South of Main Street, some of the streets reveal the presence of the White Pass and Yukon Route.
When the Close Brothers, a London based financial house, dispatched a survey party to study the feasibility of a railroad from Skagway…
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"The All-Canadian Route to the Klondike!" The headlines trumpeted the news. "Edmonton to the Klondike and return in six months." Those headlines struck a chord with Albertans mired in the depression at the turn of the century. Edmonton was not…
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I’ve often thought that Whitehorse is such a proud name for the Yukon ’s capital city. The name has a ring about it and tells a story too. A story about the nearby Whitehorse rapids whose waters once churned and…
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The community of Porter Creek has grown by leaps and bounds since the mid-sixties when the city of Whitehorse put lots for sale in the new subdivision at $300 for a 200 by 200-foot building lot. Times have certainly changed.…
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In this the 125th anniversary of the formation of the North West Mounted Police, we'll take a look at mountains named for mounties who served in the Yukon as members of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police.
Mount Wood in the…
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There may have been 300 steamboats in the Yukon in the heyday of river transport. Few remain today and none ply the river anymore. But in 1898, river was the only way to get from the coast to the Klondike…
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John McIntyre of Pembroke, Ontario sailed north on an ocean-going vessel from San Francisco to Saint Michael, Alaska in 1895. From there, he prospected along the Yukon river system, finally ending up in Circle, Alaska in 1897. By 1898,…
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There's a beautiful pass which connects the Keele River in the Northwest Territories to the Ross River in the Yukon. It was named by dominion surveyor Joseph Keele in 1907 for a brave Yukon bushman who had more than one…
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The pleasant bay and river that flows into it, on Marsh Lake is named for a member of Britain's Royal Navy, Francis McClintock, who solved the mystery of the missing Franklin expedition.
The greatest Arctic expedition of all time…
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The streets of Whitehorse are paved with stories...stories which go back long before the streets were paved. Those dusty, sometimes muddy, often frozen streets today yield nuggets about Lowe, Hoge, Jeckell, Taylor and Drury.
Last time, we walked the White…
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You can have a lot of fun with Yukon place names and learn some interesting history of the places along the way. Take Judas Creek. It’s a small stream that flows into Marsh Lake and is also the name…
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Back in the 1920s, tourism was not a big ticket item in the Yukon. The territory was accessible only by the White Pass Railway, which carried some tourists during the summer, but it was mainly used for freight operations --…
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He was the Dean of Alaskan explorers. But his extraordinary life was - to him - ordinary. William Dall was born in 1845 and began his scientific career as a member of the Scientific Corps of the Alaskan Western Union…
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