It was another early morning – checked luggage out the door by 6:30, meet for departure at 7:15. We bought some tasty breakfast from a smoothie place a couple blocks from the hotel, but it did not open until 7:00, so timing was tight.
We walked over to the White Pass & Yukon Route railway station and boarded the train.
This railway was constructed during the Gold Rush to get people and their supplies over White Pass and on toward the Yukon. It’s the steepest non-cog railway I’ve ever been on, and the locomotive lost traction a few times in a disconcerting manner when the tracks were wet or something. Some of the train cars are over a hundred years old and still in service, the average passenger car age is forty-four. The diesel-electric locomotives they’re using are 1950’s models that have been rebuilt several times. Now the railroad is owned by Carnival or Holland America.
The views on the way up the pass are amazing, but it was another gloomy day with occasional sprinkles of rain, so our photos all look dark. But the steepness of the valleys and vast hillsides cannot really be captured on camera anyway.
Once over the 2,888 foot elevation pass we entered an unusual landscape, a sort of rocky plateau, scraped and sculpted by glaciers in the past, now a sub-arctic tundra.
Not long after the pass, and a bit under two hours in total, we arrived in Fraser, B.C. where we went through Canadian Customs again, then boarded a bus which would take us to Whitehorse, Y.T. There were lakes all around, small at first, then larger as we drove north. Soon we were driving alongside lakes that were thirty or even sixty miles long, less than a mile wide, and over 500 feet deep – long troughs carved by glaciers in the past, filled with snow-melt now.
The bus stopped in Carcross, formerly called Caribou Crossing. The town name was changed because there is another town in Canada called Caribou Crossing, but the name came from a natural land bridge between two very long lakes – the caribou looking to get to the other side of some of these long, long, lakes would cross at the land bridge. Unfortunately the caribou were wiped out in the area during the Gold Rush. We parked at a tourist trap - an area with a number of small gift shops, ice cream shops, and a bakery, along with the remains of an old stern wheeler and a totem pole where a couple musicians were playing a mix of native flute songs and country folk tunes.
We returned to the bus and drove just north of Carcross to the Carcross Desert, a small but true desert formed from sand formerly at the bottom of a then-larger lake.
Our next stop was also fairly close by, at Emerald Lake, a small, shallow lake with clay and mineral deposits on the bottom resulting in a range of green hues.
Then we drove for a while until we were just a little short of Whitehorse and stopped at an overlook of Miles Canyon, with the Yukon River running through it. Finally we arrived in Whitehorse around 2:30. After settling in our Westmark Hotel room, we took a walk with my sister-in-law and the boys up the Yukon River to see the fish ladder at the hydro-electric dam. We saw a bunch of graylings, but it is still very early in the salmon run. The Yukon is the second longest river in North America, and salmon arriving at this dam will have swum nearly two thousand miles, the longest salmon run in the world. We also passed a restored stern wheeler museum, the Klondike.
We watched a kayaker playing in the rapids just below the dam.
On the way back to our hotel we stopped at Dirty Northern Bastard, a public house which had very good food and a pleasant Dirty Northern Ale.
After dinner I spent a couple hours trying to sort through the hundreds of photos of whales, glaciers, and ice bergs on our camera and get some of them uploaded with the hotel WiFi, and I still did not finish – so many whale photos!