Day 7 - Wrapping Up Whitehorse

After the cross-country antics of yesterday, we wanted to take today relatively easy, and just visit those places in Whitehorse we hadn't got around to seeing yet.  The sky was mostly clear as we stepped out of the hotel after breakfast, but we're old hands at this now, and we knew it would be chilly.  By mid-day the heat would be comfortable, and by late afternoon it might even be too hot, but you can always feel a cool nip in the morning air in Whitehorse, YT.  We made our way to the Visitor Centre to take a couple of photographs missing from our collection, then headed for the MacBride Museum of Yukon History, which has been our list to visit since we got here.

Entering, I saw a "this museum operates on donations" kind of box, so I dropped ten dollars into it, thinking that this was our admission.  Then we were rugby-tackled by the very pleasant Steph, who asked us if we wanted to enter the museum, and when we answered in the affirmative, charged us the ten dollar each entrance fee.  D'oh!  However, Steph pumped so much information into us at the start of our visit and again later on that I really didn't begrudge the extra donation (well, I obviously begrudged it enough to mention it here in this blog...)

Tearing ourselves away from Steph, we stepped quickly back outside because another of the museum's assistants was giving a gold-panning demonstration.  You know, you think you know how panning for gold is done... river bed, pan, swill-swill-swill, gold.  I thought the pan would have some sort of a sieve through which everything but the gold would pass, which is - now I come to think of it - complete nonsense.  Actually, a gold pan is more like a deep metal bowl with a flat bottom, and the act of panning relies on the fact that the gold is so much heavier than everything else - stones, gravel, dirt, water - that it will sink to the bottom of the pan while everything else gets washed out.  The girl giving the demonstration patiently explained this to the small crowd watching her, while an old woman kept asking her how she knew there was any gold in the pan.  Eventually the girl cracked and said, "I put some gold flakes in there earlier".  Sure enough, after a few minutes of panning, the miniscule flakes of gold were revealed.  I admired the girl's skill, and her patience in not clouting the old woman around the head with the pan.

The rest of the museum was as interesting and informative as I'd hoped, with yet more information about the Gold Rush, as well as historical information about the First Nations who had been here before the mad white men and their trains and boats and dreams of getting more from the land than it could give them.  There was also a feature on the utterly insane Yukon Quest, a dog sled race that takes place each winter over the 1,000 miles of snow and ice between Fairbanks, Alaska and Whitehorse, Yukon (the following year it goes the other way, from Whitehorse to Fairbanks).

After a couple of hours we headed back to the entrance, and were looking at books and gifts when Steph found us again and asked us how our visit had been.  I told her we hadn't been able to find the Polar bear skull she'd mentioned.  She looked at me blankly.  "The what?"  "Polar bear skull."  "... what?"  "Skull.  Polar bear skull."  "I'm hearing p'burrskee."  I had to laugh, I never realised my English accent sounded so weird to these northern Canadians.  "Well maybe I should just change my accent, EH?" was all I could think to say.  Eventually we broke through the communication barrier, and she directed us through to a smaller room filled with animal skulls.  The p'burrskee wasn't quite as impressive as I'd hoped it was going to be.

But Steph wasn't finished with us yet.  While we were paying for a book of Yukon scenic photographs, she wrote down the names of a number of local artists on a paper carrier bag (I promise I will look these people up), then she took our (now rather worn and beaten) Whitehorse street map and pointed out a walk I hadn't even spotted.  It promised to take us out to the old part of town, up a stairway, and give us a view of the whole of Whitehorse nestled in this Yukon River valley.  She also circled a local bakery that served organic soup, and recommended we go there to help support the local economy.  If it's local economy versus the Golden Arches or The Colonel, the local economy wins every time in my book.

Thanking Steph for her help and advice (she was such a fantastic advocate for the town), we walked back to Main Street to look in some souvenir shops, then along 6th Avenue and up Black Street to the stairs that led up and out of the valley.  They were a bit like the Stairs of the Morgul Vale, steep and a lot of them.  Indeed, there were several people in workout pants and tops doing up and down laps of the stairs for exercise.  Wheezing and gasping we got to the top, right at the edge of the airport where we'd landed on Sunday.  We walked along a path through some fir trees and looked down over this odd little town that's been our home for the last 5 days.  The Yukon River sparkled to the left, and in the distance we could just make out our hotel and the S.S. Klondike.

It was now past lunch time, so we headed back down the stairs and found the Alpine Bakery, as recommended by Steph from the MacBride Museum.  Today's soup was three bean soup, served in a big pot and with a selection of odd, mostly cracked and chipped (but still clean) bowls by the side.  You paid, ladeled out your soup, picked some bread and found a seat.  It was delicious.  The ethos of the shop was one I never expected to find in an out of the way town in the north of Canada, but they cook fresh, organic food on a daily basis, and bless them for it.

Feeling healthy both in body and spirit, we made our way down to Shipyards Park where the girl on the Whitehorse Trolley on Canada day had told me there was a market every Thursday between 3 pm and 8pm.  It being only just after 2 pm when we got there, we sat on the bank of the Yukon River in the sunshine, discussing this past week, and the rest of our Canadian adventure still to come.

At 3 pm sharp we got up and headed over to the market.  It's only small, but it's local, organic, and fresh... back home I would have been all over it.  The girl I had spoken to on the Whitehorse Trolley was there; she had a stall selling homemade cookies, of which we bought two.  I thought she might have knocked us something off, maybe we should have bought more than two.  They were very nice cookies though.  We walked through the market one way and then the other, then slowly strolled our way along the river and back to the hotel, the sky turning more grey and a few spots of rain falling.

And then our final evening meal in Whitehorse.  If you'd told me we'd be sitting outside at a restaurant at 8 pm, in shirt sleeves and eating good Mexican food, I would never have believed it.  This town has surprised me at just about every turn.  We've eaten food here that has usually been good or excellent, with a great variety of cuisines (off the top of my head, Mexican, Caribbean, Italian and Japanese).  The weather has been far, far better than I had hoped for, and once again the Canadian people have proved themselves to be open, cheerful, and willing to help.  When I arrived in Whitehorse I was nervous, feeling we might be treated as outsiders, intruders, parasites, but not a bit of it.  We've felt welcomed and included.  I absolutely love it here, and it's going to be a wrench to leave tomorrow.

But greater wilderness calls us.  We pick up our rental vehicle at lunchtime tomorrow, and head further north, to a town with the unlikely name of Mayo, on the Silver Trail.

Not sure what the internet connectivity will be like up there, so if I go quiet for a day or two, it's just that I can't get connected.  At least, hopefully that's all it is...