Finally!

Since last winter, I have tried to get a good picture of the Fox that lives in our neighbourhood and commonly hangs out in the parking area in our condo complex. Today, it actually let me get close enough and stood still long enough for me to get a nice close-up. Then it quickly foxed off.

Pond Hockey

This past weekend, there was a shinny tournament held on Chadburn Lake at the edge of Whitehorse. This was the first time I had ever played hockey on skates. I had fun, but I won't be joining a league any time soon. Partly because real rinks don't have snow banks that I could use to help me stop.

We started the day with a gorgeous 9:30 AM sunrise.

An hour later the sun began setting... Just kidding. This wasn't until 1:30 PM.

It turned out to be a gorgeous day with a temperature around zero and no wind.

Many of the teams dressed up.

But the Yukon Synchronized Swim Team won the best dressed award.

One team was kind enough to tape shot glasses to a stick and try to get their opponents drunk.

Our team in action. We're the ones without matching jerseys, but we'll be better prepared next year.

Hoar Frost

Those who have never seen hoar frost are amazed at how surreal the world looks when it clings to everything. Those who have never seen hoar frost spelled out are usually shocked and confused. Big white ice crystals brought about by a recent November cold snap blanketed the trees, and sunny days brought loads of shutterbugs out of their homes to capture the landscape sparkle.

Change is good

This post isn't just to show that a change in fashion over the decades is welcomed (these are vintage 70's clothes, by the way -- the green outfit was even handmade by my mom), or that we did do something for Halloween (this picture is from the night after Halloween - our actual Halloween involved handing out candy to kids and doing renovations until some friends came over and we all fell asleep watching Ghostbusters. Yes, we had a sleeping party), but that the recent happenings in the US are really eye-opening events that have turned that country on its head.

And a lot of it changed in a month. The US, which used to be a bastion of capitalism and run by the "old white rich guys" as one newspaper put it, now has a largely nationalized banking system and a half-black president. Crazy. This is really exciting politics compared to the Canadian federal election (for a guy who doesn't really like politics that much). If people think that nothing will change now that Obama is president, they are sorely wrong. Without even doing anything as president, many world leaders around the globe (and citizens of their countries) have completely changed their perception of the US for the better. The US and the rest of the world are ready for and welcoming change. Good luck to all.

Does this scare you?

I went for my last bike ride 4 days ago and my first ski today. There is only a little bit of snow in town, but 20 minutes up into the hills and it is full on winter. Don't worry, it isn't as scary as it looks.

But if you want to be even more frightened, then how about a picture of me in tights?

Downhills are still the most fun.

Jenny and I already have our seasons passes, so we'll be seeing a lot more of this for the next half year.

The end.

Creature Comforts

Popeye has been home with us in Whitehorse for almost 5 months now, and she seems to have adjusted to her new larger aquarium and heat lamp without any hiccups. She spends so much time in the artificial sun that I feel a little guilty for not setting a heat lamp up for her sooner.

Still looking pretty good for a 12 year-old reptile. Just a couple of wrinkles around the neck.

Lady Luck

A couple of weeks ago, a good friend from geology visited Canada after spending much of the past year exploring for uranium in Africa. Mike and Lindsey came up to Yukon for a week of northern fun, which included going to Dawson City to have an end-of-season celebration with drinking and gambling at Diamond Tooth Gertie's. Dawson City is unlike any other town in the world -- at the peak of the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898, Dawson was the largest city in western Canada at 40,000. Today it is just over 1000 people, and local bylaws stipulate that all buildings (new and old) must be built to look like frontier buildings from the first half of the 20th century. All of the streets are dirt and all of the sidewalks are boardwalks.

Jenny and I stayed at the Downtown Hotel. This is what all of the hallways looked like. I don't know who the women in the paintings are, but I'm going to assume that one of them is Lady Luck. The lowermost painting is of the outside of the Downtown (I forgot to get a picture).

The Downtown Hotel is also home to the Sourtoe Cocktail -- put the toe in a shot of booze, drink it and have the toe touch your lips in order to become a part of this elite club. This is in fact a real human toe that has been dehydrated. Jenny and I didn't do the shot this time around, but became Sourtoers last summer when we did a week long canoe trip on the Yukon River to get to Dawson City for the summer music festival.

Our Dawson trip was made even nicer by the fact that it was financed by Lady Luck. The morning of our canoe trip on the Takhini River, Jenny and I walked outside our front door and found four $50 bills blowing across the ground. We found $200 on the ground! This became our Dawson money. There is no need to go into details about where it went, but needless to say an evening of drinking and gambling in a frontier town can easily lay waste to Lady Luck.

Domesticated

Most of my recent posts have been about being outdoors, but don't think that all is not well on the home front. Jenny and I have joined a cooking co-op comprised of a group of 10 Whitehorse friends. Once a month, everybody gets together and exchanges frozen meals in meat, chicken, veggie, soup, and baked goods categories. So for the next few weeks, we have a bunch of ready made meals in the freezer. Of our new meals, we've only tried a tasty dahl and chickpea curry, and lasagna will be next.

We made enough Indian Jambalaya to feed 40 people.

In order to join the cooking co-op, we needed more freezer space to keep a mound of food. I looked in the newspaper for a used freezer, but my search was unsuccessful and we ended up having to buy a new, small (3.6 cu ft) freezer. What I did find in the paper was a lady selling this gorgeous philodendron. I've liked these plants ever since seeing Marcie's and Dwayne's. They wouldn't be nearly as cool if they lacked the holes (the leaves that is, not Marcie and Dwayne).

