Whitehorse
We find a hotel, not so easy given how long it's been since we've showered, and the daughter was absolutely devoured by the Black Flies in Burns Lake, so we're both covered in scabs and dirt. We end up in a small hotel across from the Macbride Museum, an absolutely perfect local museum of Whitehorse History that's stuffed with Native Artifacts, Taxidermy Animals and Tools from the old gold rush, the original Sam McGee's Cabin.
After exploring the museum we head on down to find the Visitor's Information Center - another World Class facility, with information on pretty much everything you could possibly want to do in the Yukon, displays of Animals and the Precious Gems and Minerals of the area - geodes filled with powery blue crystals, giant smokey quart crystals, emeralds and other finds. And, ever helpful the attendant photocopies us a guidebook to the rocks and minerals of the area, tomorrows plans are already made....
There are pictures of the Dempster Highway, which runs past the Arctic Circle to Inuvik. We're so close, and for another 10, 12 hours drive we could be there....but time on this vacation is limited, and already we've spent far too much time in the car. Next Year.
We walk around the main streets, brightly painted storefronts, it reminds one somewhat of Banff, only a Banff that's infinitely more remote than Banff is, far less "commercial" and much more - well, authentic. It's attracted it's share of tourists, to be sure, but they're the more hardened adventure tourists and wilderness lovers, those here hoping for bigger adventures and off the trail ruggedness that Banff doesn't offer.
I like it.
After dinner we curl up in the hotel room and watch TV. This is a treat I get only every other year, never having it hooked up at home.
London is burning, there are the riots and rioters tearing apart the neighborhoods, Anchors and commentators wondering "Why" when they really should be asking "What's taken them so long?". There's "Billy the Exterminator" - a surreal "reality" show that centers upon an illiterate family of exterminators in Americas South East, the staged wrestling of alligators and snakes, squashing of wasps, absolutely ridiculous. There are other shows, like "Canadian Pickers" and the standard forensic documentaries, YTV, rubbish, and finally it's time for sleep.
***
The next day we head off to go rockhounding. The guidebook copied for us suggests a few locations to go looking for rocks, we settle on the Geodes about Carmacks region and head off. The digging is good and we turn up a few rocks, the drive is absolutely stunning and the road beacons you on and on but we have to turn back, we camp that night beside Fox Lake, a beautiful specimen of Azurite left by an earlier traveler on the picnic table. And no sooner do we begin setting up the tent then it begins to blow and rain.
And rain.
Cooking dinner the pots fill with the rain, we crawl into the tent but the wind blows the fly back and the rain gets inside, all night it pours.
The next morning, still pouring, cold, windy, we pack up and head back to Whitehorse.
***
We explore more. The MacBride Museum is fabulous, and they have a map inlaid with plaster gold nuggets that show the amount of gold that was taken from each claim on the local gold bearing creeks. We take the trolley through town past the homeless encampment on the city hall's front lawn to the SS Klondike, a perfectly preserved steamboat from the day. We look at the bust of Jack London on the main street, grab a coffee at the Starbucks - and here I must note that the new gold rush is in both the Starbucks and Tim Hortons, which duel it out across the street from one another - every time you enter or pass, at any time of day, there's a line up of patrons waiting for their coffee. You can't print money that fast.
We check out a couple of the local art galleries, they're fine, then have dinner at one of the more "local" places.
The town is busy. Small, but they've done a good job of keeping the local character. There's the character bars, the "99", there are enough distractions to keep us busy for the day.
It's a great town, and I have a feeling that it will boom - the wilderness that surrounds it is indeed wilderness, there are countless unexplored mountains and creeks, and if I had the money for real estate I would spend it here, buy up properties downtown and restore them, there will be soon another boom in precious and rare earth metals and prices will skyrocket.
And that's Whitehorse.
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- Category: Miscellany
Calgary to Whitehorse
A month later and I'm just finding time to relay the Alaskan adventures now.
The first few days on the road with the daughter (the boy having decided somewhere along the way that he'd prefer to hang with friends in Calgary) - old territory, Jasper, Burn's Lake, camp a couple of days to recover from all the driving, being devoured alive by Black Flies that leave painless bites that stream with blood. The girl is horribly bitten.
Then North, along the Stewart-Cassiers Highway.
This is beautiful, and I can feel it calling....
There are few cars, sometimes only one an hour, and fewer services, gas at $1.50 per liter, stations every 300 KM. The road is somewhat paved, sometimes just gravel, and the road is taking us due North.
We stop - for a break - at a rock shop by the road, nothing of interest, only kitsch souvenirs, we ask the obese lady behind the counter what rocks and where we might go looking, she looks confused - "I dunno...try down by the river..."
"....and what might we find?" I ask, never one to let things go.
