Getting Together and Organized in Edmonton

Sign I held up at the gate.

The welcome to Canada stuff I got from a booth.

The triplets.

Entering the hotel.

 

Sad but true...

The triplets.

John had us pose by the Adventure Canada poster.

Getting our kit.

Quite nice I'd say.

As expected an older, retired, wealthier group.

Dr. James Raffan leading the introduction.

Wednesday, August 30^th.

I woke up this morning feeling crappy and worried about my health. I’m pretty sure it’s just a cold but I can’t take the chance. I don’t want to miss my trip, but I certainly don’t want to mess up John and Bruce’s or be responsible for taking COVID to the north. So, I researched and found a walk-in clinic and a Shopper’s in the same area. I took a cab there, which cost $27. I got there before it opened and as soon as the cab pulled away, I saw a sign on the door that said there was no doctor available for the clinic for three days. I had no idea if they were going to open at 9 or not, but without anything better to do I hung around and waited. Thankfully they did. The pharmacist was a lovely Sudanese woman born in Toronto who was transplanted here by family and wished she was still in Toronto. She administered the rapid antigen COVID and thankfully it was negative. I bought some cough drops, a nasal spray, and a decongestant. There was a breakfast restaurant in the same plaza, so I ate there. Then I called a $30 cab to take me back to the hotel. John and Bruce by this time had arrived in Calgary and had a four-hour layover. I texted them and told them I had laryngitis and gave them the option of getting their own room. They were fine with staying in the same room. So, I settled in and awaited their arrival. I bought each one a chocolate bar to put on their bed, made a sign with their names on it to welcome them, and got some Canadiana bits to give them. I went down to the gate and met them there. Really great to see them and be reunited. We went to the room to get organized and of course Bruce asked me to tell him all about my trip… Very frustrating not to be able to talk… Argh. We went to the hotel restaurant for dinner and a beer. Then back to the room where we all crashed. They from jetlag, me from the cold.

Thursday, August 31^st.

A very lazy day today as it was raining and there was really nothing to do anyway. We watched a lot of the US Open and just hung out. We went for a few walks around the airport. At 4:00 we went down to the meeting room where we collected name tags, luggage tags and our expedition jackets. We talked to a few people including the historian on the ship and a Dr. James Raffan ,who is one of the lead people. They both seemed really good. Then we had a briefing telling us about the flights to Kugluktuk (formerly Coppermine) in Nunavut (formerly the Northwest Territories), and what to expect. There was a presentation about how to get in the zodiacs and what to do on the landings (don’t touch or collect things, don’t bother wildlife). The three of us then went to the bar for dinner and a beer. They also thanked us for our understanding of the change from Yellowknife to Edmonton. He told us that the hotel we were to stay in in Yellowknife is full of 300 firemen! There are about 200 passengers, going out on two flights, and 37 expedition staff, so we’ll be well attended. The goal of the trip they say is they want us to connect with the place, the people and each other.

So, we’re off tomorrow morning. I have no idea if and when we will have any connectivity, so if I’m off the radar, we will pop up eventually. It should be a grand adventure and we’re really looking forward to it. Take care for now I’ll be in touch when I can.

Holland America Cruise/Overland Summary

John Mahaffy at Whistler BC.

Holland America's Noordam.

The 75 stairs up from our cabin at Denali to the lobby of the Mt McKinley Resort.

Two of the indigenous people I had the opportunity to talk to.

Our guide Julie, who did a bang up job.

The Denali chain of mountains... simply stunning.

This is the view of Denali at Wonder Lake that tourists can no longer get because of the road collapse in Denali NP. It's from the internet and obviously taken on the perfect day.

The beautiful Yukon River, the longest in Canada at 3185 kilometres.

The mighty Yukon River, which starts east of the coastal mountains in southern Yukon, flows through Alaska from east to west and terminates in the Bering Sea. 

The struggle of the salmon who swim the length of the Yukon River to Whitehorse without eating!

Here they come... John and Bruce at Heathrow.

