Month: September 2009

Preparing for Winter

For many of us this is an even busier period than summer – getting ready for winter is a lot of work when you live like we do. In the city we didn’t have this “problem” – the thermostat provided heat all winter, the driveway was easy to shovel...
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Bye-bye, cruisers! The end of the 2009 Alaska cruise season

I try to get down to Skagway to see the last ships each year, and yesterday turned out to be an excellent one. Lousy weather (as expected), excellent day. I always wonder whether people know the kind of weather to expect when they book these very late (or very...
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Moose-ing around in the Yukon

It’s that time of year when moose mate. Today I got incredibly lucky and witnessed part of a mating dance at Tutshi Lake. I first saw this bull on the sand bar at the south end of the lake, at the mouth of the Tutshi River. He was just...
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A Yukon commute

I was working at the cruise office in Whitehorse yesterday and during my 15-minute commute back to Mary Lake got a bit distracted by some photo ops. That made me think about the difference between a Whitehorse commute and what it’s like in some other places. In the Fall...
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Making Winter easier – with a snowblower

Going through photos of our house renovation progress yesterday, I came across some pictures of the snow we got last winter, and was shocked – my memory of being buried in the white crap might have underestimated it. The two photos below show Cathy digging a pathway into the...
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Hard choices on a Fall day – work or play??

The Fall colours on Golden Horn are spectacular this morning – this photo was taken from the deck at 07:40. I had planned to get into the high country today but the friend who was going to go with me cancelled because she’s sick. Now, should I go and...
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Getting ready for Winter – firewood

My list of “to-dos” is lengthy and growing, but the priority is getting ready for the arrival of Father Winter. The largest of those jobs is firewood – the cutting and the stacking. We’ve still got a good stock of logs from our cutting last year, and today’s focus...
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Fall colours, snow & steam trains

Cathy and I had planned on working on the house yesterday. No really, we had 🙂 , even though it was a beautiful morning. But then I got an email from the WP&YR railfan discussion list [now gone] that I belong to, saying that there was going to be...
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Clocks in Heaven

You may have seen this joke in various forms, but I”ve added a Yukon twist: A man died and went to heaven.. As he stood in front of St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, he saw a huge wall of clocks behind him. He asked, “What are all those...
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Map typo remains after 25 years

I just picked up 1:50,000 topographical maps of the Canadian part of the Chilkoot Trail, and found a major typo on a map that was printed in 1984 and corrected in 1999 (104M/14). Not only is the park not “Childkoot”, Parks Canada says that it shouldn’t even be “Park”...
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