Day 11, 12 North to the Klondike

Wed Aug 22 Whitehorse

Five finger rapids along the Yukon river.

One of my favourite cities, Whitehorse is a modern, diverse and beautiful stop stretched along the Yukon River.  Good bakery, three coffee shops, museums, art, and a yarn store!  I could definitely live here.  We spend a fortune on cheeses, chocolates and fresh produce, then a larger fortune on booze.

Sometimes it looks like a laundry in here.

We've been looking forward to Two Brewers distillery, an offshoot of the local Yukon Brewing, and we are not disappointed.  Their gin is redolent with aromatic spruce tips and hits the sinuses like wasabi.  I'm hooked.  They've sold out of the peatty single malt whiskey that swept the Canadian awards last year, but the new vintage is smoky and toasty enough for me.  This with dark chocolate for dessert tonight!  And there's some stashed away for home, so you may all get a taste!


Thurs Aug 23  Whitehorse to Moose Creek

A beautiful tile mosaic greets us at Carmacks.

Larder full, sanitank empty, and laundry done, we're off to the Klondike on the road to Dawson City.  Overnight rain has rinsed the forest and the still green lakes glisten in sunlight.  These valleys were glaciated, and long gravel eskars snake throough the deeply cut river beds.  We've crossed and recrossed the continental divide and are now in the Yukon watershed where all rivers flow north and west, emptying 3000 km downstream on the coast of Alaska into the Bering Sea.  Salmon come up the Yukon and once were plentiful even this far inland.  Sadly only 500 have passed through the fish ladder in Whitehorse this year, a new low.

Past Carmacks, about half way up the Klondike highway, the road deteriorates.  We slow for dips and potholes, the perils of road building on shifting permafrost.  We have entered the 'drunken forest' where tall spruce trees tilt and lean at precarious angles.  Where the underlying frozen soil has thawed and melted, pools of unstable wet soil no longer pin the trees, or the road, to earth.  The anthropocene era is upon us.

As we climb out of the valleys into the black spruce forest, we enter the southern extent of Beringia, the unglaciated refuge that extended across western Yukon, most of Alaska, and into Siberia and Asia.  Fifteen thousand years ago, with much of North America under ice, this high flat steppe remained dry and provided a pathway for migration.  Sea levels were low enough to create a land bridge across the Bering Sea that our ancestors crossed, walking with the mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers and populating the New World.  Mammoth tusks are a common find as mine bore into the permafrost.  We'll keep an eye out for the giant beaver and prehistoric horse, just in case.