Last evening, when we arrived, it rained pretty heavily, then cleared up. Again, today, it rained in the late afternoon, then the skies cleared again. It reminded me of Florida in the summer when there seem to always be afternoon showers.
As a bit of trivia, we have put 8635.7 miles on the truck as of the fuel fill up here in Dawson City. We have traveled on really nice highways, pot holed highways, in construction areas and on dirt and gravel roads in rain and dry dust-everywhere weather. Now we have mud and dirt all over the trailer and truck. We’d wash them, but we will be on 13 miles of dirt and gravel road when we leave here, so why do it now? All in all, we have had a mostly non-eventful journey, since we had the repairs made that I mentioned at the beginning of our trip. We have seen lots of animals, except for the last few days, but hope to see more in Alaska. The scenery has been gorgeous. We have had some amazing things happen that I have talked about in previous posts and will describe at the end of today’s post. We’re tired and will be taking some breaks in a few days. But, now, let me tell you about today.
We drove around Dawson City to do some sightseeing. First, we drove to the top of Midnight Dome to get an overview of the town. The first picture is of their industrial area. Mining is going on on the hill and there are some other businesses there. In the second picture is our campground. I zoomed in as far as I could, so it is a bit grainy. You can see our 5th wheel on the left side, about in the middle, above the line of trees. There is a smaller, brown motorhome next to us. It looks like not very many people are staying here, but by evening, the camp was full with three RV caravans joining the rest of us. You can see that we are at the edge of the industrial area.
The sign below is our new sign for today. We have never seen a sign for a hill that had a car on it. Usually they have trucks on them.
Once we got back down from Midnight Dome, we had lunch at the trailer, then went out to explore, again. Dawson City is still somewhat like being in the old times while still having modern amenities. The General Store has just about everything you could need for groceries, inside, but outside, they have a false front on the building that you can see being held up with a bar attached to the roof. There is a wooden sidewalk, too. In fact, you can see false fronted buildings all around the downtown area. Where there are sidewalks, they are all wooden. The roads are all dirt roads except for the main highway that got us here from Whitehorse. We saw the road scrapers running over the streets, in town, to smooth them out. We aren’t sure how often that happens, but it seems to be a normal everyday activity. The second picture shows a recycled clothes washing machine that was just down from the general store.
Dawson City is a town that is popular with the artists and writers. There are some cabins of famous writers of the early 1900s that are here in Dawson City. Below are the cabins of Jack London (left) and Robert Service (right).
There is a very old cemetery near these two cabins. Those are wooden head markers.
There are old buildings and new buildings. Some of the historical buildings have been repaired and are being used for new purposes. There are also many historical buildings that are still in disrepair. It appears to us that the town is having a rebirth, in away. Here is a very nice home and a very old church. Built in 1901, when the town was booming from the gold rush. The church could hold 600 parishioners and had a pipe organ. Now it has signs on it that it is a dangerous and very unstable structure. We saw many new or restored buildings. Time will tell if this church is on the restoration list. By the way, there is a geocache, very near the church, that we found.
. Now for the coolest thing that we did today. I can’t say that it is the coolest thing we have ever done, but it certainly is something we can not do at home. At about 11:25 PM, we went back up to Midnight Dome to see if the sun really was shining at midnight. When we left the trailer, you can see that the sun was shining on the hillside near the trailer (our trailer hitch is on the left, near the hood of the truck on the bottom of the photo). We got to the top of Midnight Dome about 11:40 PM. There is a very nice wooden bench on the top of the hill. Earl was getting the movie camera ready, at 11:50 PM, to watch the sun set. As you can see, the sun is very much shining and making shadows.
The photos below were taken at 12:00 AM and 12:04 AM respectfully. The sun is reflecting in the Yukon River. We don’t think the sun is going to set any time soon so we are going back to the trailer. The first shot is taken from on top of the hill, where Earl is standing, and the second is from near where we parked the truck.
Back at the trailer at 12:21 AM, there is still a lot of light in the sky. The two photos of camp and the one of Earl are with ambient light, no flash or other tricks. I did use the sunset setting on the camera for the two pictures of the Midnight Sun. We thought it was really neat to actually see that the sun never set. We knew that the sky was bright at night, but our trailer bedroom has been darkened so much that we didn’t realize how light it really was. Soo… different from home.
Time for bed, even though it isn't dark yet. More adventures tomorrow.
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