Why is sourdough bread such a basic food in gold rush countries like the Klondike? Well, for one thing the stuff is like the energizer bunny. It lasts and lasts and lasts.
I once took a Yukon River trip…
Read more
And there on the marge of Lake Laberge, I cremated Sam MacGee. That lake, made famous around the world by Robert Service was named for a Quebecer.
Like many other place names in the Yukon, Lake Laberge had at…
Read more
As with many place names in the Yukon, Lake Kusawa had more than one name over time. Located just 40 air miles west of Whitehorse, this beautiful high mountain lake is a delight to travel, unless big winds blow in…
Read more
As a kid growing up in Whitehorse, I always thought Miles Canyon was named as such because it was a few miles from downtown – not so. Rather, it was named by the American Army Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka…
Read more
You have to hand it to Frederick Schwatka. There was hardly a geographic feature in the Yukon that he did not notice and name. In the summer of 1883, he led the Alaska exploring expedition down the entire length…
Read more
Like almost every land mark along the Yukon River, a large island in the middle of Lake Laberge was named by an American Lieutenant.
Frederick Schwatka had embarked along with six other American explorers from Dyea,…
Read more
If American explorer, Frederick Schwatka had his way, the famous Yukon Lake called Tagish would be named Bove Lake. Imagine that. One of the Yukon’s most beautiful and important lakes named for an Italian naval Lieutenant!
How did it…
Read more
When it comes to place names in the Yukon, we can thank George Dawson for keeping some early day names that mean so much to Yukoners today.
On his government-sponsored journey down the Yukon River in 1887, Read more
00:0000:00
It's the jewel in the crown of the fabled St Elias mountains of the Yukon and Alaska. Towering slightly more than 19 thousand five hundred feet above sea level, the mountain is the second highest in North America.
Mt. Logan…
Read more
It was a fine salmon river, that’s why the local native people hammered stakes into the riverbed to make fish traps. Because of this practice, they called the river Trondek, a word roughly meaning hammer-water. The first written reports about…
Read more
August 16th, 1896 was a sunny Sunday. Too hot in fact for the three men who trudged through the bush down the valley of a small stream that flowed into the Klondike River.
A white man, George Carmack, his…
Read more
