June 9

Teslin, YT to Carmacks, YT

Overnight it started raining and did not stop until midafternoon. Our route today took us westward along Yukon 1 (Alaskan Highway) to Whitehorse, the largest town in the Yukon. It’s a busy town with all services for which we were thankful. Let me go back to the morning maybe an hour out of Teslin. We hit another section of construction where the pavement was removed and a hard gravel base was placed preparing to place new pavement on top. Well, after maybe 5 miles of this gravel base the TPMS (tire pressure monitoring system) alarm goes off. The trailer’s right tire was quickly losing air pressure. Time to break out the jack and lug wrench (neither comes with an Airstream) and change the tire. Here’s the setting: It’s raining; Temperature is 37 degrees (you read that right, 37 F or around 2.5 degrees C); There is little room to move over; There’s plenty of mud to work in; and it’s just not the ideal weather, time, or place to change a trailer tire for the very first time ever. First task was to get the tools out of the bed but they are way under the bed cover so it takes wrangling to get them. Marsha chocks the trailer so it does not slip then she checks the manual on how to jack the trailer up. That part was easy, but it was more difficult to get to the spare trailer tire underneath the trailer. Once we got that out the change was easy. Trailer has tires. Next step was to confirm the spare was up to pressure, but it was only at 50 psi. They are rated for 65 psi so we dug out the air compressor. Now to run the compressor we need to dig out the generator, start it and then use the compressor.  Next step was to put the flat tire in the truck bed. While loading it I realized the hub cover that protect the wheel bearings from dirt was still on the flat tire. That meant we needed to dig out the jack again, jack up the trailer take the tire off and mount the hub protector then put everything back together once again.

We found where a stone had worked its way into the tire causing the leak. I have a tire plug kit but felt more comfortable taking it to a shop. Thus onward to Whitehorse. First tire place could get it fixed on Monday (note to self: today is Saturday). Second tire shop could have fixed by 5 pm. We dropped it off and headed to downtown Whitehorse. First stop, the Yukon Information Center, then a late lunch at the Klondike Grill ( or something close to that). It was a great lunch. Next a bookstore and a quilt shop. After that we purchased more food supplies to hold us for a few days. Again we filled up with gas and finally got the repaired tire.

We left Whitehorse around 4:30 heading west along Yukon 1 for just a few miles where we took a right on Yukon 2 (The Klondike Trail) to Dawson City, site of the Klondike Gold rush of 1898. Gold was actually discovered fin 1896 but it took a couple of years for the tidal wave of prospectors to get there. The journey to Dawson City was long, hard, and expensive with little understanding of how many would not find any gold at all. By the time the outside world arrived most of the claims were already taken.

Heading north on Yukon 2 the first planned stop was a Lake Leberge. You may or may not have read of the Scottish poet, Robert Service who wrote so much about the Klondike. He authored, The Cremation of Sam McGee, where Lake Leberge was the setting for Sam McGee’s cremation. My mother read Robert Service to me when I was young and he has held my fascination my entire life. Marsha suggested we stop and take a photo of me next to Lake Leberge. Great idea, but we missed the turn and there was not a place to turn the truck and trailer around for the next 10 miles. Northward we headed. We stopped at a Yukon Government Campground only to find it full. Being the weekend and not too far from Whitehorse both tourists and locals are out enjoying camping. We pushed on to Carmacks where we are camped for the night. The good news is that late in the day the sun came out and the temperature warmed.