Carcross cheers the return of the White Pass & Yukon Route

Something momentous happens when I drive into “downtown” Carcross on May 23, 2007: I stop at the train crossing and look carefully in both directions.

On this gorgeous afternoon, for the first time in almost a quarter-century, the White Pass & Yukon Route railroad will bring scheduled summer service back to the community. In 1988, six long years after its initial closure as a commercial railroad, the WP&YR was revived as a heritage ride catering primarily to cruise ship tourists into Skagway, Alaska. Millions have since traveled the legendary narrow gauge, but their journeys terminated no further than Bennett, B.C.—just short of the Yukon boundary. Only on rare occasions has a passenger train snaked north along the frigid sliver of Bennett Lake and pulled into the station at Carcross.

The original purpose of the gold rush railroad was to improve transportation between the Alaskan coast and the Yukon interior, so this abbreviated route presented an obvious irony. Hence, the equally obvious enthusiasm of WP&YR president Gary Danielson during last year’s announcement of resumed service.

“It took 25 years,” he observed, ”but we’ve put the Yukon back into White Pass & Yukon Route.”

Two hours after I pull into the dusty town, an approaching headlight makes good on Danielson’s promise.

By this time, the anthill of visitors that greeted my arrival has been packed into tour coaches and hastened by the infamous Carcross winds to their next stop along the highway. The scenic photos have all been snapped, the ice cream cones from the Matthew Watson General store licked into oblivion. Now there’s just the sound of a whistle and the vision of history in locomotion, a diesel engine barreling down the track towards several waiting onlookers at the Carcross rail bridge.

The real fanfare occurred a few days earlier during special excursions for VIPs and Yukoners, so the scene is relatively calm as passengers disembark. For tourists, the final leg into the Yukon has been a scenic bonus after the breathtaking trip up and over the 2,865-foot White Pass Summit from Skagway. But for Yukoners and Carcross residents especially, the route extension means so much more.

Ken Jones is a recent retiree in his mid-fifties, but when he steps onto the platform, he wears the expression of a child on Christmas morning. The fourth generation of a Carcross family whose roots date back to the1920s, Jones left the Yukon two decades ago; now he’s “home,” temporarily at least, to work as a tour guide on the new Carcross-Bennett run in its inaugural season. He’s living with his mother Millie, a fixture of the local scene.

“You’re looking at the oldest teenager in Carcross,” he tells me later, his soft voice like a harness on the enthusiasm that might otherwise overwhelm him. “I’ve had a chance to come back this summer and relive all my childhood and family history.”

That history is as intertwined with the WP&YR railroad as it is with Carcross.

“My great grandfather was the station agent in Whitehorse,” Jones explains. “My grandmother was stationed in Carcross in the 50s through the 60s, and my grandfather was section foreman here.”

Jones’ mother was raised in Carcross and was “on the railroad,” he adds, when she met his father, who plied the southern lakes aboard the company’s paddle wheeler fleet.

“I think Carcross has been waiting for this for a long time,” Jones says, noting his mother’s excitement in particular.

The eagerness is understandable. The WP&YR established Carcross as a permanent townsite and, for years, remained the hub of community life.

“When it was gone, it was like ‘so what do we do now?’” Jones recalls. “And when it came back, it was like a dream come true.”

I resist the urge to pinch him.

This column was first published in the June/July 2007 issue of above&beyond magazine.

© 2007 Mark Koepke

Most Yukoners can appreciate their really big mountain—from a distance.

A proud Yukoner could rhyme off a long list of features that make the Yukon a spectacular place. Some of the most impressive natural features, like the aurora borealis, aren’t exactly unique to the territory, so one big-time example inevitably pops up when serious bragging rights are on the line: Canada’s highest mountain.

At 5,959 meters—that’s just shy of 20,000 feet—Mount Logan soars head and shoulders above any peak in the country, save for a few of its towering companions locked away in the Icefield Range of Yukon’s Kluane National Park. As if this lofty distinction isn’t enough, a really proud Yukoner would add that the mountain is surrounded by the largest non-polar icefields on earth.

The intriguing thing about our attachment to Mount Logan is that, for most of us, it’s not an attachment to the mountain as much as an attachment to the statistic. You’ll never want for a local who can talk your ear off about a first-hand experience at the Dawson City Music Festival, but you won’t encounter too many for whom Mount Logan is anything more than a remote idea. The truth is, the majority of us are unlikely to even lay eyes on this massive landmark, let alone get up close and personal.