Summary of the Holland America Cruise of Alaska

I thoroughly enjoyed the inside passage cruise to Alaska. Unfortunately, the weather was not as nice as I would have hoped but given that we were traveling through the temperate rainforest that gets 11-13 feet of rain annually it should not have been a surprise that it was mostly cloudy, damp, and cool. However, the weather did not adversely affect any of the activities or excursions I took. It was strange and a bit lonely to be on a ship with 2000 people and not really meet anyone as they were all couples or families. However, I do like my own company, and I had my music and Kindle to entertain me. I love being on a large ship on the ocean watching and listening to the waves. I enjoyed wandering the outside decks admiring the views of the coastal mountains and smelling the air. I especially enjoy the outside decks at night. I found the town of Ketchikan the most interesting and attractive town and thoroughly enjoyed the excursion to the river to watch the black bears fishing for salmon, and the White Pass train ride from Skagway, Alaska to Canada through BC and into the Yukon to Carcross. The food on board was abundant and decent and I tried not to overindulge. I noticed that the portions they served seemed to be smaller than I might have expected but anyone who wanted more of anything only had to go to the cafeteria area where you could gorge to your heart’s content. I mostly avoided the cafeteria area and ate dinner in the smaller specialty dinning room, but it is a bit strange eating by yourself in a restaurant. I enjoyed having a balcony, and although I didn’t sit on it frequently because of the weather, it was nice to be able to see the views and the light coming in. I was amazed at the ability of the captain and the ship to negotiate parking behind or beside other ships and docks, and tight turns in dead end bays like in Glacier Bay.

Only 43 of the 2000 people continued on the overland portion of this 18-day tour of Alaska. Again, they were all couples, and I made the odd number. I talked to most of them over the next 11 days, but there were still people I never got to know. On the land portion of the trip we had a guide, Julie, who did an excellent job shuttling us about, giving guidance and making suggestions for excursions, and making sure that everyone was okay. The highlight of the land portion was undoubtedly the flight around Denali, which was truly spectacular. It is interesting that it is simply called Denali, not Mt. Denali or Denali Mountain. I also enjoyed seeing bears, moose, and caribou in their natural environment. We learned lots about the incredible life cycle of the salmon and how it not only affects their survival, but also that of all their predators and the whole ecosystem. Nature and how it all fits together is incredibly intricate. Other than the scenery and wildlife of Alaska, the human focus was of the incredible stories of the stampeders who gave up everything for a chance at instant riches. They endured unbelievable and almost unimaginable hardships, in the wilderness and rugged terrain during the often brutally cold winter conditions. The Canadian government dictated that each prospector had to carry a year's worth of supplies to the Klondike. They did not want to have to feed and supply all of these newcomers. They traveled into areas where there were no white people, but suddenly thousands of miners and stampeders arrived who then had to build shelters, homes and towns with basic tools and supplies. After that came the next wave of people: saloon keepers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, bankers, doctors and other people needed to administer to the needs of the miners and help relieve them of any gold they might have been fortunate enough to find. Every town had a musical play for us tourists that highlighted the heroic stories of the stampeders and those that followed. We didn’t learn too much about how all of that affected the local indigenous people, but we all know that it adversely affected their whole lifestyle, culture and land ownership. They were simply pushed aside, forcibly evicted and attempts were made to either assimilate (using residential schools) or eliminate them. So far on this trip I have had little opportunity to meet or mingle with indigenous people. I have seen them but the only ones I talked to were the ones who were carving the ocean canoe and the two indigenous guides we had at the native village museum on the Chena River in Alaska. The focus of this trip has been the exploration and settlement of the north by the white Europeans. History is always told by the victors.

