Near-record snow and a couple of outings

Posted On January 18, 2021

As the snow gets deeper and deeper and cloudy skies are the norm, I haven’t been doing much outside the house, but I have gotten out with a friend a couple of times, once with Bella and Tucker, and once out to the wildlife preserve.

Visually, the deep snow is pretty – trying to deal with it isn’t much fun, though.

One of the jobs that needed to be done is shovelling the roof of the motorhome so I can get it into a shop to get some work done before Spring RV weather arrives. Normally this would take half an hour or so, but it took me 3 days to finish it as I try to pace myself so I don’t get sick.

Rolf Campbell, the Whitehorse weather historian at Twitter, confirmed my suspicions about this year’s snow – it’s the second deepest on record.

One of my many “jobs” on the computer is re-naming and moving photos so I can find them. This is what my computer screen looked like when I started writing this post yesterday. I got way behind and have thousands of images to do, so I do them a couple of hundred at a sitting than move on to other things. I typically add 2 or 3 pages to ExploreNorth every day, and spend a lot of time in my Yukon History & Abandoned Places group on Facebook, where the membership went over 15,000 last week.

Okay, let’s get out of the house and see some country! My first outing was on January 11th, when a friend and I went to the Yukon Wildlife Preserve. The next two photos show their newest resident, a badly injured golden eagle. It’s expected that he will be able to return to the wild.

One of my favourite residents is this moose, who really likes people. She apparently doesn’t have a Twitter account or she wouldn’t like them as much. She was in then pen with the male mule deer for some reason, and that really emphasized just how big she is.

The figure-8 loop is 5km (3 miles) in length, and before I got injured was an easy walk, but not long after leaving the moose I knew I was only going to be able to do half of it. We extended into the second half of the “8” far enough to see the thinhorn sheep.

We were very concerned at seeing 3 people working on a sheep laying down at the far side of the pen, but it turned out they were just trimming his hooves, and he walked away while we were still there.

I had gone too far, and needed a helping hand to get back to the car, but it felt so good to just get out.

Two days later I had Bella and Tucker in the car with me running some errands in town when a friend called and asked if I’d like to join her for a drive to Fish Lake. That sounded great so we met a few minutes later and headed off into the mountains south-west of Whitehorse.

Someone has built a fairly large igloo at Fish Lake. Good fun 🙂

Tucker wasn’t too sure about it at first, but he followed Karla in and spent a few minutes there.

This guy went out on the ice and set up his snowboard and parasail gear while we were there – it looked like a lot of fun.

On the way back I stopped for a couple of photos of a cross-country ski trail I’d not noticed before. The Whitehorse Cross Country Ski Club operates it.

The Fish Lake Road is a very scenic drive, right close to town.

The light at McIntyre Marsh was lovely, and we stopped and went for a short walk there. As well as the great light, we found some wolf tracks there.

The weather forecast today is warm but quite awful, so this will be another inside day: “Increasing cloudiness. Snow beginning late this morning then changing to periods of rain mixed with wet snow this afternoon. Snowfall amount 2 cm. Wind south 30 km/h increasing to 50 gusting to 80 this morning. High plus 4. Wind chill minus 13 this morning.”