Whitehorse & Carmacks, Yukon Territory

We arrived in Whitehorse at the High Country RV Park around 1:30PM on Thursday, June 18^th and got settled in to our site just before Vince & Lisa came back from having their 5^th wheel repaired. The park was full and thankfully Vince & Lisa had made a reservation for us so we’d have a place to stay.

We went downtown Whitehorse with Vince & Lisa to visit the SS Klondike National Historic Site. The SS Klondike is a paddle-wheeler that was used to transport people and cargo up the Yukon River to and from Dawson City. It took about 40-hours to go downstream to Dawson City, but 4-days to come up the river, against the current, to Whitehorse.

On Friday, we went out for lunch and afterwards, toured the MacBride Museum. It was very good, many artifacts on gold-rush pioneers, as well as many other exhibits.

After seeing the museum, we went to the Yukon Brewery for the 4PM tour. The tour lasted about an hour and ended with sampling their eight different beers. We had drunk the Yukon Gold, an English Pale Ale, back in 2011 and really liked it. The Yukon Brewery is a small batch brewery and doesn’t export their beer to the USA. It’s the only brewery in the Yukon Territory.

Saturday we drove to Carcross, “formerly Caribou Crossing”, about a 40-minute drive from Whitehorse, on the road to Skagway, AK. It was an interesting small town with many First Nation (native Canadians) arts and crafts shops. We enjoyed lunch at the local bistro.

On Sunday, June 21^st, we experienced the summer solstice with around 20-hours of daylight this far north. The sun wasn’t setting until around 11:30PM and sunrise was about 3:30AM. It never really got dark out, more like twilight between sunset and sunrise.

We left Whitehorse on Sunday about 7AM heading north up the Klondike Highway towards Dawson City. It was a 350-mile drive that takes about 8-hours.

About a half-hour and 20-miles out of Whitehorse, Vince & Lisa’s Ford F-350 truck experienced a mechanical problem. They lost power and pulled off to the side of the highway. They had a low fuel pressure alarm and it wouldn’t start. We stopped on the side of the road to help out. We took our pickup off and drove back towards Whitehorse where we had cell phone coverage to call for a tow truck. We ended up going back to the campground we were in for another night. Vince & Steve waited for seven long hours alongside the road for the tow truck to show up. They towed the 5^th-wheel back to the campground and the truck to the local Ford dealer. It turned out that when the Ford technician replaced the fuel filters last Friday, he over-torqued the fuel filter O-ring gasket which caused air to get in the fuel line.

On Monday morning, June 22^nd, the Ford dealer repaired the truck and we were on our way again by 11AM. We decided to overnight in Carmacks, about 120-miles up the Klondike Highway. On the way up we saw two bald eagles and a grizzly bear alongside the road. Carmacks is on the Yukon River and is a historical stop between Whitehorse and Dawson City. The old stagecoach line stopped there at a roadhouse where passengers stayed overnight and ate meals.

Just north of Carmacks, on the way to Dawson Creek, we passed by Five Fingers Rapids on the Yukon River.

Steve & Julie Cornelius