Sunset in Portland, OR: 8:38pm.  Sunset in Whitehorse, YK: 10:43pm.  I’m writing this at dusk at 10:50pm.  I woke up at 4:44am this morning and daylight was coming through the skylight in our bathroom.  It doesn’t make for wanting to get a lot of sleep!

This morning when we finished breaking camp and Mark started up the RV, we had to wait for a whole bunch of other RVs that were going out at the same time.  I didn’t understand why everyone was leaving at 9:30 until much later when we saw the whole group at a rest stop.  They are apparently caravanning together.

After a day full of seeing a wide variety of wildlife yesterday, there was nothing particularly extraordinary about our trip today except the scenery…lots of beautiful mountains, iced over lakes, and rivers.  Today was a day of seeing bicyclists on the highway.  Considering the steep grades we were still experiencing, I can’t imagine bicycling the Alcan Highway.

The real fun began after we made camp this afternoon.  We off-loaded the car and drove into Whitehorse.  Whitehorse is the capital of the Yukon Territory.  (By the way, I’ve been wondering why Yukon is still a territory and not a province.  Apparently there’s not a large enough population here yet.)

There were two museums Mark and I wanted to see.  He wanted to see the Yukon Transportation Museum and I wanted to see the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Center.  They were next door to each other so we decided to split up.  I learned some things in the Interpretive Center.  I had always thought the first peoples had come across from Siberia to Alaska on ice, but not so.  During the Ice Age, the ocean’s water went into the making of the glaciers and the area between Siberia and Alaska is relatively shallow.  Therefore the ocean dropped and became a grassy plain with no trees.  Woolly mammoths, extra large beavers and small horses all lived there, and so did early humans.  I picked up a couple pages of native legends that talk about some of these animals.

As it turned out, Mark’s museum was closed, but there were things to look at outside of both museums so that’s what Mark did.  When I came out, we drove into the cute Main Street area of Whitehorse and had dinner at a place recommended in our AAA guide book.  Then we did some exploring on foot and by car of Whitehorse.  There is so much to see and do here that Mark and I made a slight alteration to our plans.  It’s only eight hours from here to Tok.  We had planned to move to Beavercreek tomorrow night, which is only about three hours from Tok, but instead we’re going to stay here two nights and then make a longer trip of it on Monday.  We may not have this chance to explore on our way back.