We left our wonderful campsite telling ourselves that we would definitely stay there again.

Our first stop today was at the remains of the Montague House, an early roadhouse on the stagecoach route between Whitehorse and Dawson City.

We passed through Carmacks and stopped at the Tage Cho Hudan Interpretive Centre to learn about the Northern Tutchone people. Of particular interest was the coming of age custom for a girl which involved her staying in a brush camp away from her people with her mother and grandmother preparing a special hat for her to wear. She was not allowed to look out from under this hat and learned to focus, concentrate, bead and sew.

Another ingenious tool we saw was the bear spear walking stick. This was used when a bear charged. One end was placed in the ground and the other pointy end impaled the bear when it attacked.

It was time for an ice cream and we stopped at Coal Mine Campground and visited a snack bar with all kinds of funny signs.

Next up was the Five Finger Rapids lookup. The Five Finger Rapids are a navigational hazard for watercraft and many early rafts flipped over trying to traverse them.

There was lots of road construction on this section of highway and tons of dust. We stopped for gas and Ruth took this picture out of the front window.

We turned onto the Silver Trail, Highway 11, and drove to Keno City, a small town with a population of 12 in the winter. Here we found the Keno City Hotel, a snack bar and the Keno City Mining museum. The museum was just closing but we will take the time tomorrow to see it. We asked about a tour at the nearby silver mine and were told that there were no tours available, but that there was a gold panner in town who would possibly take us to pan for gold at his claim. Behind the museum and down by the river is a campground and we parked the van and Lucien, the gold panner, drove by with his red truck. We stopped him and had a great chat about life in Keno City but unfortunately weren’t able to take him up on the gold panning offer because of the cost involved.

We walked back up to the town for dinner at the Keno City Snack Bar and had a wonderful freshly made pizza.

 

Keno City has very colourful people and we met a couple of them in the restaurant and we were told about the Art and Music festival that was in town and the campfire that was to take place that evening at Patrick’s private home.

The town itself looks like a semi abandoned miner’s town with a bit of hippy culture and arts community. We had a really fun time talking to people and taking pictures.