The ExploreNorth Blog

The Labour Day long weekend is a rather manic time in the North. Everyone is doing something outside, knowing that this is the last good-weather long weekend we’re going to see until May. Whether it’s berry picking, hiking, boating, camping or just getting out for a scenic drive, it’s time to get it out of your system.

Cathy and I just went for a drive to Skagway on Saturday. The forecast was for partly sunny in Whitehorse, all sun in Skagway. Of course that didn’t happen, but that’s what we hoped for, and the clouds in Skagway were great compared to what often happens in September!

The first photo below shows the Fall colours on Caribou Mountain. It’s not going to be a great year for colour. My impression is that it takes a spell of warmish weather and then sudden deep cold to make the colours brilliant – when the temperature just slowly drops as it has this year, colours are subdued.

The colours a couple of miles further down the highway, at Spirit Lake.

A couple of rental RVs were set up at one of the nicest camping spots in the territory, on the shore of Tutshi Lake. Whenever you see 2 or 3 RVs travelling bumper-to-bumper here, you can always be sure that they’re Germans

Looking up from the same spot that I took the photo above, Winter is just that close!

With only 2 ships in port, things were bound to be slow in Skagway, but things were very slow, and many of the people on the street were from Whitehorse. The Sea Princess is on a 10-day sailing, now southbound back to San Francisco, and the Volendam is in the middle of a 7-day cruise out of Vancouver.

We’d gotten off to a late start so had lunch/dinner at the Skagway Brewing Company, then went over to the Klothes Rush and stocked up with footwear from their great sale (Skagwegians know how to put on sales!). Now I’m all set for the 3 cruises I’ve got booked for the next few weeks (Cathy only gets to go on 2 of them).

As we headed out of town, a photo op for a train near the White Pass Shops stopped me – because you can never have too many pictures of trains

Some of these locomotives won’t be working until next year…

… though they may get moved into the new engine house, which went up very quickly.

For my friends on the White Pass list who can’t figure out where the new engine house is, here it is in relation to the main building.

Northbound back to Whitehorse along the Tutshi River at Km 53.

Despite a forecast of a 40% chance of showers yesterday, I decided to head north on the bike for a bit. I almost turned around at Porter Creek when I saw the weather ahead, but decided to go anyway. The road construction that has stopped me twice before is all finished now, so Braeburn Lodge became the destination of the day despite the steady cold rain.

Fox Lake Campground was over-full, with some people camped in the parking lot rather than campsites, but seemed to be clearing out quickly due to the cold rain that showed no sign of letting up. I saw only Yukon licence plates on all the vehicles.

Nearing the north end of the Fox Lake Burn, an area that had a pair of forest fires in the late 1990s. Not exactly good biking weather, but traffic was very light, which is a very good thing when you’re on 2 wheels.

I had a pleasant visit with the owner of Braeburn Lodge (as well as coffee and some excellent mushroom soup), got one of his ginormous cinnamon buns to take home, and headed south. As on the South Klondike, the colours weren’t great overall but there were some brilliant patches like this.

It’s a great bike road, but rain and 44° isn’t the best weather to do it in! By the time I got home, with 195km on the clock, I was ready for the hot tub

There’s still one day of weekend to go, but this will be a stay-at-home day – there’s a lot of work to get done.

Living in Whitehorse has a lot of pluses. Especially when you have secluded acreage 15 minutes from downtown. Not only do you have pretty well every service you need close at hand, the wilderness is literally at your back door.

On Saturday afternoon the Fall colours on Golden Horn looked so good from our deck that we decided to take a drive up Mount McIntyre, or “Mount Mac” as everyone calls it. So up the Alaska Highway we went, turned left at the old Lobird road, went through the gravel pit and 20 minutes from home we were heading up the mountain.

This is the view that keeps bringing me back to Mount Mac, looking southwest over the head of Fish Lake, with Mount Granger on the left. The fireweed in the foreground makes a nice border along the road.

The higher up Mount Mac we got, the more beautiful it was, but off in the distance…. Father Winter is sneaking up on us!

On the summit there’s an aircraft communications system that’s “fenced off” with 3 strands of barbed wire. There’s also a sign that says “No Trespassing” and that no doubt discourages many people from exploring further. The track that goes to the right of the fence isn’t easy to spot but within a few hundred feet it turns into a good 4-wheel-drive road.

