Working on history – and the house
Winter has settled into Whitehorse, although it’s still fairly warm – as I write this at 05:00; the temperature is -5°C (+23°F). Cloudy skies are the norm, though, and despite some great aurora forecasts, most of the displays are hidden from us. What all that does is keep me in the house a lot, but I’ve been very busy.
It’s becoming more and more clear that I could spend the entire rest of my life doing nothing but scanning photos and documents from my Yukon/Alaska/BC history collection. That collection numbers in the tens of thousands of items, and I love digging significant items out to post on one of my Web sites. Over the past few days, I’ve posted well over 100 photos, either historic or showing historic sites.
The most significant of the material I’ve posted is 79 scans from a collection of 160 Kodachrome slides I bought on eBay in March 2005. They document a drive from Anchorage to Edmonton in September 1948, driving and camping out of a 1941 Pontiac. That 4-page story begins with “Driving Alaska’s Glenn Highway in 1948“.
One of the historic sites in the Yukon that gets a fair number of visitors but shows up little online is the ghost town of Silver City, just off the Alaska Highway on Kluane Lake. I’ve posted 23 photos of the abandoned community, mostly ones that I’ve shot since I started taking tour groups there in 1990. See “An Explorer’s Guide to Silver City (Kluane), Yukon“.
Finally, I’ve posted 7 photos of a roadside memorial near Teslin. At Km 1212.2 of the Alaska Highway is a memorial to Corporal Max Richardson of Company “F”, 340th Engineers, U.S. Army, who died near there on October 17, 1942.
My collection isn’t the only project getting worked on. As all of you who own a house know, there’s always something to do, and that’s especially true when it it’s over 30 years old and sits on acreage. This week, I’m working on the kitchen again. Installing a large new light fixture that I bought on the last big trip was the first job, then I added another wall of backsplash that gets highlighted beautifully by the under-cabinet xenon lighting I installed a few months ago. Once I get that grouted, I’ll move on to some cabinet touchups and adding crown mouldings and light mouldings.
All of my regular readers know that dogs fit into my schedule somewhere in a major way, and yes, they get a few hours of my attention every day as well 🙂 And we’re about due for a short road trip or 2. Skagway today perhaps, and maybe out to Soldiers Summit to pay our respects on Remembrance Day.
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