A Carl's Eye View

After a couple of days in the busy, touristy town of Whitehorse we ran two day on gravel and frost heaved pavement to find ourselves in the gold capitol of the Klondike, Dawson City. I tried to get my first Musk Ox burger at the fuel stop but they don’t serve lunch until 11:00 am. The big attraction in town (other than seeing acres upon acres of abandoned iron boilers, steam pipes, heavy machinery, and unidentifiable very large objects made of cast iron than seem to have something to do with the endless chain of rearranged river bottom that stands in endless wales that fold like corduroy across the landscape) is Diamond Gertie’s Casino and Dance Hall, the first legalized gambling in Canada. We are going to have a layover day here to visit the gold fields tomorrow. On Wednesday the trip is supposed to slow down to about 10-15 mph for the day as we take the “Top Of The World” highway over to Tok, Alaska and pass through the smuggler’s entry into the US in a town called Boundry. It seems that is the highest latitude a bus can traverse. Since we are on an early season trip we still don’t know if we will be using the road or the permafrost forest. If you have no reports for a few days, keep the faith. We will be out of touch but in good company. Personally we have been pleased that all of the reports of poor road conditions in the early summer seem unfounded. We have had some gravel and frost heaves but the various highway authorities obviously have been locked in their cabins too long because they take their “spring jobs” very seriously. The volume of clearing and repairing work already accomplished this season far exceeds anything I have ever seen from public servants. They must pay these folks by the pothole or dead limb removed. I consider road conditions to be very good, even superior to New Mexican roads after a full summer of maintenance.

The next report should be from Tok (pronounced ‘toak’ as cloak by the locals). But that depends upon the quality of communications available. We seem to have very slow internet more often than we have telephone service. And slow means please send no files. Some of us have been locked up with partial downloads for days at a time (the customers of AOL and Yahoo). We have done ok so far but our downloads have all come in clean. We do appreciate the mail from home while in the wilderness.