Date: 6 July 2001 (Friday)

Start:

End: Montana Services RV Park, Carcross YT (0 miles)

The temperature was 46f early (brrr) and cloudy this morning. It was still windy with little rain showers now and then.

We decided not to return to Skagway, figuring it would be cold and full of tourists again. Also, taking the boat to Haines didn’t appeal to Dolores in this weather.

So we wound up in Atlin, BC.

We used the visitor’s center here in Carcross and got good reviews on going to Atlin and some of the background there. Then we finished Carcross with a motor tour (less than a mile), and a visit to the local general store downtown. We walked across the White Pass railroad bridge over the small river that flows out of Lake Bennett; then we took pictures back toward town of the railroad depot, bridge, and mountains in the background. Dolores spotted a Surf Scoter (bird) that we scared up.

It was snowing on the mountain (about 6,000 feet). The visitor’s center person said it was very early (or late) in the year for this and hoped it didn’t foretell anything.

We left the little house in Carcross again and drove to Tagish on YK-8, continuing almost to the Alaska Highway (one mile short of it) and turned off on the road to Atlin (YK-7), some 60 miles down into British Columbia. The road was dirt for the first 42 miles, then paved for the last 18. It follows lakeshores and is a pretty ride. I saw a bald eagle floating into a tree. Since there was a little rain, the road was wet and the truck is now covered with mud from the doors aft. One can’t read the rear license plate. I’ll have to clean it up tomorrow. The little house also needs cleaning, though we didn’t have it along today.

We stopped at the visitor’s center in Atlin. It’s also the small museum and small gift shop, in the old one-room school. It has lots of photos of the old mining days there. Atlin had a much smaller gold rush than the Dawson one, at about the same time. The gold played out sooner, but for a while it was exciting. After WWI, it became a resort town of sorts – you could buy a ticket to it from Vancouver that took you to Skagway by steamer, Carcross by train, Taku by paddlewheeler and a tram across the neck there; then you took a steamboat (not a paddlewheeler, the lake is deep) to Atlin and the Atlin Inn. That all died out by/in the 30’s. It makes it today on tourism, the government jobs and a little mining.

After the center, we had lunch in the Atlin Inn, overlooking the lake with a wonderful view to the west and south. There were whitecaps on the lake but a sheltered spot behind a small island left water calm enough that a float plane took off and another landed. Nobody was going out into the big lake in boats, though.

We took off in the truck again, first further south to an overlook where you can see the Llewelyn Glacier in the distance. Beautiful. Then back toward town and out to the east to see the abandoned town of Discovery, almost all fallen down. We could also see the tailings from dredging operations that took place here to get out the gold.

Then we went back almost into town and looked through the Pioneer Cemetery. The headstones show that many of the occupants died young. One marker noted "froze to death", another "died of accidental gunshot wound". One of the discoverers of gold here died soon afterward at 31, cause not noted.

We cruised back through Atlin taking a few more pictures, then drove the 100 miles back to Carcross. We’re done for the day, and it was a successful one. Tomorrow, we’re on the road east to Watson Lake, YT, via Tagish again.