Day Thirteen - 10/29/07 - Whitehorse, Kluane Lake

We spent most of our increasingly precious daylight hours today in Whitehorse, the capital “city” of the Yukon Territory. Whitehorse was once a frontier town during the Klondike Gold Rush in the late 1800’s. It still retains that aesthetic sensibility. It also houses the territorial government, which administers justice in the sparsely populated territory with a long arm. Once a week a judge, a clerk, and a recorder fly together to outlying towns in the Yukon in order to set up makeshift courtrooms in community centers and recreation halls. What’s really cool is that these frontier courtrooms have come to reflect the culture and practices of the indigenous populations involved. “Sentencing circles” are common, where the friends and family of the clients involved are present to decide as a community how best to care for and reintegrate a criminal back into society.

This afternoon, as Darren camped out in a coffee shop to write an essay assignment for his imaginary “internet class,” Gordon, Brad, and I paid a visit to the Yukon government building,
where we sat in on a session of the legislative assembly. During the proceedings, members of the assembly kept glancing up at the three mittened, scruffy looking guys sitting in the public gallery. The Speaker of the Legislature shot me a sharp look when I started snapping pictures, so I sheathed my camera and tried to look contrite. In MC-ing the day’s session, the Speaker lacked a certain charisma, perhaps amounting to simply a lack of volume. Nonetheless he was the keeper of The Mace, a golden staff that had to be present for any government business to take place. You can see that bad boy in the lower left of the second picture, beneath the speaker’s disapproving stare.

Eventually bored by the long, circular debate being waged down on the floor, we gathered, ducked, and exited quietly. Outside, we went in search for food not sitting frozen in the rooftop carrier. We settled on a place called “Boston Pizza,” which seemed a bit odd because the Motherland isn’t exactly known for its pizza pizza pies. We specialize in chowdah and obnoxious pink hat wearing Red Sox fans; the pizza is unremarkable. Boston Pizza turned out to be too fancy -- $30 a pie! Having already been seated by the cheerful restaurant guy from “Office Space,” we put our menus down, gathered, ducked, and exited quietly.

Now, in the spirit of this shoestring budget journey into the cold, Gordon and I have temporarily shed our vegetarianism for the duration of the trip. I decided I should just consume whatever’s available that will keep my body going, and if that means eating some delicious wild Alaskan salmon, so be it. We were hungry in the middle of the Yukon, however, where organic, free-range, preservative-less salmon wasn’t readily available for my fiver and pocketful of change, so we made like Americans: Gordon stopped at a KFC to get “one” piece of chicken, and Brad and I ordered a greasy pepperoni pizza at a Pizza Hut. My formerly vegetarian counterpart returned with 10 savory pieces of Kentucky flavored pulverized meat nuggets, which he surreptitiously ate from under the table as Brad and I chowed on our cheap cheesy bread.

Our bellies full of fast food, it was time to leave Whitehorse for even whiter pastures. I was getting tired of this barren territory, despite the slightly creepy claim by the VHS video at the visitor center that “Once you drink from the Yukon River you’ll never want to leave!”

Tonight we tried staying at a campground at Kluane Lake, a monstrous 20-mile-long lake in Kluane National Park on the border between the Yukon and Alaska.

The park was closed, however, and the path into the abandoned campgrounds was barred by a locked metal gate and boulders lining the side of the road where would-be interlopers might try to bypass the entrance. The boulders stubbornly resisted my attempts to persuade them to scootch even a little bit.

We ended up camping right down by the lake’s frozen beach after finding a little hidden turnoff a few kilometers down the road. During perhaps the windiest, most frigid night of the trip, we pitched our tent on a roughly flat clearing, nursed a fire to life, boiled some potatoes, and watched the gibbous moon rise over the mountains.

After dinner, we stood for a while on the vast icy beach that stretched for miles on either side, clutching at our fleeting body heat while away from the fire. The dark rippling lake waters remained unfrozen, incredibly, lapping at the rocky beaches with what sounded like watery children’s voices. We had arrived at the shores of Valhalla, or Sto-Vo-Kor, or some sort of moonlit Norse/Klingon warrior’s afterlife I’d conceptually fabricated in my head, but the Yukon backcountry had already physically carved out.

Our hexagonal tent has just enough width for an air mattress, and the mattress has just enough width to fit two very comfortably or three very uncomfortably. Thus, each night two lucky winners enjoy the luxury and space of air cushioned slumber, while the other two sleep on the ground on either side, crammed between an edge of the air mattress and the cold tent wall. Tonight I had a date with the ground, as the wind’s icy fingers tirelessly pushed and prodded me through the wall. It was almost like getting a massage. A freezing, noisy, unrequested, stupid massage. Yep, that’s the Yukon – gigantic, desolate, untamed, and achingly beautiful, but also kinda a jerk when you’re stuck between an air mattress and a hard place.