"rocks. And driftwood" is her reply.
***
We continue. This landscape is wild, there are no signs of human presence apart from the road, the top half of British Columbia virtually unexplored. A reservation, new vinyl sided houses in yards overgrown with purple weeds, derelict cars, suspicious locals. Not a good place to stop.
And still we go on.
By 6:00 PM we're at the 2nd Jade Shop - Saws, samples, raw jade, pieces thrown away, cut open, a great shop in the middle of nowhere, ridiculous prices, tiny carved bears smaller than a dime for $20.00, somehow they're convinced that their jade, mined at 900 tons per year and shaped in China, is worth more than gold...We are probably they only visitors that day, by the traffic on the road, and seeing all this raw jade - white, uncut, convinces me that we must have found some in our rambles by the river, and not recognizing it for what it was threw it back. The salesgirl assures us it's unlikely, most of the jade here - in this shop - was quarried high up Cassiar's mountain, there is little if any to be found along the rivers and creeks....
I buy the girl a small bear and matching jade cave. "We'll only be here once" I tell her, and this will be her souvenir.
We go on, further north a couple more hours before finding a campsite along a lake.
There are a few campers, the sun is up late - by 11:30 I retire, sun still in the sky, and at night have that Farley Mowatt moment where I hear for the first time the cry of the Loon.
***
It's peaceful up here, in the morning we take down the tent, drink our coffee. We passed a creek back on the road that gave the history of the Cassiar's Gold Rush, we keep our eyes peeled on the road ahead, what few turn-offs there are on the creeks are staked with no-trespassing signs, and we decide to make Whitehorse our next stop.
***
The scenery, the landscape is fantastic. There are long stretches of nothing, then bare and smoothed mountains, it's a country that begs you to get out of the car and just walk. It's new, and it's been too long since I've seen anything new. And on and on the road continues...
We hit the Alaska highway around Noon, across the Yukon border, and begin heading West. 3 hours roughly until Whitehorse. We stop for lunch, a dismal diner off the road and hidden behind a modern-decrepit facade, once inside it's a properly 60's or 70's truckstop, complete with velvet paintings of Indians and wildlife, somehow perfect - not, as you see so often nowadays a mock-up or reproduction, this is the real deal, and somehow it has that homey-smell.
***
Bears, many bears upon the road, we take pictures, and now the highway - the view from the road, it begins to resemble that landscape in my dreams, there's a sense of Deja-vu, as if somehow I've been here before, as if I'm revisiting after a long absence someplace I once knew well in my childhood.
***
In Whitehorse we take a hotel, settle down for the night to explore, go for dinner and walk about the town, a main street or two with brightly painted facades, various gift shops and museums, an incredible amount of vehicles on the road (especially given how small the town is...), but here nobody walks.
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- Category: Miscellany
Meetings in the Back Room
Now for the first couple of days there were the meetings in the back room, groups of people defrauded in the Luxury Car Scam, the Owner, the door would be closed and none of the waiters would dare to enter.
There is a cloud above the restaurant.
They're not the most sympathetic group of victims by a long shot, people who thought they could by next-to-new Ferrari's and Lamborghini's at a fraction of their value are not exactly widows and orphans. And some of them have too generously shared their pain by reducing their tips.
It's taken it's toll at home as well - we can only speculate, but the Boss has been unshaven, there's a blanket on the sofa downstairs, his wife calls and has staff relay messages to him, he's shouted himself hoarse and the frequent shouting fits in the kitchen are sounding more and more exhausted, he's worn himself out.
They've caught Franco or Santo or John or however he styles himself, the police seem confident they can recover most of the money, me, I'm not so confident, seldom do victims of fraud ever see their money again. But what else can they say?
And there are more of the private meetings, the Italians sitting round the table and discussing in quiet voices the probabilities of whether they'll ever see their money again.
Unlikely.
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- Category: People
Cars out of control on a snowy road
It's dark, early evening on a snowy road somewhere (downtonwn?) - a side street off a steep hill. And cars are going past, hitting some icy patch and spinning out of control, flipping over, smashing into parked cars, no one seems to be getting hurt but it's like a scene out of the movies.
I'm wishing I'd brought a Camera.
One - looks to be municipal vehicle, flips and rolls before landing upright in facing the opposite direction. I go to see if the driver's alright - it's Fabrizio - the bosses' nephew's friends brother. He seems a little annoyed, on the back of the truck there's all these road signs - hand painted with neon highlighters, I can't read what they say. He's worried about his load, and I get off the street, it's just not safe, too many maniac drivers...
I step into a shopping mall, it's rotating, and I try to take a shortcut through but it's a series of slides who's angle change, I get into one and am somersaulted as it turns....I get off just in time, with a little sliding of my own, at the right door, a walkway into a parkade....
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