Yet another early day, luggage out by 6:30, meet for departure at 7:45. We all went to Tim Hortons for breakfast. They were featuring some meatless “Beyond Sausage” breakfast items, so we tried a couple of those. It was indistinguishable from ‘real’ sausage for me, so I was impressed with that, but the apple fritter I ordered had no apple flavor. The “Apple Cinammon Fog” tea-based drink was quite tasty, though.
We boarded the bus at eight and headed north, first on the Alaska Highway, but we soon turned off onto the Yukon Highway, continuing to more-or-less follow the route of the Stampeders. We stopped at the Montague Roadhouse, one of several stops on the historic Whitehorse to Dawson Overland Trail, a system of stops along a road to allow travel and postal mail to move between Whitehorse and Dawson in the winter, when the river is frozen.
Then we stopped at a grocery/general store in Carmacks, another town on the Overland Trail.
We had lunch beside the Yukon River in Minto, a “town” which really just consists of a handful of structures, a couple of which are houses, the others part of an RV resort that contracts lunches with Holland America tours.
We stopped at an overlook of the Five Finger Rapids, a significant obstacle to river travel on the Yukon, then we stopped at a campground/cabins/restaurant/resort with a lot of whimsical stuff. We bought some Birch syrup there, which is supposed to be similar to Maple syrup, but not as sweet.
We had another stop overlooking the Tintina Trench, a valley formed by the shearing movement of continental plates.
Finally we arrived in Dawson. The Westmark Hotel here is much nicer than the one in Whitehorse, and the sun finally broke through the clouds.
Having started the day by introducing our sister-in-law and the boys to Tim Horton’s, we ended the day by introducing them to poutine. I think they liked it, but one of the boys has “problems” with the word poutine.
We walked around town in the evening and went to the Sourdough Bar to see their (in)famous Sour Toe Cocktail – a strange tradition that started with a toe amputated because of frostbite, the toe’s owner preserving the toe in some of the whiskey they were smuggling, the toe being discovered years later, and someone daring that person to drink that whiskey. Now almost 90,000 people have drunk a shot of whiskey with a desiccated amputated toe in the glass.
We finally went to bed around 11PM after the sun had finally sunk below the canyon wall, but while it was still fairly bright outside.