Of course, there are a few Yukoners—myself not included—who aren’t deterred by the high costs, complex logistics or obvious risks posed by an attempt to penetrate Logan’s frozen domain. No, they have loftier ambitions and the determination to act upon them. Every May and June, when the weather is most cooperative, they join fellow adventurers from around the world to attempt a feat that was accomplished for the first time in 1925.

Yes, they try to climb the behemoth.

“It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen in the Yukon,” observes a Whitehorse friend who participated in an expedition in 2000. “You’re traveling on a glacier and it’s enormous. It’s so big, it feels like its own environment. Sometimes, it didn’t really feel like we were traveling through the mountains. It felt like we were traveling through the desert.”

After 16 days of skiing up Logan’s easiest ascent route, his group turned back just 300 vertical meters—and around 10 horizontal kilometers—from the summit. Altitude sickness was the culprit.

“I wasn’t all that disappointed at the time,” he recalls. “There’s a lot of relief just getting out of an experience like that—and getting out safely. For me, it was an experience and it didn’t matter whether we got to the top.”

Fortunately, another Yukon friend shares this philosophical outlook. It may serve him well, since he should be somewhere on Logan in May of this year.

“The summit success is about 30 percent,” he tells me a few months before his expedition. “I mean, 70 percent of people, if the summit is their only goal, are going to come back bummed and bitter. You have to go in incredibly humble. I’m not going in with a failure attitude, but I’m very uncertain as to our chances. There are too many variables that are out of our control.”

He adds that “tons of Yukoners” will reportedly be on Mount Logan at the same time as he and his climbing partner.

This remark, to my mind, defines the Theory of Yukon Relativity, whereby “tons” may more accurately describe “a few.” In reality, most of us won’t be anywhere near Mount Logan this spring or anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean we won’t be there in spirit, cheering a hardier breed of Yukoner to the top of our favourite statistic.

In this sense, the whole Yukon may be a little high on Logan. But some of its citizens are literally a lot higher than most.

This column was first published in the May/June 2007 issue of above&beyond magazine.

© 2007 Mark Koepke / Photo credit to Jean-Paul Molgat

A Yukoner is more than just a birth certificate

T he scene is the Inuvik airport. It’s the second day of an epic effort to fly from Whitehorse to the tiny Gwich’in village of Old Crow. The Hawker Siddley sits idly on the tarmac, waiting out the ice fog that thwarted the previous day’s attempt to land and another attempt today. As we mill about the terminal, I strike up a conversation with a fellow passenger who, just like me, lives in Whitehorse and is excited about visiting the Yukon’s most remote community for the first time. The two of us are entwined in one big adventure, subject to the same fickle forces of a northern winter.

“How long have you been here?” he eventually asks, referring not to the Inuvik airport, but to the territory we both call home.

“All my life,” I reply.

“Oh,” he says. “You’re a Yukoner.”

In the span of a week, I will hear similar observations from no less than three different people who live and work alongside me in this place. They include both new acquaintances and old friends. And this unmistakable pattern soon gets me thinking about what, precisely, a person has to do—or be—to wear the label “Yukoner.”

Clearly, there are those who define a Yukoner as someone who was “born and raised.” And perhaps it was someone like me who gave these people the impression that the absence of this all-important birthright meant they couldn’t clip on the nametag, so to speak. It might even explain why a former Yukon government, presumably in a bid to foster a greater sense of inclusiveness within the population, went to painstaking efforts to officially refer to “Yukon people” rather than Yukoners.

Yukon people?

Strangely, Alberta people don’t seem to suffer from this identity crisis. Nor do Manitoba people, Ontario people or Newfoundland people.

While I’ve always enjoyed the rare distinction of being born in the Yukon—relatively few of us ever are—I’m not sure it confers exclusive rights over the label of Yukoner. It doesn’t matter whether your initiation to Yukon life takes place at Whitehorse General or Whitehorse International; what matters is how you embrace everything it has to offer. In this sense, those of us who arrive in the Yukon with roots already attached may have a lot to learn from those who make the choice to plant new roots where none existed before. That takes some serious love.

