We got to sleep in, which was good because it never got dark, so it was difficult to convince our bodies that it was time for bed. The sun set behind a ridge around 11:30 and reportedly rose around 3:00 with twilight in between. We had a decent breakfast in the hotel restaurant that was mostly paid for by the “Dawson Dollars” that were part of our tour package, then we did a load of laundry and my wife mailed a letter to her parents. I spent some time trying to upload some photos using the WiFi in the hotel lobby, but I only managed to get a few – the connection was slow and kept dropping. It seemed like they had a WiFi router that could handle twenty or thirty connections, but fifty or sixty people were trying to use it.
Then we walked down and along the Yukon River to the free ferry crossing that allows the Yukon Highway to continue across the river.
There is a nice campground just across the river, and a bit further down-river are a bunch of decaying paddle wheel and stern wheel boats that were beached and abandoned when the highway became the dominant mode of travel in the 1950’s.
I was interested to see that the campground supplies free firewood in an effort to minimize the spread of species like pine beetles or spruce aphids.
We rode back across the ferry and stopped at the Dawson Fire Station where one bay is a museum for some very old pumpers, and they also have an extra garage with old trucks in various states of restoration. This 1897 Clapp & Jones engine could pump five hundred gallons per minute.
Then we checked out some of the gift shops and my wife found a nice “Yukon” T-shirt. We tried some new flavors at the ice cream shop we were at yesterday, then returned to our hotel room and had a few crackers with cheese.
Then it was time for our “included” excursion on the Klondike Spirit paddle wheel boat.
The boat went down the river so we could see a small First Nations village, then we got a view of the “stern wheeler graveyard” that we had walked to, finally we went a ways up-river to the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers.
We went to a wood-fired pizza place and had some tasty pizzas for dinner, then we all walked up to Crocus Bluff, an overlook of the Klondike River and its confluence with the Yukon.
