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.