Trying to connect the two trips, the Northwest Passage with Adventure Canada and the Holland American Alaska overland/cruise meant I had about a week in the middle to spend somewhere. I originally met Barb Reid, a teacher from the Yukon, in Ghana on my Project Overseas experience in 2014. I sent a note to all my friends that I was embarking on this journey, and she graciously offered her guestroom if I was in Whitehorse. That provided the link and gave me a place to hang out until the Arctic portion commenced. I welcomed the opportunity to take a break from group travel and get to know one place in the Yukon more thoroughly. Barb was a great guide and took me on a few hikes, showed me around town, took me swimming in cold lakes, paddled with me on the Yukon River and introduced me to a few friends and two of her children. It is invaluable to have a local person to show you around. It was really interesting to hear the stories of the people who choose to live in this remote area of Canada. Whitehorse has a frontier mentality, and they love the outdoors and the remoteness of their lives. They talk about the long cold winters and overwhelming hours of darkness, but they still love it here. Many people have stories about encounters with wildlife, from moose to bears and stories of hunting and fishing and wilderness treks, and canoe and camping trips and even dogsledding journeys. Very different from big city life in southern Canada. Many of residents of Alaska and the Yukon seem to be very adventurous people. As were many of the cruise passengers, and because most of them were retired elderly people (me included) the tour was described as ‘the most adventurous old folk’s home’.

And speaking of people, this trip has provided me the opportunity to meet up with some excellent friends. Right from the start in Vancouver to the end in Toronto. In Vancouver, John Mahaffy, an old and dear friend from junior and senior high school in Toronto agreed to come from Vancouver Island to meet me in the city. We had three terrific days exploring at Grouse Mountain, Capilano Canyon and Whistler all the while catching up with our lives. It felt very much like all the years apart didn’t change our relationship. Then spending time with two people I thoroughly enjoyed working with in Ghana in 2014, Barb in Whitehorse and Lyle in Edmonton. As I am typing this, I am happily awaiting the arrival of the two English lunatics who I had the pleasure of traveling to Antarctic with in 2018. This trip will finally allow John, Bruce and I to visit the Arctic after a three-year delay due to COVID. The three of us will travel the Northwest Passage in reverse and we will arrive back in Toronto on September 17^th just in time for my mother’s 90^th birthday! What could be better than travel, adventure, exciting places, and great friends? So, stay tuned the best is yet to come.

Papa Lyle in Edmonton

A trendy little cafe we went to for coffee.

The Edmonton Skyline.

Lyle and me.

View out the hotel window of a plane landing here at the airport.

Tuesday, August 29^th.

I was up super early to catch my flight to Edmonton. Barb dropped me off at the airport just after 5 am. The flight was easy and only 2 ½ hours, and an hour ahead. I was sitting right beside Paul who I met yesterday in Whitehorse, but I couldn’t talk to him because of laryngitis. Argh. I checked into my room at the Renaissance Airport Hotel. John and Bruce will meet me here tomorrow evening and we will have our briefing for the Arctic trip right here in the hotel. Ironic how things have worked out. The original gathering place for the Adventure Canada meet up was in Yellowknife. I have another Ghana participant friend who lives there. I contacted him and we were trying to set something up when the fires threatened the city, and he was evacuated. I feel terrible for him and his family, but he is safe and awaiting news of when he can return. Adventure Canada reorganized the charter flight to leave from Edmonton instead of Yellowknife. My team leader on the first Ghana Project Overseas trip lives in Edmonton. So, I contacted him, and he was happy meet me. He is still working and reorganized his schedule to free up the afternoon. He is setting up his program and the kids don’t show up until next week. He picked me up at the hotel at one and gave me a driving tour of the city. Then we stopped at one of his favourite coffee shops which is housed in a flower and plant shop. Then we went to his condo and had a chat before going for a long walk on a path through his neighbourhood in 30-degree sunshine. Then we went to a restaurant where he treated me to a delicious fish dinner. He ordered shrimp linguine which came without shrimp. When we pointed that out, they gave us both a free desert. Then he drove me back to the hotel at the airport so that I didn’t miss curfew (like I did a few times in Ghana). Sadly because of my throat I couldn’t really talk to him too much, but we managed to talk a lot about school and teaching and some traveling. He has taught for 46 years! He takes a few trips on school holidays every year and has been to many locations. He has also worked both days of the weekend for 13 years at a group home with 4 challenged adults. He loves to work with challenging students and this year is starting a new primary class of autistic children. He says autism is a growth industry and the Edmonton area has opened 35 new classes to accommodate them. We talked about many things, and he mentioned that he had met a navy seal who told him that ‘pain is weakness leaving the body’… Thanks for everything Lyle and I will remember that.

