Wednesday, August 18 - We woke up to clouds again today, 50 degrees. It rained off and on all day, and the city lost its power for a while (we didn't see any lightning, so don't know what happened). We did several tours today. The first one was next to the airport at the Transportation Museum, which featured the gold rush days. They had a passenger train car, various kinds of stagecoaches, and lots of old vehicles from WWII. Outside the museum is the "world's largest weather vane," an airplane (DC-3) mounted so perfectly on a pedestal that the slightest breeze causes it to swing around to point into the wind. It faced different ways as we passed it during the course of the day, but we never actually say it moving.
Next we drove over to the Whitehorse Dam and Fish Ladder. This is the world's longest wooden fish ladder, and spawning salmon swim 1875 miles upriver to get back here. Then, when they finally get here, they still have to go up more than 15 metres (which Joe thinks is about 50 feet) of this fish ladder! Each step has a vertical baffle and a submerged opening, allowing the option of jumping over or swimming through. Those salmon are just amazing. They don't have a big salmon (chinook) run here, but we did get to see a few at the top of the ladder through their underwater viewing windows, and we got to watch them collect 3 (2 females and 1 male) to take to the fish hatchery. The purpose of the fish hatchery was to compensate for the loss of downstream migrating chinook salmon fry as they passed through the turbines at the Whitehorse Rapids Generating Facility. From the pictures of the generating facility and dam, you can see that this is the end of the road for the salmon trying to swim upstream.
They had a very interesting art display of the salmon, which I think was commemorating the 50th year of the generating station. The first year the salmon art was provided by artists, but they opened it up the classrooms the second year. Kaylee and Cody, we could do some of this.
Joe thought he might check out the driving of this big boat, so here he is at the wheel.
But he didn't manage to get it into the water, so he waves bon voyage, and we head out to the Beringa Interpretive Centre.
The mountains on the far side of the Yukon are very pretty, look like quilted puffs. We are thinking about doing a riverboat cruise tomorrow, but hope for some sunshine.
This Beringia museum is about the ice age, and the role this area (Beringia) played. The placer miners have found a lot of ancient skeletons, bones, etc., up here when they dug up the land, especially when they dug below the permafrost, and woolly mammoths, scimitar-toothed cats, flat-faced bears, and many other prehistoric creatures roamed here from Russia, because there was land connection then. Our gold panning consultant in Chicken, Thunder Jack, told us there were still woolly mammoths about 7 miles off the Top of the World Highway, and they even had some babies, but we really think he was living in another world anyhow.
Finally, we ended our tours for the day and headed off to the grocery store, always an event, especially in Canada where I can never figure out their pricing/measuring system. I just pay whatever it says (and it says a lot!). We stopped at the Ford dealer, and Joe's part for the RV came in, so that's a job for tomorrow now. We got back to the RV and rested for a while, because we still had another event on today's agenda. The Frantic Follies, a vaudeville-type show that started at 8:30.
The show was very entertaining, a mixture of cancan dancing, singing, jokes and skits, very well done. But it kept us out past our bedtime. We got back from that about 10:30 or so, a really full day in Whitehorse.
We actually got this tour in between raindrops mostly, then we stopped at the S.S. Klondike, another sternwheeler, but larger than the Keno we toured in Dawson City. This one was completely open to tour, including the engine room and wheelhouse.
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