Mule deer, moose & heavy snow
The weather hasn’t been very encouraging for road trips lately, but I had a few things sitting at the post office in Skagway so went down yesterday anyway. Any trip to Skagway is a good one, even though some are better than others.
I got away just before 10:00 am with the temperature sitting at -17°C (+1°F) under heavy clouds, and a few minutes later met this herd of mule deer at Rat Lake on the South Klondike Highway.
This dry south-facing slope offers the deer good browse, but it’s not common to see this many together.
Two of the three yearlings in the group.
This is my Subaru Outback in downtown Carcross. It’s a 2001 with 257,000 km on it, and I got some very bad news from my mechanic the day before – it needs the head gasket replaced, an $1,800 job. Plus some other work, so a whole pile of $$$ is needed.
That got me back to thinking about getting a new(er) car, and that eventually took me here. That’s just a dream, but… 🙂 At this point I don’t know what I’m going to do – the trips I do in the conditions I do them in make having a reliable car a must, though.
Work on the “retail village” in Carcross is coming along very slowly.
The other major “some day” project is a few hundred feet away. The opening day of the Caribou Hotel was delayed a few times and now they’re just not saying – 2014, I hope. It’s the anchor that the village really needs, and not only for visitors.
On the bank of the Nares River, which few people go to anymore, is a monument honouring Skookum Jim Mason, one of the discoverers of gold in the Klondike in 1896. It needs to be moved now, as back behind the new visitors centre…
…is a replica of Skookum Jim’s house, built when he returned home to Carcross a wealthy man. The house was moved downtown from the far corner of the village a couple of years ago, and is now home to a popular coffee shop and art gallery.
The other main attraction in town is the Tutshi memorial. The boat burned in 1990, and a monstrosity of a viewing platform has been built where the main body of the boat was.
I continued south just before 11:00 am, stopping to get a few photos of a truck bringing fuel from the tanks in Skagway to Whitehorse.
The light was rather flat on the way south so I didn’t take any photos worth posting, but when the light improved I stopped to take a few here at Km 48.7, just north of the Yukon Suspension Bridge.
The unusually high and long-lasting winds over the past few weeks have resulting in wind sculpting like I’ve never seen before in the White Pass
The pass got several inches of snow the previous night, with little enough wind that the snow has stayed on the trees.
Looking back up to the north, towards the White Pass summit, at an Alaska Highways rotary snow blower working.
Unlike my trip 3 weeks ago, I didn’t meet any cyclists wanting to share the road today! 🙂
The steep descent towards Skagway was quite impressive with all the fresh snow.
After picking up my packages at the post office, I checked on progress at the Small Boat Harbour. It’s coming along nicely, and pilings and pre-fab ramps have started arriving by barge.
Fuel was being pumped out of this barge into the storage tanks where the truck I saw earlier had loaded. The double-hulled fuel barge (DBL54), owned by K-Sea Transportation, is 300 feet long and can carry about 54,000 barrels of oil. It was built in Portland 3 years ago.
A heavy storm was coming up the inlet after I had lunch, so just after 2:00 pm I headed north again, with a light snow falling.
One more photo of a bit of beautiful light just north of Fraser, then it went flat again and I just drove straight through to Whitehorse.
I hadn’t taken the dogs on this trip because of the problems with the car – if I broke down it would be much easier to get home by myself. I did miss not having them with me, though, and when I got home, Monty was frantic at being left home 🙁 I might have to take Cathy’s Tracker next time!
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