Last Day in Whitehorse

Barb's son Terry and Kona (lower left)

The mighty Yukon River flowing from the top photo...

and off to the left on the bottom photo.

Look closely, a school of trout trapped in a pool by a beaver dam on the left.

The spruce forest.

A gray jay.

Paul, his sister Grace, and Barb.

An eagle that came to watch the swimmers.

Diving into the very cool Yukon River...

Makes the whole body tingle.... brrrr.

Monday, August 28^th.

Barb’s son Terry and his chocolate Labrador Kona dropped by for a coffee this morning. Very nice young man who makes a living as a contractor doing renovations and new builds. He was expressing some of his frustrations with clients with loose architectural drawings. He stayed for a couple of hours and then we left to go for a walk. Barb was trying to find some gray jays for me that I wanted to try to photograph, so we went to a local campground. There we went for an easy walk to a beautiful view of the Yukon River. The Wolf Creek which runs through here is dammed by a beaver which has trapped a school of trout. Back at the campground I saw a few jays but didn’t get a good shot. They are members of the corvid family along with blue jays, ravens, and crows. After that we dropped by her hiking and swimming buddy, another teacher named Grace. Her husband was out riding his motorcycle but her brother, Paul, was visiting from Saskatoon. We returned to the townhouse where Barb made a moose meat stew, with stuffed peppers and broccoli for dinner. After that we sat and talked for a couple of hours before turning in as we have to get up at 4:30 to make my 6:30 flight to Edmonton. Actually, she talked, and I whispered as I have laryngitis! Argh. 

Tagish, Yukon and Arctic Adventures

Bennett Lake at Carcross

Houses in Carcross.

Naires Lake

The house that Harold and Barb built from scratch.

This was the first room from which they made future additions.

The boat we were supposed to go out in.

Lake Tagish

Leah, Hans, Alison and me.

Their house...

and the 3 acres of grass he cuts.

Whitehorse at dusk.

Sunday, August 27^th.

Mary Jane, a friend of Barb’s dropped by for morning coffee to meet me before she went out with her grandchildren. She worked at a military base on Herschel Island, at the northern tip of the Yukon Territory, as a ranger for one month, and one of her jobs was to shoot any polar bear that came anywhere near the base, which she was happy never happened. She is now a classroom assistant in the school where Barb worked. Barb and I got organized for our hour and a half drip to Tagish. On the way we stopped at Carcross, which is a town I visited a week back with the Holland America coach on the way to Whitehorse. Barb had lived and taught there for ten years before moving and teaching in Whitehorse. Tagish is a very remote area and small community on Lake Tagish where Barb and her husband built a home on an empty lot that Harold owned. Initially it was a small one room cabin with no power, wood heat, no running water and an outhouse. Barb had to carry two five-gallon pails of water for about 500 metres up from the lake. They lived in the shed over winter with minimal heat. Over the next 40 years they have made it into a very nice two floor house with indoor plumbing and all the conveniences where they raised their three children. The purpose of the trip, other than to see the beautiful area was to go for a boat ride on the lake. Unfortunately, when we got there Harold informed us that one of their kids had taken the boat out recently and forgot to turn off the fish finder, and the battery was dead. We stayed for about an hour and then went to visit friends of theirs who have a property in the area. They live on 7 acres of land (3 acres of which he mows), which he inherited from an elderly woman who he befriended and helped with her business after her husband died, until several years later, she died too and willed the property to him. Hans and his wife Alison have three children, one of whom, Leah, was there. She had just graduated from a two-year photography course in Vancouver and was happy to be back in the Yukon. Hans immigrated to Canada 30 years ago after visiting the Canadian north as a tourist on several trips, during one of which he undertook a three weeklong dogsled trip. He fell in love with the area and wanted to move from Germany. When he returned home, he did presentations about his trips and was contacted by a company that was to film polar bears in Nunavut. They offered him a position as a cameraman. He accepted the position on the condition that they sponsor him for Canadian citizenship, which they did. He had many exciting stories to regale us with about his trips to the north. We all fell to talking about our respective travels, and my upcoming trip to the Arctic. Hans and Alison also lived in Resolute on Cornwallis Island in Nunavut north of Baffin Island for nine years, when Alison went up to teach at a native school. Hans was the stay at home dad and did odd jobs to make ends meet.  Hans had also been to the Antarctic on a bigger ship than the one I took, and never made any landings. He was jealous of my trip with all the landings we did. He had also taken the Trans-Siberian Express train across Russia, thorough Mongolia and on to China, a couple of years before COVID, with one of his daughters on her graduation. He loved it. That was a trip that I was interested in but never did because I had heard from a couple of people who didn’t enjoy it. Plus, in order to get the visa for Russia you had to list all of the countries you had visited in the last ten years with entry and exit dates, and that would have been very onerous. We had a great afternoon. Hans made dinner for us before we left for the drive back to Whitehorse. The drive back was stressful with the sun setting at the angle where it is in your eyes most of the time and if any animals had been on the road, we would not have seen them. We stopped for a short swim at Long Lake before returning to the townhouse for the night.

