Whitehorse, Yukon Territory

Whitehorse is a small island of civilization surrounded by pine and spruce trees buried in the mountains.  You can eat salmon, go to restaurants like the Winds Café, and have tea in a Japanese tea house.  Or, you can go dogsledding in the winter on a mild -30 below day.  It's the capital of the territory, so it has the government buildings and it has a history from the gold rush days. 


SS Klondike

People would travel to Seward Alaska by ship and set out from there to eventually reach Whitehorse via the Yukon river.  In the peak of the gold rush, there were paddlewheel steamers to take people, supplies, and mail up the Yukon to the gold fields outside Dawson City.  They have one of those boats on display as you enter town. 

Just upstream of town is Miles Canyon.  Today its a placid stream flowing into a lake, but during gold rush days, the canyon was a torrent of rapids and whirlpools that destroyed many of the boats the miners used to float their supplies and equipment to Whitehorse.  Today there is a suspension bridge for foot traffic across the canyon and a great network of trails to hike.  I took advantage of two nice afternoons to cross the canyon and hike along it as well as hiking up into the woods towards the mountains.  Very refreshing after days of driving all day.

The trails are very well marked and are wide corridors through the trees.  I was impressed with them.  I met people running along the canyon's edge, others bicycling through the trees and hiking like me.   After looking over some of the trail map signs, I realized that it didn't end with winter.  They also used the trails for cross country skiing.  Now I begin to envy them.

Since its still springtime up here, the spring and early flowers are blooming.  I found this grove of aspen trees with blue Astilbe growing among them.  If this is like New Mexico, the wet spring months produce a riot of flowers that disappear as the days warm up and the rainfall drops.   Pat and I hiked to Mora Flats in the Pecos Wilderness early one summer and endured days of rains and repeated soakings.  Our reward was seeing the valley so covered in flowers you could not walk between them.  Many times I have been up there later in the year when there was no evidence that a flower had ever grown there.  Just grass.






















And if you really want to, you can drive ten miles...oops 13km...to have a really good latte and a cheese sandwich in a coffee house buried in the woods.