Mon, Aug 17: Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada

This morning dawns cold and wet so we don’t even move untill almost 10AM. It is raining steadily but not too hard. We lounge around, checking email and getting the blog caught up.

About noon Carolyn fixes a big country breakfast and we lounge some more. It is still raining and is forecast to do so the rest of the day. It should clear off tomorrow so we will probably stay over one more night. Sunny days are forecast for Dawson City starting Wednesday so it makes sense to slow down a bit.

Around 3PM we head for the local WalMart. The parking lot is full of RVers. It is a bust. It looks like Hurricane Ike is headed here! The shelves are stripped! So we head to the SuperStore, Canada’s version of WalMart. It is much bigger, but still the freezer cabinets are bare... literally...no frozen potato products, no frozen pie crust or any kind of pies, etc., and very little of any other kind of frozen food; just long aisles of empty cabinets....weird! The other thing we can’t find is bulk sausage like Owens or Jimmy Dean, not even a Canadian brand. We will be in Alaska by the weekend probably, maybe we can find it there. We do finally find a laundry bag and a pail...I know, but we have been looking for them the last 3,000miles or so! Carolyn gets some nice California strawberries and some fresh rainbow trout to fix almondine for supper.

After we exhaust the food stores, we head back into town

to check out a craft store. There are some really pretty wood crafts here, but artist are very proud of their work. The rain has now stopped, so we head to the dam on the Yukon River and check out Miles Canyon about 5KM up from the dam. It and Whitehorse Rapids were two, big, dangerous problems for the miners trying to get to the gold fields during the gold rush of 1898. The dam with its lake has tamed the rapids, but the canyon is still a dangerous body of water. Here the dam only raised the water level about 10 meters and there is still 10 meters of canyon wall left.There is a footbridge and a path along the canyon where a tram ran to haul the miners supplies from Canyon City to Whitehorse.Maybe, if it dries out some, we will cross the bridge and walk the 1.5 KM to the ghost town of Canyon City tomorrow.

It is starting to rain again so we head back to the rig and start our trout dinner. Cocktails, a good meal and a slow day has us turning in before the sun sets again tonight. Since the sun does not set until nearly 10PM that’s not as bad as it sounds though!