Tag Archives: Yukon

Aurora approval

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Sunday 28 August 2022 – Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t stay asleep much beyond 8am, and soon it became clear that the same was true for Jane.  Since the weather forecast was for a morning with some sunny intervals and an afternoon with cloud, we decided to go for a walk around Whitehorse to explore it beyond the rather superficial introduction we’d had from Bernie’s city tour.

One can tell, by the way, that it’s summer here from the amount of road construction work that is under way.  Bernie explained that Whitehorse has four seasons: nearly winter; winter; still winter; and road construction.  So it was nice to be able to stroll stroll around on a summer’s day.

Obviously, Whitehorse has a significant historical, erm, significance, from the part it had to play in the good ol’ days of the gold rush.  It is, however, a fairly low-key town; not large, and possible to drive through and dismiss as dull. If you walk around on a quiet, sunny Sunday morning, however, the place has considerable charm.  There’s plenty to enjoy and some things to learn, also.

There are plenty of log buildings, some historical, some more modern.  One of the tourist attractions which I mentioned yesterday is the Log Skyscraper, built in 1947 by one Martin Berrigan.  A massive influx of military personnel and labourers arrived to work on three major construction projects – the Alaska Highway, the North West Staging Route airports, and the Canol Pipeline – during the post-war boom; housing was at a premium (as it still is today).  So Berrigan, having started by building one-storey log cabins, decided it would be more effective to build up; and the log skyscraper was born.

There are, as I say, other log buildings:  a church and rectory;

a cluster of three relatively modern log buildings now used for businesses;

and many historical ones.  One, the original telegraph office, is the oldest building still in its original location, and has been subsumed into the James McBride museum;

and others can be found at Shipyards Park.

There are plenty of historical timber buildings, too, such as the old fire station

and, of course, the railway station marking the end of the White Pass and Yukon route, which linked Whitehorse and Skagway from late in the 19th century.  The railway only runs these days to White Pass (you will remember that we rode this route from Skagway, because you have been paying attention, haven’t you?), but the original rails are still largely in place in Whitehorse as a historical and cultural landmark.

There’s a healthy selection of murals

and statues, some quirky

and some more serious, like this memorial to workers who have been killed;

and many First Nation references and installations.

There’s evidence of a burden of guilt about the original treatment by the settlers of the indigenous peoples (which was at times appalling), along with what seems to be a genuine desire to balance this through recognition and inclusion.

In keeping with many places we’ve been to in what counts to us as the far north (Alaska, Iceland), there are many colourful and quirky touches

alongside some attractive buildings

and some evidence of housebuilding to attempt to catch up with demand for housing.

On the southern edge of the downtown area is the S.S. Klondike, the second of two sternwheelers carrying the name and now a National Historic Site. They ran freight between Whitehorse and Dawson City, along the Yukon River, the first from 1929 to 1936 and the second, an almost exact replica of the first, from 1937 to 1950.

Nearby that is a park which has a delightful kids’ splash park.

There are several fountains which operate in a cycle once a button is pressed.  I was particularly taken with a bucket fill-and-tip installation

and a “ring of water”.

Whitehorse is a small town, but, alongside its significant role in governing the territory, it has some very charming corners.

In the evening, we went for a repeat visit to yesterday’s aurora viewing site.  It was interesting that the lights had already started by the time we got there at about 11pm, in contrast to the day before, when we had to wait 90 minutes for the show to start.  This show was better for spectators – it covered large parts of the sky and was brighter than the previous one – but in a way less good for photography, because there was less variety in the colours on display.  Nonetheless, we got a few images which we think are pretty pleasing.

This one is Jane’s favourite – a whiskery troll’s howling face in the sky.

Thus ended the second aurora session and, once again, we got our heads down at about 3.30am with a hope for some semblance of sleep before we had to get up and check out.  It was our last full day in Whitehorse; we head back to Vancouver tomorrow afternoon for the chance to draw breath before embarking on the next section of this trip.  We look forward to exploring Vancouver in some more detail, so please keep checking in to see what we got up to there.

Whitehorse, Green Light

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Saturday 27 August 2022 – Despite a late night, we couldn’t indulge ourselves with a late rising because we were booked on a City Tour starting at 10am.   We took breakfast in the hotel; it was a substantial rather than a luxury offering, but tasty – and they have Earl Grey tea.  The dining room (in fact much of the hotel)  is set up with vibes from the good ol’ days when people came out here to die whilst failing to find gold.

