Beringia
Whitehorse to Beaver Creek
June 3, 2017
Miles Driven: 300
Sunrise (Whitehorse): 4:38am / Sunset (Beaver Creek): 12:04am (i.e. the next day)
Latitude: 60.72N to 62.38N
National Parks Visited: 1 (Canadian)
Wacky Roadside Attractions: 2
“First I’ll tell you that it is long, long, long ago. Lots of dangerous animals lived here long ago,” said Charlie Peter Charlie, a Vuntut Gwitchun Elder of the Old Crow in Yukon. This land used to be part of Beringia, a high steppe plain that bridged the western Yukon to Siberia. On this arid plain, hemmed in on all sides by glaciers, thrived mammoths, early horses, early bison, some sort of sloths, and, of course, sabretooth tigers. Now? Every year miners are finding more and more fossils of that by-gone age, 100,000 years ago. They share their finds with paleontologists. Really, for the most part, man is the most dangerous animal here. Though, if you are wise, you’ll respect the grizzly bear.
We did see our first grizzly bear and fox today. The bear could have cared less that we were snapping shots of him. He was eating flowers and grass next to the highway; didn’t even look up to gawk at us gawking. Adding to our firsts, we saw the world’s largest weather vane and the world’s largest gold pan. Also, we got our first real rain today, which is unfortunate since the clouds covered up the St. Elias mountains of Kluane National Park. But, since I’m a glass-half-full kinda gal, I take some solace in the fact that we are on the part of our journey we’ll be retracing in a week.
On a final note, there were quite a few cute places in Whitehorse. Of the stops we’ve been through so far, this has been the one place you could spend a couple of days poking around in town. It reminded me a bit of Deadwood in the Black Hills of South Dakota, albeit flatter. Anway, I’ll keep this short, mostly because we’ve sketchy internet connection here in Beaver Creek and I’m unclear how well, I’ll be able to edit my wordpress post.
Until tomorrow from Fairbanks, Alaska…
Safe Travels!
[posted from Fairbanks, that internet in Beaver Creek was not the best]
