Whitehorse, the capitol of the Yukon

Main Street, Whitehorse

A short 100 miles up the road from Teslin, we stopped in Whitehorse. We were ready for a couple nights of full hookup camping to get laundry caught up and do a little sightseeing.

We picked the Pioneer Campground, about 5 miles south of the city. The full hookups are in a flat dirt row along the highway, but we didn't either notice or care about the traffic noise. They had acable system with 50 channels, including good old CNN and CBS, and we caught a few US shows on the tube.

Since we arrived around 1:00 PM, we had lunch and caught a nap. Around 4:00 we drove into town to look around, and grabbed a sub at Subway. We did some shopping on Main Street. The camping store was serving wine and cheese, pretty cool, we thought.

Pioneer also had wifi, and after some fiddling, I got online and started catching up on my blog posts. That took most of the rest of the evening.

Goofing at the Macbride Museum

On Thursday morning, I took the ailing tire into a shop in town and got it fixed. According to the tech, it had picked up a small nail, which went right inside the tire. When I got back, we had lunch, took a nap, then went into town to check out the MacBride Museum of the Yukon. This fine small museum was apparently the collection of artifacts started by MacBride in the 1950's, and was a bit eclectic, covering a fairly wide range of topics in a small space. They had an excellent collection of mounted animals, with good descriptive text for each. They also had a collection of geology specimens, and maps showing where the major mineral deposits occurrred throughout the Yukon. They also had a small but impressive collection of First Nation artifacts, covering the hunting methods of the ancient people over time.

Panning for gold

No museum of Yukon history would be complete without some gold panning, and one of the staff was sluicing some nasty looking dirt trying to find flakes in it. He gathered a crowd, but I didn't hear anybody exclaim "Wow!"

After the museum, we looked for a small pizza stone to cook bread (and pizza) in our gas oven. Canadian Tire didn't have any, and referred us to Coffee, Tea and Spice, a local gourmet cookware store. They had larger ones, but they said they had sold 6 of the smaller ones that very morning, and wouldn't have any more until August. Oh, darn.

We picked up a few groceries, and went back to our mobile house to make supper.