After breakfast, whilst Jane was discussing the strange antics of the telephone in our room with reception, I popped outside to see what the temperature was.  Looking through the hotel window, I’d been disconcerted to see ice in the gutter outside.

It turned out to be foamy detergent runoff, presumably from cleaning the car. The temperature outside was mild – about 10°C.

For the City Tour our guide was Bernie, originally from Germany but a long-time resident here.  He first took us to the Hydro Dam, which uses the Yukon River for electricity generation.

Impressive as the mighty flow of the river is, it’s not as impressive as the facility that runs beside it – the longest wooden salmon ladder in the world.

These pictures tell only half the story, but, as a digression, if you look at the picture above you can see a beaver in the water.  He obligingly popped out for his close-up (yes, I know I’m making an assumption here; deal with it)

and then rather satisfyingly buggered off before anyone else in our little tour group could get a photo.  The salmon ladder extends out the other way as well before turning back on itself for a total distance of 1182 feet to help the salmon rise 60 feet vertically and bypass the dam, which would otherwise be an impassable barrier.

The dam constructors specifically put in an impassable waterfall to ensure that the salmon made their way up the ladder.

There is a hatchery there, which deals in the Chinook breed of salmon that inhabit the river. Inside, there are  windows into the ladder

alongside much other information about this particular  salmon run, which, at 2,000 miles, is the longest in the world (the red line in this map).

The shape of that red line is used in a rather nice, if slightly dog-eared, artwork outside

and there’s much other artwork on the salmonid theme there

along with a rather depressingly low number of returning salmon counted there this year – 128 so far, when in previous years the total was in the thousands.  It all underlines the increasing challenges the salmon have to overcome in the face of climate change.

Bernie then took us to the Whitehorse visitor centre (via the log skyscraper, of which I hope to write tomorrow). He explained a lot about the geography of the whole vast area – Alaska, Yukon and the North Western Territory

in which mining is a major industry – all sorts of minerals come from this part of the world, celebrated in a display case in the centre.

The other major industries of the area are government – Whitehorse is the capital of the Yukon territory – and tourism. He also explained that it was an expanding town.  There were lots of well-paid job vacancies, but the trouble is that house-building hasn’t kept pace, meaning that accommodation is (a) hard to come by and (b) expensive.

That was the end of the City Tour (it’s a small place, and Jane and I have a plan to walk round it to explore it further tomorrow, weather permitting); but Jane had spotted another tour which looked interesting, to the Yukon Wildlife Preserve. As it happened, Bernie led that tour as well. The preserve is about half an hour’s drive from Whitehorse and is home to around a dozen Yukon species, each in their own natural areas, spread over 350 acres.  One can walk round the 3-mile trails, but Bernie took us in his minibus.  Here’s a selection of pictures of what we saw; each species is in wire-fenced enclosures, some of which are very large and so we couldn’t get close, but we certainly got a flavour of the wildlife and spotted several species we wouldn’t otherwise have been able to see.


bison;


mule deer;


moose;


red fox (actually, this one was wild, nothing to do with the preserve);


thinhorn sheep, female and male;


musk oxen;


mountain goats;


a cute little arctic fox, which Jane captured very nicely;


reindeer, or caribou as they’re known in these here parts;


a scene which should have featured a moose but it was hiding somewhere;

and – my favourite – a lynx.  I wouldn’t have spotted it, but Jane did and between us we managed to get a very satisfactory image even though it was quite distant.  My mobile phone did a great job, here.

There are other photos – no, really – but these are the pick of the bunch in my view.

As I’ve hinted before and elsewhere, we had an activity booked to start at 10.30pm, so we went out for dinner to store up the necessary energy.  Jane’s first choice, a joint called Klondike Rib and Salmon, was taking walk-in customers only and the line of them stretched down the street. So we headed for another place, one Bernie had recommended as we drove around on his tour.  It is called Antoinette’s and has, I think, been recently opened, because they had all sorts of signs around the outside insisting that they were, indeed, open.  They also had a table free, so we had their unusual twist of Yukon and Caribbean cuisine, and very good it was, too.  I’ve not eaten bison or elk before, and this meal enabled me to try both.