The truth is, there are as many versions of Yukoner as there are people who inhabit this wild and storied space. The fact that I have lived my entire life here means, for example, that I am a Yukoner who can see the ghosts of this city’s long-gone landmarks where others may not. On the other hand, I’ve never worked a placer claim, owned a dog team, spent the winter in a tiny cabin with no running water, taught school in a remote fly-in community, climbed Mount Logan, or paddled the Snake River. But I know people—Yukoners all—who have come from across the country and around the world to connect to these amazing aspects of the Yukon experience.

Of course, I also grew up with people who couldn’t run far enough or fast enough to escape this place. Maybe they’re Albertans now. Or Ontarians, or Manitobans or Newfoundlanders. Or perhaps they remain Yukoners forever. I’m not sure.

But I do know that a state of mind defines a Yukoner as much as the statement of a birth certificate. So, for those who join the party a little later in life, bear in mind that there’s room enough for everyone—not just in the Yukon, but in the name by which we can all attach ourselves to its beguiling soul.

Wear it well.

This column was first published in the March/April 2007 issue of above&beyond magazine.

© 2007 Mark Koepke

A writer’s ode to the Yukon DNA

L ast July, I issued my very first travel ban. I informed my partner, whose patience for delusional antics is seemingly boundless, that she couldn’t make the trip from Whitehorse to her family’s cabin on Shuswap Lake near Kamloops. She was expecting in August, so the situation seemed far too risky.

“You’re right,” she conceded.

No doubt, she was imagining the possibility of delivering a premature baby in a fairly remote setting—medically speaking, not the best idea—while I was at home missing the action.

Bless her heart.

The truth is, I was determined to remove the threat of my first-born going through life with a British Columbia birth certificate.

The fact that my partner comes with Alberta paperwork is a flaw that I’ve been gracious enough to overlook. She did, after all, choose the Yukon (and me). Unlike her, I am what people around here call “born and raised.” I drew my first breaths of fresh air outside Whitehorse General Hospital where my partner now spends many of her working hours. And our house is just blocks from the apartment to which my parents—themselves Yukon “immigrants”—took me home in a brand-new ’72 Datsun 510.

Perhaps my profound attachment to the Yukon was foretold when my folks, impressed by the novelty of life on a legendary frontier, proudly announced my arrival as a “new strike in the Klondike.” For as long as I can remember, I have lived with the sense that belonging to this place is a rare and precious gift. Canada’s most westerly territory, like the NWT and Nunavut, has never had a huge population, so history counts a relatively small number who have carried membership from Day One. As a result, life here sometimes seems like an epic story into which a small cast of hardy protagonists, myself included, has been lovingly written. Over many years, this point of view has been reinforced by the dazzled reactions of Southerners when they learn I hail from the “Land of the Midnight Sun.” It has also been reflected in pop culture’s frequent use of “Yukon” as shorthand to describe a place beyond civilization’s ordinary reach.

Call it a father’s conceit, but I wanted to imprint my offspring’s first experiences with the same mythical Yukon DNA that mine received. My feelings about this place have nothing to do with pride, which is the domain of achievement not accident. Nor are they signs of a hopeless parochialism. I have visited every Canadian province and territory, yet I have explored each with a degree of foreign curiosity only slightly less than I would Timbuktu—and I’ve been there, as well. After many far-flung travels, I have inevitably returned to the town, neighbourhood and damn near street of my origins, with the realization that I don’t really belong anywhere else. When I eventually depart this world, only feet from where I entered it, I might ask myself: Was I man, or salmon?

So, no offense, Shuswap Lake, but I could live without your rugged beauty. CN Tower, Plains of Abraham, Banff National Park—I love you all, but I could live without you, too. More often than not, I could especially live without the long shadow of Parliament Hill.

At the same time, I’m pretty sure I could never live without the mundane sight of the sandy bluffs that curve around my cozy Riverdale subdivision. Or the morning sun as it climbs out of bed behind Grey Mountain and beams through the window of my home office. Or the poplar leaves turning electric yellow during an evening ride along my favourite singletrack.

And finally, I couldn’t be completely happy without some space—a second home, constructed of words—to illuminate the whole experience.

This is it.

This column was first published in the January/February 2007 issue of above&beyond magazine.

© 2007 Mark Koepke