Whitehorse – Yukon capital

When we got back from Carmacks, we still had a couple of days to spend in Whitehorse. Fortunately, there are a lot of potential activities around town!

On the first day, after watching the horrible match of Switzerland vs. Sweden, we went for a short tour in the brewery of Yukon Brewing. Good beer, including our favorites Yukon Gold and the Ice Fog IPA.

On the second day we walked towards the dam of the Schwatka Lake to take a look at its famous fish ladder. From around 200’000 chinook salmon starting their journey up the Yukon river at the Bering sea, about 1’500 get as far up as Whitehorse to spawn. The journey of about 3200 km is their last – they die when their job is done. In order to pass the dam, the energy company built a fish ladder at which employees measure all the passing fish. Tourists can look at them too through underwater windows. Unfortunately, this years salmons are just halfway up the Yukon and will end up in Whitehorse in about 3 weeks time. We still could see a greyling and a young spike. After that, we looped around Riverdale to get back to Whitehorse.

Next day we rented hard tail mountain bikes to ride some tracks south east of Whitehorse. There were a lot of really nice single trails, but in the end the constant up and down did tire us quite a bit. We’ve also visited the Klondike II, an old steamboat that was travelling between Whitehorse and Dawson and can now be visited by everyone. What amazed me here was the huge size of this boat considering that it drove through the same river we just did in the canoe (and further). It took a boat like this 1.5 days to get down to Dawson, and 4-5 days to get back against the stream to Whitehorse. Another interesting fact: It consumed about 20-25 cords of wood between each woodyard. Woodyard themselves were placed about 20 km apart of each other. One cord of wood consists of 4 * 4 * 8 foot (3,62 m³) of cut logs. With several dozens of steamers on the river, it was no wonder that through time the whole trees along the Yukon were cut down. This ended up in an exploding price for wood, such that most companies had to switch and mine for coal.