Canoeing and Swimming in the Yukon

Canoeing on the Yukon River.

Barb in the very cool waters of Hidden Lake.

Saturday, August 26^th.

This morning we did a couple of errands, including buying a Yukon toque, before heading to the Canoe People and renting a canoe to paddle the Yukon River for $85 each for the day. The river here in Whitehorse is very swift, flowing at about six kilometres per hour. You can see the current, eddies and whorls in the water as it follows the shore and flows over the features of the bottom. Paddling was easier because of the current but steering was more challenging. I was in the stern and paddled some but mostly it was my job to steer the canoe as we navigated the 15 miles of the river that we paddled. The scenery was beautiful with forests, mountains and clay cliffs, and we saw dozens of bald eagles on the cliffs and soaring overhead as they seemed to be checking us out. We saw two eagles do the spiral move where they grasp each other’s claws and spin several times in the air. We also saw several take fish from the river. Photographing the birds from the canoe was very challenging with the current, the bobbing up and down of the canoe and the position of the bird, either beside or ahead. I was wary at first of bringing my phone and good camera into the canoe even in a dry bag, but I wanted to get shots of the birds. The camera was out of the bag most of the time. We arrived at the haul out landing spot 4 hours later. We were picked up with several other paddlers by the Canoe People in a van for the ride back to town as it is impossible to paddle back. On the way back our driver who was Japanese gave us a guided ride back. He told us that people in the Yukon and Alaska should be happy that Japan bombed Pearl Harbour! Why? Well, he preceded to explain that after the attack the Americans were worried that Japan would attack the continent and might try to invade in a very uninhabited area… Alaska. They needed to be able to move troops, supplies, and weapons north. As a result, the Americans with the help of Canada worked overtime to build the Alaska Highway. It begins at the junction with several Canadian highways in Dawson Creek, BC and ends in Delta Junction, Alaska via Whitehorse. It was completed in 1942 and was about 2,700 kilometres (1,700 mi) long. They used lots of people from the American south and cleared the land and built the highway in record time, a matter of months. It was originally a very rough unpaved road but has been much improved and pave since. It was a very warm day here. The temperature was 26 degrees and was warmer than Toronto and twice as warm as the cottage at that time. After that we went to Long Lake where we were yesterday for a swim, but there were dozens of cars there and too many people, so Barb drove us to one of the Hidden Lakes where we found only two other people. She got in straight away, but I stood in the water acclimatizing for a bit, before I got in. It was very cool, but when will I ever get the chance to swim in the Yukon again? Eventually I got used to it and swam around using the breaststroke for about 20 minutes. Then we had dinner at a local restaurant before going for a short walk through a forest and then heading back to the townhouse for the remainder of the evening.