OK - SLOWLY getting organized

World's largest weathervane: Whitehorse Airport


Sorry about the sideways pictures and so forth. Gradually I'll pull it together. Probably on the last day before I leave! I did this post the day before yesterday but this is the first time I've been able to post it. So, without further ado. Also, I'll get a picture or two up on the next post. Here we go:

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Made it to Whitehorse!

February 11, 2006

We pulled up at the River View Hotel in downtown Whitehorse at 11:00 AM Pacific time. Mileage: 116,612. Total mileage to get here: 4,867. The car is parked at:
N60º43’18.4” x W135º03’07.2”. The elevation here is 2,106’. The temperature was 31º when we arrived; when we left Teslin this morning it was 13º and on the way here it went down to 10º, the lowest temperature we’ve seen on the trip.

Out hotel is about one block from the Yukon Quest HQ and we walked over there when we first got here, just to look around. It’s Saturday but the Quest is starting today and believe it or not there were people in the office and they waved at us to come in. and one of the volunteer coordinators, Jennifer, opened the front door and said “Ivory and Nicky! Hi!” I mean, can you beat that? Nine days on the road, leaking head gasket, five thousand miles of driving, pull into town and the first place we go to they greet us by name. So, we are definitely loving life.

There’s a great trail that goes up and down beside the river – the Yukon river, that is – so Pat and the dogs and I hiked up and down it just to see what’s around. The weather’s beautiful and I’m telling you, 32º here is just no big deal. Even with the wind blowing off the river. And the people at the hotel are so nice to the dogs (and to us).

The river is mostly frozen solid except for a little channel running down the middle or along one bank in a couple of places. It’s got what appears to me to be a lot of what mushers refer to (I think) as “jumble ice”, big sheets several inches thick and maybe the size of a washing machine. They’re thrown up in big piles and even seeing these relatively small ones here in Whitehorse, I can imagine how difficult it must be to have dogs pull a sled over them. Because from the accounts I’ve read, when you get way up the river there are just huge piles of jumble ice, pieces as big as garage doors and the piles go from bank to bank on the river – no way around them. This long distance mushing is some serious business. Even from the perspective of a three-time Ironman finisher this looks extremely difficult. And you don’t get to stop for ten or eleven days or two weeks. And you have to feed the dogs, take care of their feet, everything. So the main thing mushers sacrifice to do all that is sleep. For weeks on end. Ironmans are a lot of work and I’m slow but I still don’t miss any sleep!

When the dogs and I were walking up the river we saw a magpie on the bank, our first magpie in the Yukon. Maybe even our first magpie in Canada. It’s funny that my favorite bird at home is a chickadee (black and white) and here I’ve been watching magpies the whole trip (also black and white). And Ivory and Nicky are black and white! Maybe I don’t need to take color pictures…


It’s around 3:00 now and Pat and I got up here to the Canada Games Centre around an hour ago – he’s going for a swim and I’m just checking the place out. I’ll come up here and get a swim in some time this week but I’m just learning about the whole area. I guess it’s busier because it’s Saturday but this place is just full of people. They’ve got several hockey rinks and they’re all packed. It seems sort of like the Yukon equivalent of pickup basketball. Some of them look really, really serious and they’re playing really hard. They also line up and do these drills where they have lines up pucks on the ice and lines of players and they all come up one at a time and shoot them at the goalie. In another area they were doing a similar thing with volleyball. One guy would serve, the same guy all the time, I guess the coach. A guy on the other side would bump the serve up to a setter, he would set it and a guy would jump up and spike it, and some of the guys were really good. One guy would try to block the spike. Usually they couldn’t block it, then the person who spiked it would come over and try to block the next spike. Until finally a blocker missed and he would have to drop and start doing pushups while all of the guys on the other team would have to do drills and run back and forth frantically for a few minutes. The same thing in the hockey drills – I think if a shot got through the goalie a whole bunch of guys would throw their sticks down on the ice and start doing pushups. And they’re swimming in here, playing soccer, just tons and tons of activity. I’m typing this while I watch them do all kinds of different cool looking, very high speed hockey drills. The only thing I haven’t seen them practice yet is fighting – probably they were working on that before I got here. It’s all about the fundamentals.

Pat’s plane leaves at around 7:00 tomorrow morning and it’s Sunday and we’ll have the whole day free. So I think I’ll give the dogs a lot of food and maybe grab a cup of coffee and a water bottle or some Gatorade and take a long hike up the river and see what it looks like. It may be warmer here than it was in Teslin but I think it’s going to be pretty cold in the morning. People around here are uniformly surprised it’s as warm as it is. I’m not complaing about it being warm but I’d really like to take the dogs and walk out on the ice, probably walk across to the other bank. In a lot of places it looks like you could practically drive across it – it looks thick and sturdy. We’ll see what it looks like. I’m really looking forward to a long hike with the dogs. Nine days in the car is plenty.

I looked away from the ice for a while to do some typing and watch some people walk by – this is a whole, whole different place – and when I looked back there were ten or twelve hockey players around the net with their backs to me and they all have ponytails! It’s a girls hockey team! I guess I shouldn’t be surprised but I am. They’re out their skating through a course made up of eight orange triangles then they come out at the end of it and shoot at the goalie. I think they’re timed. They’re very controlled and graceful and I just sort of assumed they were going slow until they pass the glass in front of my and their ponytails are whipping out behind them and they’re absolutely flying. I think I’ll be waiting a long time before I see this in Richmond, VA.