This wolf came wandering past the office at work on Wednesday. It seemed fairly unconcerned by any of us, and trotted on its (her?) merry way.
(It’s strangely warm here at the moment, and apparently I’m not longer used to the heat as I’m finding 30oC heat meltingly hot. Nonetheless – today, bike and climbing; tomorrow, bike and scrambling; Sunday, either day of rest or some hiking/scrambling.)
Yukon River paddling. Drifting along in the current. Serenity. Eagles. Splashing paddles. A deserted island (except for the Swiss). Camp. A beaver! Marauding insects. Dinner. Hanging food out of reach of animals. Can bears swim? Random haircuts. Cards. Ever-present sunlight. Sleeping bag. Sleep. Sleep-in. Lake Laberge. No more fast current. Tail wind. Wind blown waves. Paddle paddle paddle paddle. Shuttle to Whitehorse. Icecream. Aeroplane. Home.
Mum and Emma
Me in a boat – I got to sit in the back, and hence got control of the rudder, fun!
The morning view from our island
Rougher paddling on Day 2
There were no polar bears at the Arctic Circle. There was no snow. No seals, or ice, or igloos. All in all a fairly disappointing experience.
We stopped for breakfast there though, and revelled in the Northness. And to be fair, the lack of snow or polar bears made it a lot easier to sit around on the ground eating muesli than it would have been otherwise.
Fireweed lined the road as we drove to and from Eagle Plains to the Arctic Circle. But after our morning trip up north, we turned around and started the trip back down towards Whitehorse.
Stopping along the way in Tombstone Territorial Park, which had some of my favourite scenery from the bits of the Yukon I saw (although all of the Dempster Highway was lovely). We went for a hike up Goldensides Mountain.
Its sides were sort of golden, and it had ground squirrels. And it was a lot further to the top than it looked from the bottom.
Tombstone mountain
We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming with an exhilarating account of Megan’s ascent of Ha Ling Peak.
Bike rests at the pass (note water crackers in drink bottle holder)
The cycle from home, through town, and up the hill to the pass between Mt Lawrence Grassi and Mt Rundle went something like this:
(click to embiggen)
Then the bike was hidden in the trees, and bike shoes were switched for Chaco sandals. And the hike went something like this:
The summit of Ha Ling is at 2407 metres (7897ft), so an elevation gain of 700 metres for the hike, or 1.1km if you count it all the way from cycling through town. Basically, it was high enough for the intermittent rain to turn up as snow just as I arrived at the summit (while I was quite warm in shorts and a t-shirt down in the valley).
After some summit photos and snacks, I trotted back down the hill again, singing along to the songs in my newly created adventuring soundtrack…
I’m burning through the skies Yeah!
Two hundred degrees
That’s why they call me Mister Fahrenheit
I’m trav’ling at the speed of light
I wanna make a supersonic man of you
(Queen are fun – although I’m not sure how much sense some of the lyrics make, particularly that one about a racing car passing by like Lady Godiva).
Back down from the hiking, I collect my bike and just after taking this photo, realise my wallet is not in my pack. This was nearly the sad tale of a wallet lost somewhere on the wilds of Ha Ling Peak, but instead is the feel-good story of a lost wallet found by someone and handed in to a passing Park Ranger, who in turn got the wallet back to its owner.
Thanks for that Tom. After the weather, we’ll be coming back to you with more hard hitting news from the Yukon.
After visiting Dawson City, where I didn’t really take any photos for some reason (possibly related to my camera issues – although the 50mm is nice, it never focuses well and isn’t ideal for landscape type shots, and my lovely wide-angle lens isn’t focusing properly due to an incident with a slippery rock, and when I switched them over I got dust on my sensor again)… but anyway, Dawson City was very quaint and had Ye Olde Time boardwalks, and shops selling a vast variety of dead animals. We continued on to the Dempster Highway, which was in really good condition. Nice and dry and hard, the only problem was the random potholes of deepness. Given some of the photos I’ve seen of the Dempster (like Vik’s from his bike tour up there just recently), we were pretty lucky.
This was the day of the moose sighting at the appropriately named Two Moose Lake. It is suspected the moose sighting was brought about by the finding of this good luck charm/passport-photo (supposedly it’s someone’s father).
So we drove up the Dempster Highway, gazing at the beautiful scenery, stopping to skip through the fields of lupins and take photos, until we reached Eagle Plains, where the ubiquitous fireweed (with the purple flowers) surrounded our tents.
That evening we tried to escape the insects in the Eagle Plains Hotel, which has a lovely chandelier made of antlers, as well as several antlered heads on the wall and a complete caribou. We played shuffleboard and waited for it to get dark. Then we realised shuffleboard was actually a fairly boring game, particularly when noone can remember all the rules, and that it wasn’t actually going to get dark, at least not before the pub closed (there’s something fundamentally wrong about a pub that isn’t dark in the evening). We were kicked out at 11pm closing, in full daylight, and wandered off to try and sleep in our tents. That were full of light.
The sun set close to midnight, but rose again at 4.45am or so anyway, and there was still plenty of light around at dusk and dawn. I didn’t actually see any darkness the whole time we were there.
