May 30 – Whitehorse, Yukon

A partly cloudy day with a high of 12C. There are supposedly a bunch of good museums in town but we don’t really like staring and reading static displays. We would much rather be outside so off we went for another hike.

Whitehorse has a great trail system in the hills just east of town. There is a huge set of hiking, mountain biking and cross country ski trails. They are very well marked, with maps at the key crossing and arrow posts at each junction.

Today we did what is called the Hidden Lakes Trail. During the last glacier period some of the blocks of ice got buried in the ground and stayed frozen a while after the glaciers had moved on. Once they melted they left huge holes that filled with ground and rain water. They have no inlet or outlet and are “hidden”.

We always read the information panels.

The trail looped around several small lakes, up and down the hills. We figure it was about 6 km total.

There were lots of views of mountains off in the distance.

We found this beautiful carved bench about half way around, on top of a hill. It must have been a lot of work to get it there.

Back down along the lake side.

Jennie caught this loon. I love the zoom on her camera. This picture was not cropped.

The view back from the other side of the lake. The bench is on top of the foreground hill in the middle of the picture.

More wildflowers, these are Yukon Lupines.  There were numerous Prairie Crocus everywhere we went.

After lunch at a viewpoint next to the Yukon River we headed back into town and got this shot of downtown Whitehorse.

 

We saw this interesting structure on somebody's front lawn. They obviously have a lot of bicycle rims.

Next photo stop was the “Log Skyscraper”. A 3 storey log building.

And finally the world’s largest weather vane. A real DC-3 mounted on a pedestal. It didn’t actually take much wind to get it to turn.

One of the huge vehicles used to build the highway.

We are leaving tomorrow to head up towards Dawson City but we are going to make a little side trip onto something called the Silver Trail to visit Keno City. I am pretty sure we will be out of touch for the next two days.