The ExploreNorth Blog

During a Yukon summer it’s easy to just sit back and enjoy the benign Nature that surrounds us, and even that is easily overshadowed by the rush of “things to do” that most of us have. This time of year, though, Nature is tough to ignore - she bites, she screams and sometimes she gets crazy and sings really loudly! Reminds me of a woman I used to know…… but that’s not where this post is going

I went to Skagway yesterday to pick up some stuff from the post office and UPS, and it was one of Mother’s beautiful-but-crazy days. It started out to be a perfectly normal day, though the forecast was for it to get very windy. I stopped at Emerald Lake for a telephoto shot of last night’s dusting of snow on Montana Mountain, then went to the cabin to check on it.

Just after heading south from Carcross, I passed a coyote standing on the side of the road. Coyotes are common enough that I usually just keep going, but for some reason I passed her then turned around and came back. Not only did the coyote not run away, she came towards the car a bit, then when Kayla started howling at her, she howled back!

This silliness went on for a very long time, with Kayla howling, screaming and barking at the coyote and the coyote howling, screaming and barking right back at her. I was laughing so hard I was crying, and for the rest of the day every time I looked at Kayla I started laughing again!

Eventually I pulled away from this show and continued south. By the time I reached Log Cabin it had started to snow and the wind was picking up speed dramatically. I thought about turning back, because this is the sort of weather that can close the highway. A forced overnight in Skagway with 2 dogs was not something I would be able to enjoy.

I didn’t check to see what the winds did reach at Skagway. It was certainly nowhere close to the 100-mph winds that hit Anchorage, but it sure made the car rock when I parked at the shore, and the surf hitting the rocks at Yakutania Point was quite impressive.

I picked up my Cabin Cuddler blanket at the post office, a PowerCenter for Cathy’s new TV at Wings, then went for lunch at The Sweet Tooth.

While I was having lunch I got into a conversation with a couple from Fort St. John who are up on an anniversary trip. They’re surprised that tourist season is long over, but seem to be enjoying the trip anyway. While there are more businesses than ever before still open, most of the stores on Broadway are closed (most of them are cruise-oriented). Skagway closes up shop differently than we do in the Yukon, though. While most of the shops are empty and dark, they aren’t boarded up. In Carcross, when shops close, they are CLOSED (the same is true in Whitehorse, though it’s not as obvious). At Christmas, much of Skagway’s downtown is decked out with lights, making it not look abandoned at all.

I post more about the US election than I do the one that’s coming up in Canada on October 14, simply out of amazement that Sarah Palin is still on the ticket in the States. In the Yukon, though, we have a situation that looks somewhat similar - in this case a man, but someone running for a high office who is out of his league.

When I drove charter bus I got to know Darrell Pasloski well enough to know that he’s a bright guy, but you’d never know it from the way he responds to questions during this campaign. I have to assume, therefore, that Stephen Harper has him muzzled - that he’s just not allowed to answer questions for which the answers haven’t been scripted by The Party. During the past few days, I see Darrel ducking questions over and over again. He couldn’t attend the all-candidates forum in Dawson, he didn’t respond to the PSAC questionnaire (let’s alienate one of the largest voting blocks in the territory!), he wasn’t ready to answer CBC’s questions yesterday…

Am I going to vote for someone who’s going to represent his party’s leader instead of the Yukon? Who is unable for any reason to give an intelligent answer to a reasonable question? Give your head a shake.

Being a railfan, I love this analogy…

Speaking of train wrecks, at BustedTees.com I found a t-shirt for the poor kid who Sarah is claiming as her future son-in-law:

After staying fairly stable for much of the Wall Street crisis, my RSP funds have suffered staggering losses this week as people panic and bail out of the markets. Depending on what you’ve invested in, that may be a good idea, but probably not. My former financial advisor gave me no end of grief about my refusal to invest a nickel in the States, but my plan has worked out much better than his.

Yahoo News says today that “Canada has the world’s soundest banking system, closely followed by Sweden, Luxembourg and Australia, a survey by the World Economic Forum has found as financial crisis and bank failures shake world markets.” To read the full article, click here. The message is “don’t panic - this is the time to settle back and think long-term”.

I got an email this morning that told the amazing story of Brutus:

The K9 above is Brutus, a military K9 at McChord. He’s huge - part Boxer and part British Bull Mastiff and tops the scales at 200 lbs. His handler took the picture. Brutus is running toward me because he knows I have some Milk Bone treats, so he’s slobbering away! I had to duck around a tree just before he got to me in case he couldn’t stop, but he did. Brutus won the Congressional Medal of Honor last year from his tour in Iraq . His handler and four other soldiers were taken hostage by insurgents. Brutus and his handler communicate by sign language and he gave Brutus the signal that meant ‘go away but come back and find me’. The Iraqis paid no attention to Brutus. He came back later and quietly tore the throat out of one guard at one door and another guard at another door. He then jumped against one of the doors repeatedly (the guys were being held in an old warehouse) until it opened. He went in and untied his handler and they all escaped. He’s the first K9 to receive this honor. If he knows you’re ok, he’s a big old lug and wants to sit in your lap. Enjoys the company of cats.

