Whitehorse

First sight of the Yukon

We've actually been in Whitehorse for 5 days now, getting up on Saturday PM, but I ran into some problems with the power supply up here. I have a range of transformers supposed to deal with the issue, but they aren't working for the laptop. Bizarrely however, it turns out that a simple adapter for the standard Australian transformer works fine. So I'm trying to catch up now. The weather to date has been fantastic, as you can see; this picture taken on phone through plane window, so not quite ideal conditions. Note the golf course.

You don't get such a clear idea of the way Whitehorse is sandwiched between two ridges

Whitehorse

 from this perspective, but it is, which makes it very narrow and quite long. One local told us it's about 35 km from one end to the other - maybe, but it's be lucky to be a kilometer wide. It runs from First Avenue, next to the river, up to Fourth Avenue. Going the other way I have seen a 72nd street.

Wood-fired Brooks Mogul 2-6-0

The landscape is briefly startling; fir, aspen, silver birch nothing at all like anything I've ever seen, but it is just as monotonous as any Australian landscape. Of course in reality, neither landscape is monotonous to the focussed eye, but fir trees, it seems to me, get a much better press
(undeserved) than eucalypts. It's certainly much greener than any Australian landscape, but with 1/3 of the worlds freshwater it would be pretty bad management if it weren't.

Whitehorse itself apparently rarely gets (heavy?) snow, despite the cold, because it's too dry. However, there is snow clearly visible on the hills around the town, even in midsummer. The hills don't look particularly high to me, so it must be a pretty fine margin of dryness. (I'm reminded that when I was in Daqing in 2002, the general feeling around town was that winter wasn't as cold as it used to be - maybe Whitehorse is the same) Certainly the museum has a lot of pictures of people struggling through snow between 1898 and 1927.