On the nearly level summit past the communications system, the Fall colours were beautiful – not as bright as I’d hoped for but certainly enough to brighten up the day.

The tundra offered a great location for a family photo, and Kayla really got into the wilderness spirit with a good wolf-howl! Or was that just a Rebel yell?

This is the view to the SSE from the location above. The mountain to the left is Golden Horn – our house is at the foot of the mountain, further left.

The wind up there had a bit but we went for a bit of a walk to enjoy the incredible views, with the city right below and Marsh Lake off in the distance to the right in this photo. At this location we were right on the city boundary!

It’s hard to believe that the tiny plants that cover the ground up there can be so hardy.

The Tracker is the perfect little truck for this sort of outing. The high clearance and short wheel base make roads like this quite simple – as long as you judge the right line to take through the rocks! Coming down this section was actually worse than going up (it’s much steeper than it looks in this photo).

Starting back down the mountain.

We took a wander at the spot where the truck is parked above. Here’s a closeup of some of the most brilliantly coloured plants – bearberries, I think. Kayla discovered blueberries and turned into a berry-picking machine!

The cranberries were a bit past prime but still quite good.

This is the shortcut that goes pretty much straight down to Fish Lake, saving a very long trip around on less-rough roads.

Fish Lake was a busy place. It seemed to be an organized group of some sort, with powerboats and a big video camera. We didn’t stay.

Here’s a map of where we went – click on it to greatly enlarge it.

The first step getting out of the Yukon is the tough one. Not as tough as it used to be thanks to Air North, but still an “ouch” financially. I just got the Fall sale email from Alaska Airlines and when I dug into it and saw that you can fly from Juneau to Seattle for $199 ($417.60 return with taxes) and Juneau to Los Angeles for $269 ($536.19 return with taxes) it got me to thinking about how reasonable that would be. Everyone has sales on now – Air Canada to LAX right now is $907.65 return including taxes, using Air North and WestJet it’s $730.68 with taxes. Anyway, to use Alaska, you’d drive to Skagway and park the car, take the ferry to Juneau (or Wings of Alaska, but that’s too weather-dependent to be reliable), taxi to the airport and away you go. Convenient it’s not, but having come home from Anchorage that way after a cruise it can be considered to be part of the adventure. And you have an extra $300 per person to do fun stuff in California or some other warm place

The cold, wet weather of Fall has arrived. As well as all the things that have to get done around the house to get ready for winter, things have gotten busy at the travel office as people start making plans to get warm for a week or two. All those things haven’t kept me from playing, though – I spend just enough time at Amazon and eBay to ensure that I “have to” go to Skagway quite regularly to pick stuff up.

Despite the forecast for light rain on Monday, there was a copy of the 1928 book The Cruise of the Northern Light waiting at the post office, so I geared up and headed down on the V-Star. I actually turned back after a few miles, came home and put another layer on – a full-body layer of fleece. Then the ride was comfortable.

The rain held off for longer than I had expected but through the White Pass it was ugly, and it took me a few minutes to figure out how to keep my modular helmet from fogging up. Traffic was very light.

The next stop after the post office was the Skagway Brewing Company to get my halibut-and-chips fix. It was excellent as always. As soon as I pulled up, a middle-aged woman came over and said that that’s the way she’d like to see this country, from her motorcycle. She was on the Radiance of the Seas with a couple of friends, and we spent quite a while chatting.

After lunch I went over to the helicopter base. They were quite busy, which surprised me.

I’d like to see a review from someone who took that very expensive excursion on a day like this. Is any day in a helicopter a good day? It could be – my day with Island Wings at Ketchikan certainly was, in similar weather.

It was great to see the Radiance in – I’ll be back on her for the 3rd time in a few weeks! Although we loved the Infinity, the Radiance may still be my favourite ship.

I was surprised to see major construction going on at the WP&YR yard – it appears to be a locomotive shed.

The ride home was much wetter than the ride south had been. But all in all I was pleased with the experience. I have the right gear to stay warm and dry, so the season will be longer than I was afraid it might be.

Atlin is having a tough time, there’s no question about that. Back in the early and mid ’90s I used to go there fairly regularly, both by myself and guiding groups on both day trips and overnighters. The ability to take large groups to Atlin ended when the Atlin Inn closed almost a decade ago, and my personal visits to the town get less and less frequent as shops and eateries close. An article in last Friday’s Yukon News, though, prompted a return to Atlin on Monday. It was just a short visit, but was enough to remind both Cathy and I how much we love the place. Even without much to do in town now, the area provides enough variety that a 3-day visit can just scratch the surface.

