June 10

Carmacks, YT to Dawson City

An uneventful travel day to Dawson City. Highway 2 is a fairly narrow one that has some great scenery. We joked about taking the Demster Highway to the Artic, but it’s several hundred miles of not much. Services are few are far far between. No Demster Highway for us, at least not on this trip. Probably best not to tow a camper up it. On approaching Dawson huge piles of rock tailings were visible on both sides of the highway. The tailing are what was left after the gold was extracted. I expect that what we observed was the result of huge dredges and not individual miners. The rock piles covered a huge area.

Since we will be in Dawson City for a couple of days we drove to the far end of town where the ferry crosses the Yukon River to both the Yukon Government Campground along the Yukon River and the start of the Top of the World Highway. We are now camped at the Campground across the river and just downstream of Dawson. It’s exciting that two great writers, Robert Service and Jack London lived at one time in Dawson City.

It was a midafternoon arrival at the campground and we are now set up in the far end of the large campground with nobody close to us. Plenty of privacy here. Even if it was fairly full each site is wooded and well away from each other. Crossing the Yukon on the free ferry was a treat but our hitch rides lowto the ground. The ferry crew need to place boards down so that we could drive off the ferry. With the pickup alone there is no problem. There’s no problem with the trailer either, it’s just the low hitch.