Caribou on Goldenside mountain
We had a beautiful day. For the first time in several days we awoke to sunshine, and it stayed sunny and almost cloud free all day. After breakfast we drove up about 1.5 km to the lookout over the Tombstone Valley, which is exactly where we had the flat tire when we were here in 1997. This time though we drove just a bit farther on, and took a small road into a microwave tower. Here is where the Goldenside trail starts. At first it passes through small dwarf birch about 1 to 2 feet high, then crosses a stream, and then starts a gradual climb. The climb becomes much steeper roughly a kilometre into the trail as it follows a grassy area between two rocky ridges coming down from the mountain. We continued to climb past a small patch of snow where we saw a large Arctic ground squirrel. As we neared the top of the ridge, Enid saw a caribou about 100 metres away from us. Although it knew we were there, it didn’t pay much attention to us, and continued grazing.
We climbed the rest of the way to about 50 vertical metres from the crest of the ridge, where we tucked in behind a large rock to shelter us from the wind, but where we could sit in the sun. We watched the caribou through most of the time while we ate our lunch. The last part of the trail is very steep, and so Enid started down. I continued on to the crest of the ridge, where it became very flat on top, and I walked easily up the last 400 metres to the summit at 1860 m. From here there are spectacular views in all directions. Coming down was tricky, because it was steep, and it was muddy. I slipped twice and sat down hard. Enid was quite a way ahead of me, but she went slowly and had no trouble getting down to the starting point at 1300 m. The total round trip was about 4 km for Enid, 4.5 for me.
At the bottom we saw some very interesting flowers. They look much like a crocus, but are white with dark blue streaks in the petals. There were also many bright red leaved cranberries all through the higher part of the trail. After we got back to our campsite, we walked over to the interpretive centre, and spent about an hour looking over the exhibits. It is a very nice new building. They have two huge solar panels outside of the building, and they are mounted on pedestals that constantly align to the sun. The whole building is designed to be environmentally friendly. It has many large windows on the south. I’m not sure how late in the year the building stays open, but they would catch a lot of sunlight until later in the fall.
We set up our shower and had a good wash once we got back. The shower bag works really well now that we have figured out how to support it in a large cloth recyclable grocery bag which we bought in Whitehorse for this purpose. There wasn’t quite enough sunlight in our campsite as it is quite shaded, so the water wasn’t quite hot enough, but we added just a bit heated on the stove, and that worked great.