Unfortunately, like most super-heroes, Brutus is a work of fiction - http://www.snopes.com/photos/military/brutus.asp.

Stated more accurately, I don’t read properly anymore. Like many people with busy lives, I read snippets of information rather than complete articles - on the Web mostly. I seldom buy newspapers anymore, and often they sit on the table for days or even weeks before I do more than glance through them. Books have dropped off my “to-do” list completely, and I feel bad about that because I love books. I have a huge library - books, magazines and historic documents - though most of the magazines went to Raven Recycling a couple of months ago.

This morning, I’ve been reading the newspapers that have sat on the table (some since September 24). Among them is What’s Up Yukon, a bi-weekly newspaper that follows events and a wide range of Yukon activities and lifestyles. Though I’m far from a regular reader, I’ve enjoyed watching the maturing of the journal and its writers, most of whom had never done anything like this before. The editor, Darrel Hookey, obviously loves his job, and I expect that his writers feed off that to some degree.

One of the reasons I’d like to get back to reading a lot is that I’d like to get back to writing. The main focus of that is my first book, Fractured Veins & Broken Dreams, which I’d really like to get updated and back in print. To do that, I need to get my head thoroughly back into writing - to do that, I need to get back into reading. There are days when I wish I had a 9-5 job and only one house so I could focus - not many of them, though…

Some of the readers of this blog are excellent photographers - here’s a chance for you to win some great prizes with your images. Enter Alaska Airlines Share the Moment Photo Contest. Choose and upload a photograph that best captures your favorite vacation moment from anywhere in the world. Your picture could be worth more than $5,000 - the Grand Prize includes $5,000 in the winner’s Alaska Airlines My Wallet, a Columbia Sportswear Rolling Gear bag, and Snapfish photo products.

There’s also a daily scratch-off game where you can instantly win stuff from Columbia Sportswear and Snapfish.

The modern world is full of paradoxical situations, and sex and dating is one of the oddest. In North America and Europe in particular, sex in the media is getting more and more blatant - the new TV series Californication being one of the best examples of how far this has gone (I watched it for the first time last night - that’s what prompted this post). Americans in particular are paranoid about nudity such as Janet Jackson’s infamous wardrobe malfunction, yet in Canada and Europe, non-sexual nudity is widely accepted as a reasonable aspect of advertising.

In the online dating world, as well as scores of “conventional” dating sites there are sites for any sort of specific interest (or kink) you can imagine. The largest of the sexual dating sites has 30 million members! The site getting serious attention in recent months, though, is Sugardaddie.com (”Dating for Successful Men & Stunning Women”) - the site has even been discussed on Dr. Phil 3 times. I’m glad that my kids are grown - I have no idea how I’d explain all this to them….

Yesterday was a gorgeous day to get out, and it looked like pretty much every Yukoner had the same idea. Our reasonably warm, sunny days are about to end, and traffic was quite heavy on the Alaska Highway - by our standards that means that there were occasionally 6 vehicles on a single mile of highway! There have been lots of reports lately of bison and elk on the highway, so that was the justification for the drive, but in reality any wildlife would just be a bonus.

We only went as far as the Kusawa Lake Road, 64 km from Whitehorse. That’s not really far enough to see wild bison, but by that point we had seen 2 distant elk (a bull and cow) and 2 elk beside the road (a cow and yearling calf). I didn’t get any photos of even the close elk because we were too busy laughing at the reactions of our huskies - while Monty was mute and focused as usual, Kayla was in full hunting-wolf mode, shaking and whining and then howling when they started walking away and she couldn’t give chase!

We went a few k down the Kusawa Lake Road, to a point just past Mendenhall Landing, where the Mendenhall River flows into the Takhini. The photo of the fisherman below was shot there (click to enlarge each photo today).

The photo below, shot a few hundred yards from the one above, shows a backwater off the Mendenhall River.

The migrating Trumpeter swans below were feeding on a qiuet spot along the Takhini River.

Whenever I drive past the Laprairie Bison Ranch I always wish that they had a field closer to the highway, or a side-road to the existing field. Once the leaves are off the trees it makes for a lovely scene anyway.

The ponds below are one of my favourite scenes along this stretch of highway. It was in heavy fog when we were westbound earlier, but made a worthwhile stop on the way home.

Many of you in Whitehorse will have seen the large private jet that sat at the airport for about 10 days as big-game hunting season began. It was a Bombardier BD-700-1A10 Global Express owned by a charter company from Spain. Did you wonder what a bird like that would look like inside? Well, see below - even in executive configuration I figured that she’d hold more than 12 people (plus 2 flight attendants, of course), but I was wrong. She’s set up to convert to 5 twin beds and one double, easily making the 7,957-km flight from Madrid to Whitehorse without stops, cruising at 910kmh. Even in my lottery-ticket dreams I don’t travel quite like that - at least I hadn’t before I saw this plane!