Day 64 - Friday July 21/17

(Posted on Saturday July 29th, at TrailerCraft in Anchorage AK, while waiting for a new tire to be installed on the trailer)

An alarm started our day today. We needed to be up and at it early as we had an appointment for truck servicing in Whitehorse at 10 am and it was an hour away from our base in Carcross.  

We arrived with time to spare. The location of the Chrysler Dealership couldn’t have been better as a McDonalds was less than half a km away along the same street. We walked to the restaurant carrying our laptops, used another frequent customer loyalty card to get a free coffee and started to blog. We spent almost 4 hours hard at it, writing, editing, adding photos and posting several days of blog, while the truck was in for servicing. We only interrupted our work briefly to get some value menu hamburgers for lunch. We returned to the dealership at 2 pm to find the Ram ready and waiting for us. It had fresh oil and after a thorough examination the only extra bit of service needed was a new air filter. If Chrysler ever needs an endorsement for the Ram 1500 Hemi we will be happy to give it!

We took advantage of the facilities in Whitehorse to buy some cards, get gas and do grocery shopping. We then found a TD Canada Trust branch. We realized we had been outside Ontario for more than the limits of our extended health plans and we wanted to arrange extra medical coverage for the rest of our trip. We had a wonderfully helpful staff member at the branch who tried his best to find the right coverage for us. On a busy Friday afternoon he finally asked if he could call us back with the info when he’d had time to investigate more thoroughly. We got the call from him before we got back to Rocinante in Carcross.

On the return trip down the South Klondike Hwy from Whitehorse to Carcross we took the time to explore some of the places we had sped by this morning. We stopped at the historic site of Robinson’s Crossing – a stop on the rail line from Skagway to Whitehorse (photo). 

What a lot of money and effort was spent on development in the Klondike. Many projects took longer to complete than the rush lasted which was only two years. The railway is actually still in use today, mainly as a tourist attraction.

We also took a brief stroll through the Carcross Desert which is billed as the smallest desert in the world. Needless to say our walk was brief.  Carcross Desert is commonly referred to as a desert, but is actually a series of northern sand dunes. The area's climate is too humid to be considered a true desert. The sand was formed during the last glacial period, when large glacial lakes formed and deposited silt. When the lakes dried, the dunes were left behind. Today, sand comes mainly from nearby Bennett Lake, carried by wind. The dunes contain a wide variety of plants, including unusual varieties such as Baikal sedge and Yukon Lupine, among others. (photos)

With our campsite most closely resembling a parking lot, we had a low key dinner in the trailer and headed to bed early.