An evening walk at the Whitehorse airport
Cathy and I are fairly good about geting out for a walk with the dogs at least once a day. Just short ones, a loop around the property, but it’s something. When we lived in town we used to go to the airport for our walks quite often, and last night we went there again, I think for the first time since we moved to Mary Lake. Although the Centennial Trail is the popular trail in Whitehorse, I prefer the airport for several reasons.
First, there are airplanes 🙂 – sometimes really good action, sometimes just airplanes sitting off in the distance. We lucked in to Air North’s 7:00 pm departure just as we walked by the runway on the way to the trail along the top of the “clay cliffs”.
What a beautiful evening to see the Yukon from the air! Yes, I did just get home from a long trip, but I still got a twinge that I’d like to be going somewhere 🙂
This is the furthest-north point of the trail along the cliffs – it’s a long, dizzying way down! I love seeing the city from this perspective – it’s a great reminder of how beautiful the setting is. The cliffs and the possibility of meeting other people and dogs require Kayla and Monty to be on leashes, though.
It was a fairly slow night at the “WalMart RV Park” – some nights there are more than twice this many rigs. This may seem to many people like an odd way to “camp” but some of the local RV parks that you pay a lot of money for are even worse, jamming motorhomes in on a gravel parking lot. I wish that the Yukon and Alaska would use New Zealand as a model of what to offer campers – few people camp at malls there.
Looking across downtown to Grey Mountain. The largest building, with the green roof, holds government offices. The furthest line of buildings is the hospital complex – with the hospital on the left and the new (under construction) nurses’ residence on the right.
The airport trails range from a paved path to this ATV-enhanced route along the airport fence, to wide open meadows full of flowers.
We encountered the 2 immature bald eagles from the nest along Robert Service Way. A couple of women we met had just seen them arguing over a ground squirrel one of them had caught!
A different look at Main Street, at 7:35. One of the things I really do like about Whitehorse is that Main Street is still the main street instead of a nearly-abandoned backroad as in many cities. Malls and superstores hurt downtown for a few years but the vitality has returned, perhaps even stronger than before.
On the drive back home, we came upon this very “Yukon” scene – a floatplane being returned to Lake Schwatka after spending time with a mechanic up at the airport.
In the hour that we spent on this walk, we saw a total of 5 people and 1 dog. That’s one of the main things I like about the airport trails – the fact that they get very little use.
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