Gold!

After a very lazy morning (can we say jammies at 11:30!) we finally got our butts in gear and headed into downtown Whitehorse. First stop – Raven Recycling, the local bottle and recycling depot, a busy little hub of activity. It’s really nice be able to recycle while on the road. It was pretty important to us when in our house, and we recycled and composted as much as we could. Bob and I were both unhappy with the thought of having to throw everything in the trash, but we've had reasonably good success finding places to recycle.

Then we headed over to the MacBride Museum to check out all things Klondike. As luck would have it they had just started their interactive gold panning demonstration/ workshop. We paid $5 each to join in and got us some tiny little gold flakes to hunt for in a pan full of Yukon River gravel.  Let me tell you, knowing that there’s real gold in the pan is powerful incentive to Find It!  At first I didn't realize we actually got to keep the gold we were hunting for, so extra bonus score. J Panning is both easy and difficult. The gold is heavier than the rocks and will stay on the bottom of the pan while the water swirls and carries away the rocks and sand. But you have to get the movement of the pan & water just so to be really effective. Those little flakes are really tiny, though, so you don’t want to be too aggressive. My arms were getting tired before I managed to spot them (and that was only one pan! Think of the prospectors doing it all day.) The kids got bored with it pretty quickly, but were more than happy to steal away the little vials of shine from their hard laboring parents!  (typical)

Bob panned these little flakes of placer gold

Inside the museum, there are lots of displays providing information about the gold rush and the characters from it (Klondike Kate, Sam McGee, and many others). One section was devoted to the different methods people used to extract gold from the area, another detailed the life of Sam McGee, of Yukon fame, immortalized in the well-known Robert Service poem The Cremation of Sam McGee (which I admit I have never read in full and actually only uses the fellow’s name – he was a friend of Mr. Service, and actually died in Bieseker, AB). The exhibit that proved most interesting to the kids was the display of local animals. Caribou, muskox, moose, ermine, eagles, bison, wolves, bears and more were in the small room. To keep the kids attention, which was flagging a bit, I asked them each to pick three animals they found interesting and tell me something about them. Morgan chose a caribou, an ermine, and the beaver (where he decided that the little one looked like a beaver-hedgehog; not sure where that came from!). Lily also picked a caribou, plus a muskox, and I think she liked the lynx for her third.  At least she liked stroking the soft pelt of the one in the interactive session that followed, where a variety of animal pelts could be touched and examined. My verdict- beaver pelts really are soft, I can see why the fur trade set them as their currency; the arctic fox is the softest of all; Dall sheep fur is actually quite rough and nothing like any sheep (or goat) I have felt. We left the museum after this, grabbed a snack and then walked by the old log church and log skyscrapers that were leftover from the Klondike days. 

Home for a quiet evening and then packing for me. I’m off to Calgary in the morning for appointments on Thursday while the rest of the family stays here. How surreal. I've just spent the last month and a half steadily further away from Airdrie only to hop a 2.5 hour flight and go back.