Chris Robinson is the host of The Chris Robinson Travel Show - broadcast on Newstalk 1010 every Saturday at 10am and on CJAD 800 Montreal at 11am. www.ChrisRobinsonTravelShow.ca
Robert Service, the Bard of the Yukon, conveys the allure of the Yukon in my favourite poem of his:
The summer - no sweeter was ever; The sunshiny woods all athrill; The grayling aleap in the river, The bighorn asleep on the hill. The strong life that never knows harness; The wilds where the caribou call; The freshness, the freedom, the farness - O God! how I'm stuck on it all.
I am in the Yukon this week for a future radio show and to interview some Yukoners along the way. But most of all I’m here to experience the enchantment of that Yukon spell.
Capital city of the Yukon Territory and thriving hub of the Canadian North, this place is still rooted tangibly in its spectacular landscape and storied history. The 27,000 people who live here are a heady mix of First Nation, Gold Rush descendants and more recent arrivals who fallen in love with the Yukon. They all have stories to tell, as I am finding out easily: Yukoners are as open and loquacious as Maritimers! Getting here is easy: after an early flight from Toronto to Vancouver and a perfect connection, I was in Whitehorse by early afternoon.
The Beringia Centre is a perfect first stop to get an overview on how the Yukon came to be so central to the peopling of the Americas. I was able to try my hand at the atlatl, an ancient throwing spear used for hunting – there need be no concern for Yukon wildlife on my account!
Next stop: the MacBride Museum, which uses a fun and folksy approach to telling the history of the Yukon, both natural and human. The Yukon River runs centrally through the history of the Territory as it does through downtown Whitehorse – a magnificent and swiftly flowing river, steps from the shops and hotels. Riverboats used to churn the waters of this river and the S.S. Klondike is a well-preserved example and national Historic Site of Canada. My guided tour was effective in helping me visualize the days not so long ago when the wharf in Whitehorse was festooned with riverboats large and small en route to the goldfields.
The city is lively again with visitors in this last week of summer. One-of-a-kind local craft shops offer good shopping; hotels are full ( I am staying at the Westmark – recommended); and there are many surprisingly good restaurants – I have enjoyed excellent meals at several fine restaurants.
But my most marvelous Whitehorse moment so far has been an early morning jog along the trail beside the Yukon River as the sun rose above the eastern mountains. Steam was rising from the river and mixing with early morning mist rolling up the valley. The mountains and forests floated above the broiling river, the scent of pine was in the air, a beaver swam through the shimmering waters and a bald eagle caught the first sun’s rays in the top branch of a fir. What a start to a day - this is some city!
Today’s trip has it all: grand scenery, great history, fascinating characters and a rollicking good train ride! The Klondike Gold Rush of 1898 led miners to travel via the feared Chilkoot Trail up from the coast at Skagway and through the coastal mountains to a series of lakes leading to the Yukon River and thence to Dawson City. This railway was built in 1898 to 1900 by 35,000 men through ravines and mountains to carry the gold of the Klondike and those who sought it.
Today it’s one of the great rail journeys of the world ( see my Top Ten list at: http://www.chrisrobinsontravelshow.ca ) I boarded in Carcross, a tiny Yukon community, and the old carriages were soon rattling and rolling along the shores of Bennett Lake with snowcapped peaks rising above. The borders of the Yukon, British Columbia and Alaska all converge in this area. We stopped for lunch in the ghost town of Bennett, BC at the other end of the lake, where the Brakeman turned his hand to playing piano ballads.
There was time in Bennett for me to hike a little of the northern end of the old Chilkoot Trail: a few minutes up the trail I was in glorious wilderness, a jumble of rock, tree, sky and racing river. Back on the train again, we continued to Fraser where I interviewed David Dobbs, the Conductor on the train, before returning to Whitehorse on the South Klondike ‘Highway’. A memorable day.