Grey Mountain

Just a few shots from a day-long hike'n bike I did to get to the north peak of Grey Mountain (the peak on the left in the picture below). The south peak can be reached in about an hour with a drive and a hike, and I've previously posted pictures of its view. The north peak sees way fewer visitors and felt like more of an adventure.

If you drove straight into this picture down the South Klondike Highway, you'd see breathtaking mountain views for an hour and a half, then end up at the Alaskan coast in Skagway. Along the way you'd pass by Carcross, where there is amazing biking, Log Cabin, where there is great backcountry skiing/boarding, and the Chilkoot Trail, a popular hike that takes you over Chilkoot Pass, which claimed many prospectors' lives during the Klondike gold rush in the 1890's. That highway holds a lot of fun.

If you drove straight into this picture, you'd pass by the left hand side of Marsh Lake (big lake in the background) and be heading east on the Alaska Highway -- our main supply line to the rest of Canada.

Powderface Ridge

Quite a few of my friends who I've known for 10+ years have gotten married over the past year or so. That necessitated going through stacks of old photos to find incriminating evidence for wedding slide shows. Although not incriminating, this picture is probably 12 years old, was taken with a really crappy point-and-shoot film camera, and is still one my favourite photos. It epitomizes my summers during the early years of university when whoever was free on a particular weekend would pack camping and biking gear into a vehicle and head out to Jasper or Kananaskis. This particular photo was taken along the Powderface Ridge trail in Kananaskis, and was one of the first times I remember playing photographer and setting up a shot that I thought would look really good. I remember thinking the light was stellar, and had Jasen pose on a knoll just off the trail, with the valley and the Rocky Mountains in the distance. I had only been mountain biking for 3 or 4 years at this point and I learned a lot about photography by looking at photos in mountain bike magazines. Even looking back on it now, I think it is a stellar photo, and wonder how much better it would have looked if I had used a nicer camera. I didn't even have the pleasure of seeing the photo immediately on the screen of a digital camera.

One Bike, Any Trail

For the past two seasons, I have been riding my resurrected GT frame from 9 years past. It did a valiant job of getting me up and down Yukon singletrack, but eventually a crack developed, forcing me to retire it and move on to a new ride.


Most of the parts from the GT frame were still in good working order, so I only had to find a nice frame to hang everything on. In came the Turner 5 Spot. This bike is pretty amazing. I can climb better and descend faster than any bike I've ever had before. It is pretty much my dream bike and has been getting a lot of use during the past few weeks of spectacular fall colours. Turner is a boutique brand out of California, and they have been building top-end mountain bike frames for as long as mountain biking has been around. I had a couple of other options in mind (including a Canadian brand, Banshee, but my size was unavailable), but in the end this bike is a great match for the type of riding that I do. Plus, I've never owned a red bike before.


If you are curious to know what the trails are like where I live, then I suggest you download this magazine article to see what I get to ride.

The Takhini River

(This picture will likely be my desktop image for quite some time)

Our canoe trip on Sunday was to revisit this beautiful river just outside Whitehorse. A few of the pictures below (the ones of Jenny and me -- in the red and yellow life jackets) were taken by our friend Kate.

It was surprising to see just how slick and cool a Ford Focus can look with a canoe.

Much of the river was nice easy paddling.

But there was a small section of rapids affectionately known as the Jaws of Death.

Luckily and skillfully, we all managed to cheat death and show Jaws who's boss.

Autumn Has Fallen

Wow. Has it really been 4 months since my last post?! The funny thing about blogging is that when you've been doing things worthy of a blog post, you rarely have the time or inclination to actually post about the events. Since my last entry, I have done everything from look for gold near the backwoods town of Trout Lake, BC, to diving into a pool after spinning fire at a friend's wedding, to entering my first ever downhill mountain bike race, to submitting my biggest and most important thesis chapter to a journal. It's been a lot of fun. Now that the weather is cooling and the days are growing shorter, I'm sure I'll start sorting and posting the myriad of pictures that have accumulated from Jenny's and my summer adventures.

If I had to choose 1 picture to sum up the past 4 months, I'd have to choose this one of Jenny and me in front of the Takhini River with the Ibex Valley in the background. We're happy about the summer we experienced and glad to live in such a great place. The colours around Yukon are absolutely amazing right now, so last weekend, we went for a short drive away from Whitehorse and did a bit of 4x4ing to find this secluded spot. It was so beautiful that we rented a canoe and spent today paddling down this same river. Our friend Kate took pictures of us shooting the rapids called "Jaws of Death," so you will soon be able to see how we made out...

Belated Birthday

During my period of non-posting, Jenny's birthday came and went. To celebrate, we went to the local Indian restaurant with a few friends and spent the evening visiting. Her actual birthday was on a Sunday, so we mostly took it easy. We spent part of the afternoon at the lookout on Grey Mountain and enjoyed the view of the Yukon River valley and surrounding mountains. We can get to the lookout in under a half hour, and once you are there, it does not feel like there is a city anywhere close to you.

And what better way to stay young than by playing with Lego on your birthday?

That night, we made a few plastic pets for the aquarium so that we have something to watch while we wait for Popeye (my turtle) to come up from Edmonton in June.

Our birthday present theme this year was Yukon art, so I bought this mountain scene for Jenny. Stephanie Ryan is another popular Yukon painter known for her stylized landscapes depicting Yukon life. Most of her work is available as prints of water colour paintings, so when I walked into Yukon Artists At Work (YAAW) and saw this original acrylic, I knew that it wouldn't be available for long. And it wasn't, because now it hangs in our living room.

You can see more of Stephanie's work here: SR Paintings
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