A Carcross weekend
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 10:30 pm 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 be 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.
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 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 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.
Today we’re making the drive to Atlin, BC, a town that’s similar to Carcross in many ways.
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