Exploring the Marsh Lake Dam on the Yukon River
I was going to entitle this post “Icy Fog Spells the End of Motorcycle Season”, but it’s more about the dam.
It was -15°C when I woke up this morning, so when I went into town I took the car. The fog seen in this photo was sitting in the bottom of the valley over the Yukon River but had been much higher and had laid ice on the road.
It is beautiful, and I made a detour over to Schwatka Lake to get the photo below. While I had been determined to get one last ride on the motorcycle today (which is my 60th birthday, the reason for getting the bike), coming home it was clear that there were just too many places where the ice wasn’t going to melt off (the high today was minus 2 and many places will be in shade now until March or so).
Luckily, I’d taken the bike out for a couple of hours yesterday, into town and then out the Alaska Highway to the Marsh Lake Dam (a.k.a the Lewes River Dam). The bridge behind me in this photo carries the Alaska Highway across the Yukon River between Marsh Lake and Whitehorse.
The little dam isn’t a very photogenic subject, and most people probably roar by without giving it a second glance. Both its history and its current functions are quite interesting, though.
The British Yukon Navigation Company built the first dam at the site in 1922. It was designed to allow the company to release a great deal of water all at once in the Spring to flush ice out of the river and Lake Laberge so their steamboats could get to work earlier. In this photo, the sternwheeler Gleaner, which served the Southern lakes from its base at Carcross, is seen on the upriver side of the new dam.
A wooden dam takes a beating from the ice, and by 1943 when this photo was taken the dam was barely functional. The demands of the war effort (BYN sternwheelers assisted in the construction of the Alaska Highway) made some degree of maintenance and rebuilding necessary, though.
In 1952, the Northern Canada Power Commission built a new dam with a new purpose – it would regulate the flow of water behind a hydro-electric dam being built at Whitehorse.
In 1975, this new steel-framed dam was built.
Under the rules laid out in Yukon Energy’s water licence, all the control gates must be open by May 15th. They are left open until peak water levels are reached in August or September, then are gradually closed through the Fall. In another couple of weeks these last few gates will be closed.
One of the coolest features of the dam is the boat lock (there`s also a fishway at the other end of the dam, to allow fish free access up and down the river).
It works exactly like the locks on the Panama Canal and Suez Canal except that the gates are opened and closed with hand cranks operated by the boat owners. Going upstream you open the bottom gate, sail in, close the gate, then open the top gate slowly to allow the above-the-dam water to enter and raise the boat. When the maximum water level is reached, you open the top gate fully and sail out 🙂
So that was the end of the 2010 motorcycle season for me (there have been very few bikes on the road in recent weeks – apparently I’m one of the last hold-outs!). Tomorrow I’ll put it into proper storage – I’ve got to get my kitchen-renovation stuff put away, then the bike goes into a back corner after a bit of prep work, and the 2 cars fit nicely in front.
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