The views along the Atlin Road are enough to justify the drive.

While the Yukon News article reports that $5 million in highway construction funding was cancelled for the British Columbia portion of the highway, there’s a lot of money being spent on the Yukon side, which was in much worse condition. The worst stretches have already been chipsealed, and the work currently underway is going to make another big difference.

We unfortunately got off to a very late start and didn’t get to Atlin until a few minutes past 1:00pm. This is the first place I always go when I visit Atlin – the marina and float plane docks.

A couple of fellows from Whitehorse have recently bought the Atlin Inn and are renovating it. The restaurant is already open, and that’s where we would have gone for lunch except for the fact that it was too warm to leave the dogs in the car. We ended up at the Pine Tree, where 2 takeout deluxe burgers and 2 cans of Pepsi cost a few cents short of $42 (gas there is $1.289 per liter).

Ah, the hours I’ve spent in these 3 buildings, especially browsing antiques in the Garrett Store and attending musical and theatrical performances in the charming little Globe Theatre…

Three more of Atlin’s many interesting buildings – the late Dr. Brannigan’s “pyramid-power” holistic healing cente from the 1970s, the courthouse, and a private home with a “widow’s walk“.

Several years ago, Kershaw’s Hardware was renovated as a coffee shop. It was wonderful, but as I understand the story, it was so successful that the owners had to work much harder than they wanted so closed it down!

There were some people on the deck of the Tarahne, which gives me hope that the very successful special-event dinners on her are going to be re-started.

This gazebo was built in 1917 over a mineral spring, for use by clients of the original Atlin Inn, which had been built by the White Pass & Yukon Route, more famous for their Skagway-Whitehorse railway. It’s got quite a lean to it now (not apparent from this angle) and appears about ready to fall down.

After our look around town, we headed out Warm Bay Road – this is the view of the Llewellyn Glacier, which flows from the Juneau Icefield. A few years ago, we spent a very enjoyable weekend at the Glacier View Cabins a few hundred yards above this viewpoint.

This is the warm springs, at Km 24.3. Back in the 1920s it was several feet deep but it’s been allowed to fill in so it’s not quite waist deep now. I was surprised to find no other people there.

The vegetation around the spring is glorious.

Another couple of kilometers brought us to The Grotto, a creek that runs from an underground mineral spring.

A quick stop at Warm Bay, where we were going to run the dogs. There were too many people to allow the dogs off-leash so we continued on.

McKee Creek, one of the historically significant placer gold creeks.

The outflow of Palmer Lake.

Pine Creek Beach was a great place to run Monty and Kayla. It’s reached by a 5-minute walk from the parking lot at Km 4.3, which is also the trailhead for the Monarch Mountain Trail. Looking up the mountain, it’s hard to miss the Moore House B&B, the probable location of our next Atlin overnighter – what a spot!

We made a stop at Jenz, one of several eateries that have recently opened, for ice cream. There are certainly too many cafes/restaurants now for the available traffic, and some won’t survive – it’s a shame that that’s happened.

This spot on the road back to Whitehorse always stops me – one of the best views along the road.

A last look at the newest section of construction, just south of White Mountain.

This is the Yukon’s holiday weekend – Discovery Day – and it’s a beauty, with sunshine and record-breaking temperatures. We spent the first couple of days of it at our cabin in Carcross. This was our first overnight there since I moved completely to Whitehorse 3 years ago, and it felt wonderful.

Following Cathy down the driveway – I had to take the pickup with the lawnmower and some other tools (and the dogs).

On Saturday afternoon we walked about a mile south to a little cove beach I love, and spent a couple of hours with the dogs cooling off in the silent wilderness. This was the view about halfway back to the cabin.

The view from the living room window at 10:30pm that night.

Kayla is a master at picking wild raspberries, and found some great patches!

Carcross was humming with activity yesterday, and I decided to take some photos of what’s making that happen. The community got about $3 million in government infrastructure funding about 5 years ago when I was on council, and one of the projects that got approved was the boat ramp and dock at the far left side of the bridge in this photo. I’m very pleased to see how successful this has turned out to be, since it was also the one that almost got scrapped a few times.

