All Systems Are Go!! Dawson to Whitehorse

The Dawson City Museum.

Beautifully presented displays.

Robert Service School - first day back.

Celebrating with a coffee after hearing from Denise 

that the Arctic trip is still on!!

The environmental disaster of the 'tailings' waste of the dredge mining.

A glacial braided river.

Part of Whitehorse. 

Whitehorse and the end of the White's Pass.

The swiftly flowing Yukon River which is now blue after dumping all 

of its silt on route from Dawson City.

Tuesday, August 22^nd.

I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep worrying about the fires in Yellowknife and how it was going to affect my Arctic trip. Obviously, what the people of Yellowknife are going through is a lot more important that my trip, but I certainly don’t want to have it cancelled. It was cancelled twice already due to COVID and I am so looking forward to traveling with John and Bruce again on the opposite pole from our first trip. I was running all the scenarios through my head and couldn’t figure out how it would happen. Even if they end the evacuation of Yellowknife, it would be a long time before hotels would open up again and we would be allowed in. I got up and finished packing the suitcase and then decided to go out for a walk as we were not heading to the airport until 11. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny morning with a brilliant blue sky. First, I went to the Dawson City Museum which is housed in a historic government building. It is a beautiful museum outlining the gold rush and life in the town since. “Wild excitements, misery, riches, debauchery, broken hearts, scurvy, frostbite, suicide; the midnight sun, the Arctic night, the Aurora Borealis, the land of gold and paradoxes – that was Dawson in ‘98” – Neville Armstrong, stampeder. There is an excellent interactive science room all about climate change and aimed at kids. Too bad only one school can access it. Then I walked down to that the one school in town and saw an email from my travel agent Denise asking me to call her. I thought perhaps she was going to say that Adventure Canada had been forced to cancel the trip. But, NO! They have rearranged the charter flight to fly out of Edmonton instead of Yellowknife! Yahoo! So, Denise has booked me a flight from Whitehorse to Edmonton and is booking a new hotel. John and Bruce were to get to Yellowknife from England via Calgary and Edmonton, now they don’t have to take the last of the three flights. I imagine everyone on the trip is rearranging flights and hotels, and all of the people on the ship coming from the east to west who were to end in Yellowknife are also now arranging new flights home from Edmonton. Oh boy… that’s why I like having Denise as my agent, she has solved more than one problem for me in the past. I immediately went to the little café and bought myself a coffee and an oatmeal cookie to celebrate. Later I met one of the teachers in the school who was out on recess duty. I learned it is a K to 12 school with about 200 kids and only one split grade. I met up with the group back at the hotel, boarded the bus and drove the ten miles to the airport. We got off the bus and went directly onto the plane… no security, no passport control, with bottles of water and told to sit where we liked (despite having seat numbers on our boarding pass)… amazing. The flight was about an hour, and we landed in Whitehorse at one where we were picked up by another bus and taken to our hotel. After my luggage was delivered, I put on shorts and t-shirt as it is 23 degrees here and walked for a block to the walking/biking path along the Yukon River. I sat in the sun soaking up the vitamin D and contemplating my good fortune while watching the river swiftly flowing past. I ate at Subway, had a Tim’s ice coffee, and just enjoyed the afternoon and evening outdoors. Back to the room by 9 to catch up on my sleep.