Catching up as Winter deepens

Posted On November 30, 2022

It’s been 7 weeks since I last talked to you. In that time the southern Yukon has gone from a nice Fall to a dreary but fairly mild Winter, with a more normal snow level than the last two extremely heavy-snow Winters. Another Winter like those two might get me looking for an RV lot in Yuma!

There hasn’t been any one thing that seemed worth posting about, but a catch-up makes a useful photojournal for me and hopefully will be interesting for you as well.

I had to take the motorhome to the shop for some work on the water system, and when I was on my way home on October 16th, the view out that window, looking south on the Alaska Highway, sure made me want to keep going! Not to any particular destination, just to go. I was stopped when I shot this photo, actually pondering the idea of hitting the road. But a few minutes later, the RV was tucked away in the forest for the winter.

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On October 19th, I completed my multi-year slide scanning project. With that 30,000-image addition there are now 194,154 photos on the external drive, taking up 1.38 TB of space. Ultimately that doesn’t mean squat as I have no plans for them – it was just a thing that needed to be done because it was either that or take them to the dump. Well, that’s where the physical slides went anyway, but now I have the important component, the images, saved…

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The permanent snow arrived a bit early this year. I usually figure on Hallowe’en as the date that my world turns white, but on October 24th we got a good dump.

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The total ended up to be 11 cm (4.3 inches) – enough to get the shovels out, but not the snowblowers.

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Bella the Arctic Dog is very pleased to have her world looking ike this again. She usually rejects offers to come back in the house. Tucker, on the other hand, would like to be on a warm sandy beach with me 🙂

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The skies haven’t been clear very often in the past many weeks, but on the morning of November 3rd I did get a good though brief aurora show. My “sixth sense” for waking up just before the skies light up has been working very well the past few months.

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I had to go into town on November 4th for something, and shot the next photo of the Yukon River from the side of the road on the way home. It looks very cold, but was only -9°C/16°F.

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My former packed-full Collection Room in the basement is now empty, and I’m slowly rebuilding it to bedroom standards, though Cathy and I haven’t yet agreed on a purpose for it. While the plan was to quickly get rid of everything, it hasn’t worked out that way, and there’s only room for one car in the garage (Cathy’s, since she uses her Jeep every day – mine gets used about once a week).

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This secretary was the largest piece I wanted to sell, and it went within minutes of me posting it online.

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I had high hopes for an Antiques and Collectibles sale on November 5th, but sales were very poor – all the vendors reported similar results and we closed a bit early. I did, however, re-home a couple of pieces that I really wanted gone (by almost giving them away) so it wasn’t a complete bust. And a couple of hours ago I got a message about another piece that I discussed with a fellow there, so it’s not over yet, perhaps.

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A great deal of my stuff is going to museums, with the MacBride Museum in Whitehorse getting most, including several terrabytes of research material and some hard-copy notes and books. This envelope going to the Princeton Museum had some papers and a house number from the mining town of Copper Mountain, which was bulldozed a few decades ago. I collected this stuff in the 1960s, and the museum said they had nothing like it in their collection yet.

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In 1997, just after publishing “Mackenzie Breakup,” I mis-filed a folder of material from the author’s time on the Canol Project. I found it a few weeks ago! It’s a gold mine of photos, negatives, newsletters, Jean’s letters home to her parents, and much more. It’s a complicated collection and I’ll need help to share it properly online, but now that’s it’s all scanned it’ll be going to a museum. I offered it to the NWT Archives in Yellowknife but haven’t heard from them – if I don’t hear from them pretty soon it’ll be offered to the Norman Wells Museum, who sold most of the copies of “Mackenzie Breakup” I printed, so I’m fairly certain will want it.

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I’m still spending a lot of time scanning papers of various kinds, though scanning is getting increasingly difficult as my dementia progresses. It would be easy to argue that the Boeing 737 is the aircraft that has changed travel to the greatest degree for the average Yukoner. What makes this ad in my collection special is that when it was published in Holiday magazine in December 1966, the Boeing 737 hadn’t even flown yet! The first flight was on April 9, 1967, so this is likely the first consumer-focussed ad for the 737.

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Airlines and cars make up the bulk of my hundreds of oversized ads (11×13 inches, so they require two scans each then they get pasted together. This cute Studebaker convertible was published in Holiday magazine in January 1960. I posted a couple of my ads on a Studebaker fans group I belong to. After a few hours a guy said that if you scan it with a black background it minimizes the bleed-through of whatever is on the other side of the page. I’ll be re-scanning a few of the ads, like the one above – the Studebaker has been re-done with a black background.

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On November 16th I got a call from a friend asking if I’d like to go for a short drive out to Marsh Lake. It was a dreary, foggy day, but it would be good to get out of the house so I said yes. What a wonderful surprise to find a large patch of blue sky over the lake!

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A freeze then a thaw, combined with lowering water levels created some wonderful photo ops for us 🙂

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A recent wind while the water was open but the temperature was well below freezing did this to the shore.

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The broken ice blown into shore then froze solid enough to walk on (the water below it was only a foot or so deep).

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Some close-up details. It was so nice to get out in the sunshine for a couple of hours!

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November 18th was the 8th anniversary of my Yukon History & Abandoned Places group on Facebook. There are now 17,500 members, and almost 13,000 photos posted – and that actually doesn’t include many hundreds, perhaps thousands of photos, that have been posted in comments.

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Many weeks ago, I got 3 requests for engagements of various kinds, and I declined all of them – I simply didn’t feel up to it. Talking to Cathy, she convinced me that I still have things to share and perhaps teach, so I called them all back. The first was an interview for a heritage conference – the 18-minute video was shown at the conference.

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The next was a podcast for Yukon, North of Ordinary magazine – that 38-minute audio is online at Buzzsprout or anywhere else you listen to podcasts.

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We were getting down on our firewood supply, so Cathy ordered 6 cords of pine/spruce, and the first 3 cords arrived on the 22nd. I’ll peck away at that for the rest of the winter – there’s no rush.

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To end this post, a call from another friend got both Cathy and I off our butts for a drive out to the Yukon Wildlife Preserve. The next photo shows the Takhini River Bridge – no, it wasn’t very nice weather.

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Cathy rode the bus around while Laurie and I walked the 5 km loop. It’s always nice to get out there among the animals whatever the weather.

As I finish some edits at 07:00 the sky is clear but it’s -31°C/-24°F. I might get out for some photography this morning…