I’d never seen so many boats on Lake Bennett as there were yesterday – everything from sea kayaks and freighter canoes to some beautiful sport boats and cruisers.

The footbridge, which cost some $950,000, hasn’t really added anything to the community since we’ve always had a bridge, but the old one was about to fall down and not having one would have been a big loss.

Many of you will laugh when I say how crowded the beach was, but for Carcross this is a crowd! I look at photos such as this crowded beach and wonder how that can possibly be an enjoyable day!

While I was at the new viewing deck, the afternoon train from Skagway arrived. This is it passing our cabin.

Looking down to the beach from the viewing deck, which has washrooms and picnic tables. The section of beach close to the railway and foot bridges used to be the one most heavily used, but the section by the viewing deck is much more popular now.

Lake Bennett is cold – the glaciers that feed it are only a few miles away. The very gently sloping beach, though, allows the shallow waters along the main beach to warm up nicely during a spell of warm weather. The other beaches down the lake don’t warm up – even on a hot day, a few seconds in the water is plenty!

A telephoto shot of the deck area from our cabin. The temperature yesterday set a new record for the day, at 30.3°C (86.5°F) – that’s actually a Whitehorse figure since Carcross doesn’t have a recording station, but it’s usually very close.

Another new project is this building being added onto the wreckage of the sternwheeler Tutshi (the bow of the ship is to the left). The last drawing of it I saw was really ugly – hopefully it’s improved with age. A comment from a local business owner, though, indicated that it hasn’t.

The return of train service to Carcross was huge. Not huge financially particularly, but huge in the way that the community sees itself. It was created as a railway town, and having the railway infrastructure abandoned for so many years just felt bad. Some people still think that this was originally an Indian village – or even that it still is. it wasn’t, and isn’t – Natives moved here after white people arrived during the Klondike Gold Rush with lots of cool stuff.

Yesterday afternoon, as so often happens, the lake got windy. While that was bad news for many people, it was welcomed by others!

After my long absence, that was a wonderful couple of days at Carcross. Slowly, with many bumps in the road, the community is heading towards its potential. It has the most spectacular location of any community in the Yukon (people in Haines Junction may argue that ), and the surrounding mountains and lake system offer unlimited recreation opportunities. Click on the image below to see a larger annotated image of the Carcross area from Google Earth.

Today we’re making the drive to Atlin, British Columbia, a town that’s similar to Carcross in many ways.

I flew down to Kelowna, British Columbia, on Monday for a family visit, and will be heading home tonight.

I don’t usually leave my car at the airport, but with a flight that lands in Whitehorse at midnight on a day that Cathy has to work, decided to do it this time. This was the view along the Alaska Highway at 05:46 on Monday.

Looking down on Carcross and Lake Bennett at 07:09. This is looking southwest.

The western edge of the forest fire just south of the Yukon border that’s closed the Stewart Cassiar Highway for much of the past couple of weeks.

I had over 4 hours to kill in Vancouver – the price to pay for getting flights on points. I had planned on taking the Canada Line downtown, but the weather wasn’t good so I stayed at YVR.

We were in the clouds for almost the entire 50-minute flight to Kelowna, but despite Environment Canada’s reports of thunderstorms, it was very nice when our Dash 8 landed.

Yesterday my sister and I had a great day shopping for bike gear and then touring farms and wineries. I got the armoured gear I need at a good price, discovering in the process that there are so many things to consider that buying online isn’t a reasonable option.

Our first agriculture stop was Summerhill Pyramid Winery.

We had an excellent lunch at Summerhill, which is an all-organic facility. My lunch included 4 pieces of apricot pizza – it probably sounds odd but was very good!

Then out Lakeshore Drive through the area burned by the massive 2003 forest fire.

We tasted about a dozen different types of goat cheese at Carmelis Goat Cheese and left with 2 types for future enjoyment. I wanted to introduce Tracy to Gewurztraminer wine, but the first attempt at Cedar Creek Winery was unsuccessful – the light wine was totally overpowered by the lingering taste of goat cheese.

As well as wineries, we went to the Okanagan Lavender Farm, a very successful agri-tourism operation. With the lavender harvest over, the garden wasn’t too impressive.

