It was back to town today. Our first mission was to take the 11:00 a.m. walking tour of town. Today was the first tour of the season, the 11:00 a.m. tour was the first of the day, and our guide was giving his first tour. The hour tour was looking at a lot of old houses in the downtown area and hearing about their history. The tour was OK but it would have been better if there was more history and fewer old buildings. After the tour we set out for another of the recommended restaurants for lunch. This one was better than the one we ate in the day before. The main highpoint of lunch for Leslie was that they had Arctic Char on the menu. Char are very similar to trout except the flesh is pink rather than white. They have a rich flavor and Leslie will almost always order Char if it is on the menu.
We finished lunch and set out for the S.S. Klondike. We took a tour of the boat and watched a short film about its history. The Klondike was built to haul passengers and freight between Whitehorse and Dawson City on the Yukon River. When a road was finally built between the two town, the river traffic was no longer needed and so it stopped. The boat had a draft of only 30 inches and they still occasionally got stuck on a sandbar. The trip down river took a day but the return upriver took 3-4 days.
While looking at the boat I had an ahhah moment. I knew that during the Klondike gold rush, people flocked to Skagway in the late 1890s to find their riches. Skagway is on the coast and is reachable by ship. From Skagway they had to get their supplies inland over a mountain pass and most did this by packing everything in on their back. They needed something like 1,000 pounds per person so they would haul as much as possible inland and then return multiple times for more loads. On the inland side of the mountains, they had to built a raft or boat to continue their journey. Once afloat, they journeyed down the Yukon river to Dawson City where most never found their riches. My ahhah moment was when I finally figured out how they completed their journey from Skagway to Dawson City.
Whitehorse has a trolley that runs between the S.S. Klondike and the Wal-Mart on the other end of town. We didn’t ride it but we did see it whizzing by.
After looking at the Klondike, we hit Wal-Mart, got fuel for Snowflake, and went back to the campground. I fixed a brisket for supper. Connie gave me the directions for cooking it all day in a crock pot. The result was barbequed beef and it was delicious. I still have two more pieces of brisket in the freezer.
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