the year – the sun rises at 10:10am and sets at 3:48 pm. But the winter solstice, the time when our part of the earth is at its maximum tilt away from the sun, occurs at 9:47 PST – 42 minutes from now. Then the days get longer, a few seconds a day to start with, then up to 6 minutes a day eventually. It may be -36 degrees at the moment but Summer is on the way!

I thought it would warm up. Well, it did, but I was busy. “Warm” and “not busy” never did coincide (well, “not busy” never actually occurred). So, at 30 below zero, the Xmas lights went up on the house this afternoon. Next year I’ll get them up in October. Really, I will….

I might have decided that we didn’t need lights this year, but we’re having family and friends over for Christmas dinner and other visits. One of those people is my son, Steve, who will be up for 4 days from the RCMP training academy in Regina. He’s spent the past 4 months in barracks and has 2 months to go until graduation, so making this place “home” is important.

It’s a tad nippy out there this morning – -31°C (-24°F) – but my god it’s beautiful. This was our view of Golden Horn at 10:16, 7 minutes after sunrise.

Today was a “special treat” morning for breakfast (these special treats get more and more common ) – Eggs Benedict. Cathy has been researching for some time trying to find a restaurant in Tuscany that offers great food and a great view for my 60th birthday celebration next year, and so far hasn’t found a suitable one. Perhaps we’re just spoiled. This picture isn’t very good, but you get the idea – I was too anxious to dig in to the bennies to set up a good photo!

It’s cold enough that the wood furnace needed a bit of help from the oil furnace to get the house up to a comfortable temperature while the fire was building. The oil hasn’t fired for a couple of hours now, though, and we’ve still only used half a tank of oil in just over 2 years.

This little guy sure could use a little artificial heat this morning. He’s the only creature we’ve seen moving – he was adding material to his nest in the firewood stack.