My sister and I both find that the smallest wineries are the ones that offer the best experience. The photo below shows SpierHead Winery, the newest boutique winery in Kelowna. We thoroughly enjoyed chatting with the owner, a former commercial photographer – his signature Vanguard wine in particular is superb. It was just a photo of a wine bottle label that took us to our final winery of the day, the OkanaganVilla Estate Winery, but we left with 2 bottles of the Gewurztraminer that I had been trying to explain to Tracy

This is my view as I write this post. We have another beautiful day coming (sunshine and 29°C – 84°F), and then at 7:20 tonight I leave on the first leg of my trip home, with clear skies forecast for the entire trip.

Every now and then I come across something that triggers “man, I’ve gotta see that!” This morning it’s the Aleutian Islands again, prompted by a couple of photographs at the Museum of the Aleutians Web site. I’ve always been fascinated by the Aleutians war – by the difficulty and the brutality of it – and that was brought to the surface when, a few weeks ago on the Infinity, I met a man who fought in it.

There are many challenges to doing a “proper” visit to the islands – weather, logistics, money and time. The weather is seldom conducive to touring, transportation is difficult and expensive, and it would take weeks to do more than skim the surface of what the region has to offer. If you’ve never thought about the Aleutians, have a look at the Unalaska/Port of Dutch Harbor Convention & Visitors Bureau site – intriguing?

Some of my regular readers know or at least have met Dan Pakula, owner of the Stikine Riversong Lodge in Telegraph Creek, British Columbia. Dan died on Monday, July 26th – my understanding is that he was unloading a 45-gallon drum from his truck when it slipped and crushed him. This is a huge loss, not only to his friends and family, but to the entire region. Dan was a tireless promoter of the Stikine River, the river that brought him north 30+ years ago. I’ve talked with him many times, by email and in person over the past 20+ years, and to say that he was passionate about it is an understatement. There’s an email from him sitting in my Inbox that I hadn’t even had a chance to answer yet.

My sincere condolences go out to everyone affected.

Contemplative thought – What if there isn’t anymore?

I’ve been saying for a few years that I’m semi-retired – although I have to work, I can pretty much do what I want, when I want to do it. I’ve just discovered, though, that to be truly semi-retired, a guy needs a toy or two. The motorcycle is the first toy I’ve had since selling the airplane 25 years ago, and I love it!

On the first day (Friday), all I did was ride it from the dealer’s to my garage. Day 2, my friend Amanda, who just bought a new Kawasaki Versys, invited me to go riding, and we went out to Marsh Lake and back – 125km. Day 3 was the first major road trip for both of us – to Skagway and back – and we had a ball. Here we are in my driveway Sunday morning.

Leaving on our little adventure…

A brief stop at Emerald Lake.

We had lunch at Glacier Smoothies in Skagway, and a look at the Seven Seas Navigator, a small ultra-luxury ship that I’d love to see the inside of for a week or so

I’ve decided that on sunny weekdays I need to work in the morning and then reward myself with a ride in the afternoon. Yesterday, it was time to get my portable garage set up properly. It’s not level, it’s not anchored properly, and it’s a mess.

The first step was to anchor it properly, with a 4×4 at the bottom corners.

I built an overhead tire/wheel rack in the barn, but it requires carrying the wheels up a ladder – it seemed like a good idea at the time but didn’t work out that way. A chest-height one over the snowplow storage spot will be much better. It just took a few minutes to figure out the right measurements for it.

Much better – I have to add a shelf for the tarps and finish levelling the garage today, but the job is largely done.

The Whitehorse-Tagish-Carcross loop is very bike-friendly, so that was my reward. This is looking east on the Alaska Highway at Jake’s Corner, where you turn right onto the Tagish Road.

The eastern end of the Tagish Road – sunshine, lots of curves and virtually no traffic!

I stopped in to see a cousin and her family at Tagish – it was good to see how the bike handles on a mile or so of gravel.

Passing Crag Lake, near Carcross at the west end of the Tagish Road.

My initial summary of the bike is that it fits me like a glove, but does have some issues that have solutions except for one. That one is the range – with a 4.5-gallon tank and getting 44 miles per gallon, you can’t get very far without a fill-up. I used the reserve tank yesterday to complete the 225km loop – the reserve is 1.2 gallons.

I’ve got a lot to learn about motorcycles. Not only am I surprised by how many manufacturers there are now, there are a lot of dealers online with great deals on accessories and gear. I’m keeping track of them on my new motorcycle page