May 24--White Horse, Yukon to Tagish

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May 24, 2011 Tuesday Hi Country RV Park, Whitehorse, YK. 8348 starting mileage; 50 degrees at 11:00

Dropped down, literally, into town and out to Wal-mart parking lot. Wanted to purchase some more Puffs, as we had gone through 3 boxes with our colds. Valerie was also going through more batteries than we expected. Anyway, met with a bunch of our group hanging out there, then went over and filled our propane tank for the first time. It took 18.7 liters, so we were getting low. We are using more propane since we are doing more “dry” camping and the gas runs the refrig which saves big time on the house batteries.

We really liked the very neat, well maintained town of Whitehorse, which is the capital of the Yukon Territory. Everything looked freshly painted. Although small, it is certainly not dead downtown and was filled with neat art work here and there. We were surprised by all the international restaurants. It sits on the Yukon River and it was here that the “stampeders” who climbed up the Chilkoot Trail went up the Yukon to the gold fields by boat. We are now in the area permeated by the history of the Klondike and these gold seekers.

Drove a bit out of town toward Carcross and Skagway and had lunch in a park by a lake. We immediately hit road construction as we left with the top of the asphalt having been scrapped off so that it is nothing but gravel. One of the things we have noticed about all the road construction that we have encountered in Canada is that there has been an ambulance on site at each one of them.

About 8 miles from the town of Carcross, a full grown black bear crossed the road in front of us. It was the first time we have seen a mature bear and it was where we could get a good picture. We then went by one of the prettiest lakes we have seen---it was a deep blue-green because of a layer of carbonate on the bottom—called Emerald Lake. Not sure that the photo can capture the color well. The sand from all the lakes and glaciers have blown into an area they call the Carcross desert---really just an area of huge sand dunes.

Turned left toward Tagish just before we entered Carcross as we had thought we could see some birds in that direction. This is a large Native Indian area which here they refer to as “First Nation People”. We didn’t see the swans and other birds we were expecting but, did see a pair of merganser ducks sitting on a rock in the middle of the river. Spent the night in Tagish, !st Nation Provincial Campground.

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