From Dawson City to Whitehorse
My Road Scholar tour has been over for 3 days now, but I want to catch up for those of you who were following along.
We began Monday morning with a drive up the Midnight Dome, elevation 2,911 feet, or 1,860 feet above Dawson City. The morning light is always the best up there – as well as this view up the Yukon River, you can also see for many miles down the river.
Most of the group went on the full tour through Dredge #4 at the end of our city-and-goldfields tour. It’s very sad that due to Parks Canada budget cuts, this is the last year that she’ll be open to the public.
The “yarnbombing” event going on in Whitehorse has spread much wider – even the prospector on the dyke at Dawson got a vest 🙂
On Tuesday we headed back to Whitehorse. As there’s no reliable place to get lunch halfway between Dawson and Whitehorse anymore, I had the hotel pack us sandwiches, and stopped at Minto Landing on the Yukon River for our picnic.
There’s a private ferry at Minto, operated by the Minto copper mine. While we were there, the ferry brought a pickup across.
A stop was made at Five Finger Rapids, one of the danger points for the early steamboats. I wonder who got paid to proof-read the text of that sign before hundreds of dollars were spent creating it.
For the past couple of days, I’d been successfully fighting the nasty cold that was going through the bus. I got the bus cleaned up on Wednesday morning, went to the airport to see a few of the group off, then went home and collapsed into bed. It’s now Saturday morning and this is the first time I’ve been out of bed for more than 2 hours since then.
That was my last tour. Many people who know me well don’t believe it, but it really is. It’s going to take me a while to wind down the many other projects I have going, but I now consider myself retired. On Octber 5th, Cathy and I are off on a dream trip to Europe to celebrate our life together.
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