June 1 - To Dawson City, Yukon

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Our plan today was to drive to Keno City and do some hiking. It didn’t quite turn out that way.

From the RV in Mayo, it is a 50 km dirt road to Keno City. The road was actually in much better shape that a lot of the highways because they can grade the dirt to get rid of potholes. When they fill them on pavement it never seems very smooth.

It was a fairly easy drive with lots of long distance views. This is Mount Haldane.

We arrived in the “city” / village and checked out the museum. It had lots of old mining equipment.

A very old snow machine.

A large diesel generator.

Then we did a walking tour of the town.

The beer bottle house.

This little church is now the library.

It looked like they were completely gutting and rebuilding the hotel. I guess this place gets a lot more visitors in the summer because we were the only non-locals there today.

There is a road, up a hill behind the town, that was said to have some spectacular views and some interesting hiking trails. Unfortunately the lady at the museum said that it was still snowed in at the top. We started up anyway. It was very rough and I was glad for the high clearance of the CRV. We only managed about 20 kph, avoiding rocks and potholes.

It is 10 km to the top. After 6 km we hit the snow. Oh well. Still some great views.

The rest of the road.

The moving cloud shadows on the hills were interesting to watch.

Jennie saw this single patch of flowers with no others in sight. They looked lonely.

Since there was no hiking to be done we headed back to the RV. By that time it was only 1 pm so rather than staying in Mayo we decided to move on to Dawson City. The scenery was much the same, Lots of burned out forests now covered in aspens.

The road did however get worse. Lots more frost heaves and mostly filled in potholes. You have to watch for little orange flags at the side of the road that tell you where the bad ones are. If you see the flags you slow WAY down. Since there was so little or no traffic, most of the times I could avoid the bad spots by using the whole road and lots of times be completely in the other lane.

We are in another barren parking lot type park. We will check out the others tomorrow to see if it is worth moving.

The people at the park recommended someone to come and repair the chips in the windshield. It turns out he is the only one in town. He runs to other businesses as well. On cleaning the windshield it turns out we had one big divot, two smaller chips and several other surface gouges. He worked for about 2 hours on them. The smaller ones seem to have disappeared but the larger one still is quite visible. He really worked hard on it and and said it shouldn’t spread. We’ll see. At least it is not in my direct line of site. 

There is a lot to do and see in Dawson. We will probably stay 4-6 days.