On the way South now. Seems like the rain has followed us all the way down. The ladies in her knitting group in Ninilchik had told Ruthine that it starts to rain up north in August. They recommended that we get up there as early as we could. And we're glad we took their advice, even though it meant leaving Ninilchik a month earlier than we had planned. In all, we drove 3,067 highway miles in Alaska! Over 1000 miles of that was on dirt roads. We traveled about 90% of every numbered highway in the state.
The communications have been tough since we left Ninilchik - going in and (mostly) out of range for the cell and internet. We stayed at RV parks in Tok and in Chicken after leaving Fairbanks on the 13th of August. They had wifi - not - although we paid for it... Since we left Tok, Alaska (a week ago tomorrow) we've been almost completely out of range of civilization as we know it (in communication ability). But the drives have been super, even with the rain!
The Yukon Territory of Canada is about 2/3's of the size of the state of Texas. However, there are only about 34,000 people in it (half the population of Baytown). Monday we drove the Top of the World Highway through the Yukon Territory. That night we ended up camping on the bank of the Yukon River at Dawson City. The Yukon is a huge river - and Dawson City, where the 1896 Gold Rush began, is a tiny little town with a huge amount of history in and around it.
And were we ever in luck!!!
Wednesday the Canadian Park Service was celebrating the opening of a new trail at the Discovery Claim where that first gold was found. There was free food for all - barbeque burgers with all the trimmings, potato salad and slaw, plus cake. We toured Dredge No. 4 and went on down the road to the trail for the festivities. There was a small band playing historical, turn of the century gold rush music to entertain us while we feasted. And the (Royal) Canadian Mounted Police were there in their dress-red. We were able to have our picture taken with them. Cool stuff - even if neither of them happened to be Sargeant Preston with his faithful dog, Yukon King.
Dredge No. 4 is a tremendous machine - the largest wooden-hulled bucket dredge in North America. It moved along in a pond of it's own making, digging gold bearing gravel at a rate of 22 buckets a minute, 24 hours a day, for approximately 200 days in a season. (They closed it down for the winter when the temperatures started reaching -40.) It moved forward about a half mile per season. And over it's 46 years of operation it unearthed nine tons of gold, grossing 8.6 million dollars.
We had been told that if we panned for gold, we needed to bring our tweezers to separate the grains of gold dust from the dirt. This machine was able to separate that dust from the dirt. We are not sure just how long Dredge No. 4 is, but it is 8 stories tall. Undoubtedly this is one of the most fascinating things we have seen to date on our great adventure!!! And if you are interested, Wikipedia is a good place to start for information about Dawson City and the gold field adventure.
Thursday we took off for Whitehorse, leaving Dawson and the hills of gold-tailing landscape behind us. That night we stayed at the Yukon Government Campground at Twin Lakes. There were folks there picking the biggest golden mushrooms we have ever seen - and if we had known a bit about mushrooms, we may have joined them - but we don't, so we didn't. A principal part of the "underbrush" (in addition to mushrooms) was wild roses. We can only imagine what that park would have looked and smelled like when the roses were blooming! And every bush was just covered with rose hips! They were as pretty as the roses must have been.
Friday we ended our journey down the Klondike Highway. We're back on the Alaskan Highway now, at Whitehorse. Our plan was to sight-see today and head out tomorrow. But we are both "too pooped to pop" as they used to say. That means we are in the camper for the day - napping, catching up on the news, catching up on Geezers on the Road, catching up on Ruthine's FarmVille, and catching up and learning more about Ruthine's new potential addiction Ravelry (a knitting site introduced by Toka). We'll see what tomorrow brings.
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