July 20, 2009 by Rae

Skagway, Alaska

Skagway is an odd narrow town sandwiched on three sides by tall mountains and penned in on the forth by the ocean. It is a port city where cruise ships arrive in the hundreds during the summer season. The town appears, at first, to look a lot like Dawson City, very quaint and beautiful, but it soon becomes obvious that it is Disneyfied. The buildings on its streets are little more than façades hiding one kitschy tourist shop after another. But there is a Skagway to discover, if you care to, and I had four and a half hours in which to do so. I took a walking tour with a park ranger, visited the Klondike Park museum, and strolled through this small community. At the end of the afternoon, the group met up again for one last taste of civilization, superb Thai food at the Starfire restaurant on 4th Avenue. Skagway is obviously more than meets the eye.

looking down Broadway towards the cruise ships

remember this name…

façades on Broadway (and our nice ranger guide on the walking tour)

close up of a false front

home of William Moore, founder of Skagway (historical colours!)

one of several cruise ships docked that day

you know you’re in the middle of nowhere when…

the Chilkoot info centre, check in here for trail conditions, permits, and info

one of the oddest buildings I have ever seen

June 14, 2009 by Rae

Good Thing I Didn’t Come For the Gold

Gold was the theme of the day.

Claim No. 6

The mosquitoes at Discovery Claim sure hit the jackpot with me today! 😀

It was the discovery of gold at this claim on Bonanza Creek that launched the Gold Rush of 1898. Today, you can park at the claim site and stroll down to the water to try your hand at panning for gold. I borrowed a pan and shovel from work and had fun spending about a half hour playing in the mud before the mosquitoes and frozen ground chased me away. I’m pretty sure I struck iron pyrite based on the number of gold-coloured flakes lying at the bottom of my pan. There is no way I am going to even think that they might have been real gold. 🙂

Dredge No. 4

Dredge No. 4 was one of several barges (set in man-made lakes) used to mine for gold from the 1930’s to the 1960’s. How they work is a bit complicated to explain without actually being on site, but I’ll try. I’d say the nearest comparison is a mechanical shovel:

The dredge works on a similar pivot-system and has a thingamabob sticking out of it like the shovel of the digger. This thingamabob gobbles up all the gravel and dirt in front of it in a wide radius and sends it into the bowels of the dredge to be processed for gold. When all the gravel and dirt has been eaten, the dredge moves ahead. It spits out its back the unusable rock forming the Klondike’s famous rock piles called ‘tailings.’ I was surprised to learn that only four men where needed to operate these behemouths. That figure is misleading, however, since a ‘dredge camp’ had more than 100 employees.

The method for mining gold in the Klondike appears to be quite different than in Val d’Or, but this might be because of the permafrost here. There seems to be a lot of tourmaline and quartz in the tailings, so I think we can assume that Klondike miners are looking for the same thing as Val d’Or miners, but have a different way of getting at it.

Dredge no. 4 sank into muck in the sixties and in the eighties the decision was made to salvage it. Work on that project did not start until the early nineties. The lower level had been stuck in silt and ice for almost thirty years by this point, but the structure still came out mostly intact! They were even able to salvage the old floors. What impressed me the most, thought, was that the mechanical parts that had been buried for so long still worked perfectly.

Parks Canada now manages the site and gives a very good hour and fifteen minute tour ending with a ten minute video presentation of the raising of the barge. Well worth a visit!

The statistic I remember best from the tour is something I haven’t been able to confirm or deny. Apparently, Dawson City was the third city in North America to get electrical power after Chicago and Montreal. If that’s the case, I am very impressed!

tools of the trade

Bonanza Creek, cold as hell, yellow as gold

at one point, I realised that my toes were turning blue, the ground and water were so cold!

Dredge No. 4 (this is a BARGE!)

thick cables!

clutches

view of the manmade lake from the winch room (highest level of the dredge we can visit)

emergency stop button (and my feet, again)

sluice boxes

these were buried in silt under ice for almost forty years and STILL WORK!

planks from 1939/1940, buried in silt and covered by ice for almost 40 years! (and, of course, my feet)

this shot really shows that the dredge is a big boat

driving home along Bonanza Creek Road

June 4, 2009 by Rae

Whitehorse to Carmacks

I got up at six on Tuesday morning and decided that Starbucks was going to make me breakfast (dark brewed coffee with space for a little bit of milk and a chocolate croissant, please and thank you). I gassed up at the best price I’d seen in a while (101.9) and hit the road at quarter to seven (unheard of for me!).

The day’s mileage would be about 500km and I decided to drive it as though I only had half of that to go. So, I stopped everywhere that looked interesting, did hikes, took advantage of photo ops, and had a good lunch break. It was another great day on the road.

First stop was Little Fox Lake:

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Next stop was the Montague Roadhouse:

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In the days when stage coaches and sleds were the only way of going from Whitehorse to the Klondike, roadhouses like these dotted the landscape and provided refuges for weary travelers, offering food and lodging.

The inside of the log structure was covered with muslin to lighten the interior and also keep the chinking from falling into the rooms. This ruin is about a hundred years old and, yet, some of that muslin is still visible:

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The roadhouse in its heyday:

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I then paused just long enough in Carmacks, ‘the hub of the Yukon’, to get a picture of its beautiful welcome sign mosaic:

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May 21, 2009 by Rae

Bannock

If you’re Canadian, chances are that you’ve made bannock at some point in your life, probably in summer camp or as part of a school outing. I used to make it whenever I camped, but sort of forgot about it as the years went by. I picked up a recipe for this quick bread at the Fort Nelson Museum last week and have had a craving for it since!