Then it was time for our evening activity, which was an attempt to see the Northern Lights; this is actually the principal reason we visited Whitehorse, and was as part of a special Aurora package put together by Northern Tales, a local agency (who also provided our City Tour and Wildlife Preserve tour earlier). We were whisked away to a site north of Whitehorse (and not too far away from the wildlife preserve, as it happens), where there were a couple of heated cabins, drinks, snacks, a bonfire and an open area where we could set up to view and photograph the Aurora Borealis.  As anyone who has tried this will know, success is entirely a matter of chance, and the initial omens weren’t too good, as we drove there through what sounded like heavy rain.  The rain, at least, had largely ceased by the time we got there, and so I busied myself with the relatively drawn-out process of setting up to get photos should the clouds decide to clear and the aurora to turn up. This excursion was basically the reason I had toted a tripod and an extra wide-angle lens with me, though it turns out that I could have left the tripod at home, as they provided some.  Never mind, I am familiar with mine which helps, I think.

After a few minutes, it seemed that the rain was going to hold off, so I set my tripod up with the camera and a remote trigger on it and checked, as far as I could, that I had a working setup. jane helpfully made tea and eventually (because the cabin was too warm and the weather was not cold) we settled down on a seat near my and others’ tripods and stared into the far distance to see if we could see anything happening.  It was really quite dark by that stage, although we could just make out lighter and darker patches; after a while of getting dark adapted, my eyes started playing tricks on me and I could have sworn I saw flickering patterns in the sky and the odd occasional dancing light.  We waited for about an hour, between 1130 and half-past midnight, taking occasional photos of dark sky and clouds.  I got to the stage where I thought I could entitle this blog post “I came for the Northern Lights and all I got was this bloody wildlife” when we thought that maybe we saw a little extra light out to the north.  So I took another photo, and, sure enough there was a tiny flash of green in the far distance.

Was it real?

Yes!

The next 90 minutes was an orgy of photo taking and checking the results as best one can in near-total darkness.  I thanked God for a Nikon product called Snapbridge, which transferred photos from camera to phone, so we could check results on a phone screen rather than on the small one on the back of the camera.

It was great. We didn’t see the gorgeous dancing hanging curtains of light so beloved of marketing departments; but we did see enough to make staying up until 3am worthwhile.

A fundamental truth of the northern lights is that they are rarely bright enough for the human eye to see the colours; camera sensors, however, have greater colour sensitivity.  Often, humans see just a greyish light when the camera shows green.  But sometimes the lights are bright enough so that the cones in the human eye can make out colours; and so it proved now – we could just about make out the colours, although they were much clearer on digital images.

I took a lot of photos.  No, really.  But to save you the agony of looking through them, here’s a video constructed from two sequences of photos from two slightly different viewpoints.

Obvs, I’m pretty pleased with that little selection, but that may just be because I’ve only had four hours’ sleep and I’m getting hysterical.

You’ll be glad to know (yes, you will) that we repeat the whole process tonight, so I may take a few more snaps and share them with you.  Come back tomorrow and see whether the clouds got in the way or not.

Skagway – It’s The Rail Thing

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Sunday 14 August 2022 – Another eventful day beckoned, which meant, you guessed it, an earlyish start, for we had to be out and about by 0845 with our tourist faces on. The weather forecast was once again uncertain about whether it would rain, and the view at breakfast supported that uncertainty.

It was cool, but we were still able to sit outside for breakfast which was pleasant. We decided that we would laugh in the face of the prospect of rain, mainly because we would be spending almost all of our tourist minutes under cover: the morning was a train ride, the afternoon a trolleybus.

Rather conveniently, because Silversea had managed to get a good parking spot for the ship, the railway came to us, rather than us having to be ferried to it. A short walk took us to our train

and what seemed like a slightly longer walk took us to a carriage which we picked randomly. As carriages go, it was fine, but (from a photographer’s perspective) we should have taken a carriage near the rear of the train for maximum cute “here’s the train going round a bend” photo potential.  And once we were in a carriage and a kindly gent dressed as a ticket inspector had, erm, inspected our tickets, we were enjoined not to move carriages, so we had to make do with where we were.

