Spring at the Carcross cabin
I’ve been down to the cabin the past couple of days, getting it dug out and dried out for the coming season. Luckily our snowfall this year has been very low so it’s not as big a job as it has been some years. It’s not all work, though. My camera – a Fujifilm FinePix S1800 – is getting plenty of use.
On Wednesday I went to Skagway first, to pick up some motorcycle accessories that were at the post office waiting for me. This is Brute Mountain above Carcross on the way down.
The view down the highway to the Venus Mine and beyond. Not a great day but certainly not bad.
The WP&YR tracks and some of the parking lot at Fraser have been cleared of snow.
I spent very little time in Skagway – just picked up my stuff at the post office and headed back to Carcross.
Poor Kayla. Hiking up to the cabin, she got stuck, for the second time in 3 days. She forgets how old she is (she turns 11 in 2 weeks) and tries to follow Monty through deep snow, then collapses. I try to keep her behind me so I’m breaking trail, and usually she’s okay with that – but not always.
When the snow slides off the metal roof the pile gets very deep and very hard. The fallen and drifted snow on the main part of the deck is much easier to deal with.
I got the heavy stuff, now Mother Nature can deal with the rest of it!
Approaching the Carcross Corner on Thursday morning. This is where the South Klondike Highway meets the Alaska Highway. There are days when I’d just like to keep going straight ahead – this was one of them.
I turned down the South Klondike, then for some reason stopped and took this photo of what had been Maggie May’s Chuck Wagon cafe. When I returned a few hours later, it was gone – bulldozed into history.
The peaks beyond Rat Lake.
Just past the Carcross Desert, this rough road leads off towards Lake Bennett. With a 4×4 in the summer, you can get right to the lake and the mouth of the Watson River.
I crossed the Nares River Bridge than walked back to get another of the “classic” views of Carcross.
The “driveway” to my cabin that I prefer to use won’t be useable for weeks yet as I didn’t plow it at all this past winter, so I went through this old part of the village along the waterfront. Most of the cabins along here have been abandoned for many years – some date back over a century.
The broad view from the deck at the cabin.
A closer look at the swans in the above photo, taken from the deck.
There’s a lot of digging to do, but this short trail has a fairly high priority 🙂
At the other end of the priority list is the back corner of the cabin which is always tough to deal with.
By 3:00 I’d cleared about enough snow for the day – it was time to set up a zero-gravity lounger, pull a a fine cold beer aptly named Ice Fog out of the snowbank and enjoy the sunshine.
Kayla and Monty agreed. I find it funny that they prefer to lay in the snow – as the snow melts away they’ll seek out the very last patches to nap on 🙂
In just a few weeks this snowmobile trail along Lake Bennett will once again be the White Pass & Yukon Route railway. A few years ago I called the railway office and asked them to stop blowing the locomotive horn when they approached Carcross in the Spring as it scared the swans away, and they quit – that’s what a good neighbour they are. I love watching the trains there, especially when they’re full of people marvelling at how beautiful this country is.
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