This morning, I looked at the multigrain bread I normally have for breakfast and felt mildly queasy. So, I decided to whip up a batch of this bannock for a welcome change of pace. Of course, bannock tastes best cooked over an open fire, or, in a pinch, a cast iron skillet, but this morning’s batch made in a non-stick frying pan was most satisfactory.

Ingredients

(can be halved)

4 cups flour

2 tbsp sugar

2 tbsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

3 cups water

raisins (optional)

Method

Mix dry ingredients. Add water and mix dough to a drop consistency.

the dough will be very wet

Melt cooking fat or heat oil in a frying pan until hot.

Drop tablespoons of mixture into hot fat.
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Fry until brown all over.

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Suggested toppings: honey, butter and jam, or, this morning’s sweet treat, real Quebec maple syrup.

The bread is very light and chewy. Unlike my former favourite quick bread, biscuits, bannock is great cold.

You can, of course, adjust the quantity of fat. I’ve been burning a lot of calories these days, so I didn’t go lightly on the olive oil this morning, but normally I wouldn’t use any fat at all in my non-stick skillet. I would also normally do half whole wheat flour, half white, but I was out of whole wheat today.

I didn’t count how many cakes a half recipe made, perhaps a dozen or so. Total time from getting the ingredients out of the pantry to flipping the last cake out of the pan: fewer than fifteen minutes.

I never keep eggs in the house, so these are going to become my alternative to pancakes. They’re so good! With raisins, they can easily be eaten as is. Next time, I’m going to add some nuts, in addition to the raisins, to turn the bannock into a great hiking snack.

May 17, 2009 by Rae

Sign Post Forest and Wye Lake

I drove into Watson Lake this afternoon to take a gander at the town, especially the famed Sign Post Forest:

A tiny sample of the more than 65,000 signs in Sign Post Forest

The Sign Post Forest was started by a homesick GI building the Alaska highway in ’42:

The original sign post

What struck me as I walked through the forest was from how far some of these signs had been hauled, including all over Europe and the Americas:

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In case that’s not clear, these folks drove from Guatemala (C.A.=Central America) to Alaska. WOW!

Or not hauled, but the people still came from across the sea (and were quite creative):

A Sterilite container lid marked up by a family from Holland

I was also surprised to discover that I couldn’t stare at one section without seeing a sign that reminded me of a place I’ve lived or visited:

Mt. Baldy is the ski hill near Oliver and the first time I set foot in Virginia was to visit Arlington.

Fond memories of camping at Lake George (upstate New York) with my family

I lived near Bobcaygeon for nine months and enjoyed showing my dad the sights in this quaint village.

Menomonee Falls was one of my many stops on the Great Road Trip of ’05

Nepean (green sign, bottom right above the yellow) is home of the Ottawa Municipal Campground, from whence I set off my RVing journey

Trying to remember what brought me to Wiarton all those years ago

I stopped in Black Diamond when I was touring Kanaskis Country in September ’08

There were several more that stuck out at me, and this was just from random browsing without doing any in depth scanning. Visiting Sign Post Forest was a real trip down memory lane!

The Watson Lake Visitor Info Centre is located in the heart of the Forest. Staff is very friendly and helpful. I was surprised that they were open so late on a Sunday! There is a small gallery there about the building of the Alaska highway as well as a movie. Unlike the similar exhibits in Dawson Creek, these were Canadian-centric. I was surprised to learn that the U.S. did not wait for Canadian approval to start work on the highway. So, the Americans really did literally invade Canada! Thankfully, we’re pretty laid back… or Prime Minster Mackenzie King knew we couldn’t afford to go to war against the U.S., again, for invading us, again (even though we kicked their butts last time, but that’s another story altogether–Google the War of 1812).

I took a picture of this sign because find the sentiment to be so true:

You don’t miss comforts if you’re long enough without them.

It was getting on dinner time by this point and I had a twenty minute drive back home, so I just stopped quickly to check out Wye Lake. It’s time to point out here that you don’t actually see Watson Lake from the town, only Wye Lake! As for Wye Lake it was named because it occurs in the centre of the ‘Y’ in the roads around it.

Wye Lake

The other main tourist attraction in Watson Lake is a planetarium called the Northern Lights Centre, but it won’t be open until at least Tuesday, so I’m not sure I’ll get to see it this time around. The rest of what’s to be done in the area involves being out in nature: hiking, hunting, boating, fishing, that sort of thing. Watson Lake is a full service community with a few restaurants, a bank (CIBC, yay!), a grocery store, a few gas stations, ample choice in accomodation, a good hospital, an RCMP station, etc.

While at the Visitor’s Centre, I met some gals on a long weekend road trip. When I got home, I decided to have dinner at the lodge and as I was eating the gals traipsed in in search of good grub. They asked me to join them and we had a blast talking about my travels. That’s one nice thing about being a solo traveler; you get to meet so many wonderful people!

With dinner, I continued to discover the local brews, finding the most perfect beer ever: Midnight Sun Espresso Ale by the Yukon Brewing Company. Beer and coffee together in one beverage. Perfection. 😀

Thankfully, it’s getting warmer!

A Life By Design

"Sometimes in life, we reach to a right place by departing from a wrong port with a wrong ship!" ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

History Museums

Skagway, Alaska

Good Thing I Didn’t Come For the Gold

Whitehorse to Carmacks

Bannock

Sign Post Forest and Wye Lake