Finally, a fine day for travel through the Yukon.
We are officially in the Klondike and the road is less traveled and also rougher. It is still a paved road, but not kept up as much as further south. there were lots of patched and dips, particularly through marshy areas where it seemed like the roadway had settled unevenly. Harry, who was following Speedy, says that Speedy left the ground at least once, but he exaggerates.
With all the wildlife that is supposed to be about, we only saw a few rabbits along the road, except when approaching Dawson, when I saw either a coyote or wolf atop a mine tailing mound, but it trotted off before we got a chance to see it clearly.
The view coming into Dawson City was a bit unexpected. There were long dikes of river stones perpendicular to the road for several miles on the way into town. These were all tailings from gold dredging operations. It looked like there ii still some activity going on.
We stopped at the visitor center to get a local map and orient ourselves. Dawson is a strange conglomeration of a town. It is still a mining town of sorts, but large chunks of the downtown area is a Parks Canada Historic Site, with buildings preserved as they were at the height of the gold rush. These are not much different from the rest of the buildings in town, except for their interiors. It also seems to be a tourist-oriented town as well with some touristy shops. Aside from the grocery stores, the tourist shops were all that were open today, a Sunday.
It is finally a town that still has a frontier look and feel, except for the Klondike Highway, which ends at the ferry across the Yukon River, the other streets in town are all unpaved with boardwalks along each side. All that is missing are the horses.
After walking about the downtown, stopping for coffee at a rather hippyish cafe with slow service, and picking up a few groceries, we headed back out of town to find a campground. We are staying at one of the commercial campgrounds on the outskirts of town, the Dawson City RV Park. It really wouldn't matter which one, since they all look like parking lots and have the aura of a truck stop. It is filled with big RVs and trailers, but we took unserviced sites (no water or electricity) that back up to a stand of cottonwoods and Bonanza Creek (free panning for gold behind the park). They are probably the best sites in the place. The cottonwoods are "flowering" and the air is filled with puffy cotton-like seeds that are so thick they look like drifts of snow on the ground.
We stopped here for the showers, laundry and Internet access, along with fuel and propane...although the Internet has been down most of the afternoon.
Tomorrow we are off for the Dempster Highway, but we may not go as far as we had hoped. Harry and I were talking with a fellow who was washing his truck, having just returned from a trip up the Dempster as far as Eagle Plains. He had four flat tires and a broken spring on his trailer and a flat on his truck, a beefy Ford F-350. A flatbed tow truck had to come out to bring the trailer back to Dawson. Evidently, the gravel does not cover the bedrock shale any more and the shale chips are like a bed of razor blades. They were going no more than 20-30 kph and still got the flats.
Neither Harry or I are interested in flat tires...been there already on this trip and it was in rather more civilized Michigan. We will still go out at least as far as the Tombstone Territorial Park for a couple of days.
Only 99 miles today
21 hours between sunrise and sunset and twilight does not end before tomorrow's sunrise.
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