This is a rafting trip for softies…A gentle float down the icy Dezadeash River near Haines Junction, with Paddle Wheel Adventures, a creation of Lee and Tiffany Drummond, a young couple who have clearly fallen under the spell of the Yukon – see their website at www.paddlewheeladventures.com . We put in on a quiet bend of the river and for the next couple of hours we drifted gently down this spectacular river, guided expertly by our Guide Richard Anderson, a former Yorkshireman who prepares Yorkshire pud in his wilderness camps!
It’s an idyllic time, relaxing and enchanting in equal measure, with no sign of humanity anywhere at all. The sun is warm, the mountains of Kluane are bright on the skyline and nature seems close and benign. Although Richard has had close encounters here with grizzlies and moose, today we see only beaver dams, kingfishers and a bald eagle soaring against the backdrop of distant snowfields. There is a comfortable silence save for Richard’s occasional paddling and the riffles on the river.
My spirit of wonder got me up here - a tough three hour slog from the trailhead on Kathleen Lake in Kluane National Park, through lush woods speckled with bright red, orange and yellow berries and up a moonscape rock glacier into a majestic cirque, surrounded on three sides by soaring cliffs streaked with snow. Then a knife-edge ridge curling upwards around the King’s Throne to the summit where I sit.
A throne fit for a king indeed. Beneath the brightly coloured, but very tattered, Tibetan prayer flags on the summit cairn stretches an endless array of mountain peaks in Kluane National Park – a chaotic jumble of snowcapped peaks and ridges rearing ever higher into the clouded horizon above which Mount Logan, Canada’s highest mountain, shimmers.
Immediately below me on the northern side is an intensely blue lake that changes hue as the sunshine plays with the reflected clouds on its waters. An island lies like a Caribbean mirage amidst the reflected peaks all around. A delta of yellow and green intrudes into the lake from the west and the distant roar of its waters is the only sound to reach this mountain top of shattered rocks. Distantly, two Dall sheep move across a scree slope and a ptarmigan scuttles among the sharp rock fragments – but otherwise I am alone on the King’s Throne, for a few moments, master of all I survey.
The sun and shade patterns on the mountainsides chase each other over fall’s brilliant yellows and a breeze now plays with the prayer flags beside me. I am loathe to leave this miraculous vista and I look for an excuse to linger for a few more minutes. There are not many moments in our busy, busy world to savour such a landscape, such quietude, such immense personal space. Such moments are precious and treasured. Here on the King’s Throne in Kluane, Yukon Territory I have found my personal bit of space and time that will sustain me for a long while to come.
There are no roads in Kluane National Park, no easy way to see the glaciers and peaks reaching nearly 20,000 feet…except by taking to the air. So I am taking the ‘Grand Mountain Tour’ with Sifton Air who specializes in giving travelers a bird’s eye view of one of the greatest wilderness areas in Canada. The pilot, Taylor Morrison, looks too young to drive, let alone fly, but he proves to be skilled and knowledgeable in the mountains.
We take off from Haines Junction, flying north and west with Kloo Lake on our right and the turquoise blue of Kluane Lake ahead. A banked left turn takes us up the Kashkawulsh River valley to the great Kashkawulsh glacier with its precisely defined dark moraines striped against the white glacier ice. Into the heart of the St Elias Range, Mount Logan the highest peak of all is mantled with wisps of cloud in the distance before we bank left again over ice fields and across to Dusty Glacier which tumbles in part over a 500 foot high icefall into the Lowell Glacier below. It’s a heavenly, other-worldly maze of peaks, ridges and glaciers.
Down the Lowell Glacier to where its snout disintegrates into Lowell Lake with icebergs floating clear from the ice edge. Finally a turn north up the Alsek River valley and back to Haines Junction which seems lush and tropical after the ice kingdom we have been flying over for the past 80 minutes. I am left with a mesmeric collage of images: serrated arêtes with glacier ice hanging from their walls; glacier crevasses filled with meltwater of the most vivid blue; sinuous moraines reflecting the flow patterns of the glaciers; meltwater rivers braided into hundreds of channels each reflecting the sun.