Where we were was towards the front of a train that would take us along the White Pass and Yukon Route.  This is a railway that in its entirety goes to Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon Territory in Canada.  We would not be going that far today – simply climbing nearly 3,000 feet to the White Pass summit, looping round and coming back down again, a distance of around 40 miles in total. The Silversea blurb described it as a scenic railroad journey, so I had high hopes of being able to take photos of some, you know, like, scenery and that.

The railway has a huge historic influence on the origins of Skagway, all bound up in the 1896 Yukon Gold Rush. Skagway (we learned later, as you’ll find out if you keep reading) has unique attributes – the furthest north deep sea port, and a convenient notch in the surrounding mountains to make access a fraction less than impossible.  There had been two routes from Skagway to the Canadian Klondike: the ridiculously steep Chilkoot Trail and the longer but flatter White Pass. The founder of Skagway, William Moore, discovered the White Pass and busily set about creating an infrastructure to exploit support the hopefuls who would rush there in their tens of thousands in the – faint as reality demonstrated – hope of getting rich. Part of that was getting a railway built; this started in 1898 and it took just over two years to build the route.  For many years after the gold rush it was used to carry ore and concentrates to the deep sea port of Skagway, and then, after a period of disuse, it was reinvented as the tourist attraction it is today.

It is scenic, but in the early part of the journey those damned trees tend to get in the way of the view. Inside the carriages, a (rather stilted) commentary is broadcast, including alerts for things to look out for.  However, the best place to be to take actual photographs is standing on the platform outside the compartment, where you can’t hear the commentary.  So I spent practically the whole journey standing outside on the carriage platform, which was a bit chilly. I missed a few decent shots on the way up; but since the way down is simply the reverse, I made some mental notes of things I wanted to capture if possible on the return journey.  There were gaps in the trees to capture the odd scene, though

(that’s Skagway in the distance – you can tell by the cruise ships) and Jane did a great job of passing on alerts from the narrator to give me the best chance of catching decent scenes.

Bridal Veil waterfall

a bridge higher up on the railway – looks dangerously flimsy to me.

Regrowth after a landslide, or glacial erosion

Going over the “flimsy” bridge.

A steel bridge, in use until 1969 and once the tallest cantilever bridge in the world.

Eventually, we reached the border with Canada, marked with an obelisk and the flags of each nation

and we looped around and headed back down again – stopping, somewhat bizarrely, for customs purposes when we reached the US border.

I caught some video on the way down

and also this scene, which was one I missed on the way up and wanted to be sure to capture.

The train duly delivered us back to the ship, where we snatched a swift lunch before heading out for Phase II of the day – a Street Car tour of Skagway.

Our driver and guide was Anna,

who was clearly a larger-than-life character and had a robust delivery to match, full of historical nuggets and pungent comment. She took us around Skagway, which is a very attractive little town, telling us stories about the buildings we passed;

the church, for example, was the first granite building in Alaska.

She took us to an overview point to give us a, erm, overview of the town

before taking us to the Gold Rush Cemetery, where many who died during the gold rush years are buried.

Two key characters in the development of Skagway were the villain, Jefferson Smith, who got the nickname “Soapy” by conning customers with bars of soap, and the hero, Frank Reid, who killed Smith.  Actually Reid was a thief and murderer on the run, but that seems to have been forgotten because he was the cause of Smith’s death, as part of which, he himself was killed.  Anna, as one might expect, milked this strange and sorry saga for all it’s worth.

Anna ended the tour back in town, which gave us the opportunity to go for a quick walk around it taking better photos of this attractive place than can be easily done from inside a bus. There are many colourful timber buildings, especially on Broadway along which the railway used to run

including the Skaguay News above, which used to publish the news regularly, once every month. (The original name of the town was Skagua, meaning “that windy place” in the Tlingit tongue, and the name has since been anglicised). There was the odd occasional mural or other quirky item,

an extraordinary rotary snowplough for clearing the railway,

and a statue of Skookum Jim, a Tlingit native, and Captain William Moore, representing their discovery and mapping of the White Pass.

This brought us back to the ship for its 4pm departure for our next port of call, Sitka.  We’re due to go on a hike and much scenery is promised in the blurb about it.  Therefore, in theory, there should be some lovely photos to look through tomorrow to distract you from my commentary.  You’ll just have to check in to find out, won’t you?