The metric system, foreign money, and toast with a pedigree...
Sourdough bread is an interesting thing. It actually can have a pedigree, particularly if it’s really good. And the sourdough bread that came, as toast, with our breakfast in the dining room at the 1202 was excellent.
The thing about sourdough is that it is made using “starter,” a culture of benign bacteria that must be kept alive so that a little of it can be mixed into the dough for future loaves, giving it its mild sourness. It really is possible for sourdough starter to be kept alive indefinitely, and the starter used at the 1202 had been brought to the Yukon Territory in 1898 — more than 100 years ago. Toast with a pedigree. No wonder it was included as a feature item in each breakfast listed on the menu. And man! was it good.
I bought a postcard there, intending to send it to my mother in California. On the front was a picture of a big rig, with an enormous black bear stretched out on it and the legend, “A little bear hunt in Beaver Creek.” I didn’t have any Canadian postage, though, so I held onto the postcard hoping to mail it in Whitehorse.
We set out from Beaver Creek after breakfast, having decided that the gas still in my tank from Tok would get me another hundred miles or so down the road without any worries. As we drove, clouds appeared on the horizon ahead of us, threatening drizzle and rain — a threat that was carried out in sporadic fashion as we passed through a complex of glacier-formed valleys where I saw a few bald eagles and a whole lot of ravens. Of course we had seen both kinds of birds aplenty during our years in Alaska; it wasn’t worth getting on the ham radios to talk about these ones.
On Chris’ drive up five years ago she had encountered Kluane Lake in sunshine and pronounced it the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Under the storm clouds the vast lake was still remarkable, and the water unmistakably blue despite the gray skies. We paused at Destruction Bay for gas, using the radios to compare a Shell station’s 71.9¢ (Canadian) per litre with a nearby Totem Oil station’s 69.9¢ price, and choosing Totem. I had been concerned for a moment on the way to Destruction Bay by a “mileage” sign that I forgot to convert, still being new to this metric stuff. Figuring based on past gas mileage that I could make it a certain number of miles, I saw the number of kilometres on the sign and read them as miles. Slight panic moment, until I remembered where I was…
After leaving Kluane Lake behind we traversed more subarctic valleys under consistently leaden and often drizzly skies before coming to the mouth of a wind tunnel at the north end of the highway leading down to Haines, Alaska from Haines Junction, Yukon. But by the time we reached the junction itself we were out of the wind flow, and were able to stop at a burger-and-shakes place for a quick hot dog lunch. We ate while standing outside, looking at pamphlets on a community bulletin board. The Mounties were looking for information about vandalism in the little town, and there was an advertisement for a sled dog farm where tourists could go on short sled runs for a fee.
Shortly after leaving Haines Junction, we began to notice that the ubiquitous scraggly spruce trees — which one of Chris’ co-workers in Fairbanks had likened to the evil “trifids” in a 1950s horror movie — were now sharing the forest with healthier looking pine trees. I began to see pastures with cattle. And then we began to see billboards describing businesses in Whitehorse, capital and chief city of the Yukon Territory. As we made our way through the increasing traffic to the turnoff from the Alaska Highway that would take us into downtown Whitehorse and our hotel, I saw a pickup truck with a Northwest Territories license plate. From seeing a sample on the wall at the DMV office in Fairbanks I knew what the plate looked like, but seeing it “in the wild” was different. In fact, until reaching Whitehorse, we had been seeing significantly more Alaska plates than even Yukon ones.
Downtown Whitehorse is a mixture of hundred-year-old historic buildings, brand-new government and Canadian corporate offices, and an old-fashioned Main Street business district right on — believe it or not — Main Street. It was here, on a three-mile hike to round up dinner, that Chris and I saw our first RCMP patrol car. In all our time in Canada we saw only one such vehicle patrolling the highway, which may be why most of the cars with local license plates were quick to pass us as we poked along at the legal maximum. But in towns and cities along the way the Mounties are the local police, and are not at all seldom seen. In fact, cities with their own municipal police forces must be pretty rare in Canada. Mounties on regular duty do not wear that picturesque red uniform; they actually look like fairly normal police officers. Only the insignia, and maybe the cut and color of the clothes, are significantly different.
On that hike we stopped at a drug store so Chris could pick up a comb and hairbrush, she having determined that her comb and brush were either misplaced or left behind, and we learned that the roughly $62 (Canadian) of multicolored cash notes she had left over from her 1994 drive to Alaska, included one denomination since discontinued. The clerk told us the $2 note was now worth more than face value. Chris took back the note and instead gave a “toonie,” the two-dollar coin that had since replaced it. Canada’s one-dollar coin, bearing the image of the bird known as a loon, had previously earned the nickname “loonie,” so “toonie” is undoubtedly a play on that name. (We also saw, later on, coin purses being sold as “loonie bins”.)
Our walking route also took us to look at the Yukon River as it passes through Whitehorse. The water at that point is remarkably clear, unlike the heavily silted (and much wider) river we saw years before when we first drove from Fairbanks up the Dalton Highway (a.k.a. the Prudhoe Bay “Haul Road”) to its crossing of the Yukon River, several hundred miles downstream of Whitehorse.
When we had left home the day before, the fall color had been near peak, and it seemed to be the case over in the Yukon Territory as well. Some birch-like trees — which were all but uniformly yellow in Alaska — were even showing tinges of bright red over here. And where, on this day’s drive, we saw mountains that rose above tree line, the tundra there was also bright red. In fact, on this drive, while we saw variations in the amount of fall color that was showing, it was several days later, near the lower end of the Alaska Highway, that the fall color seemed to be less than dominant.
Our room in Whitehorse was in a high-rise downtown hotel. The cats were less stressed out there than in the previous night’s Atco trailer room. But getting Taz into his carrier the next morning wasn’t any easier. I was able to mail my postcard from the lobby, but my plan to buy stamps came to naught; the hotel only had a postage meter.
