Evening on the Stewart River
Last evening (Friday night) I walked along the Wolf Creek trail. It goes out to a high bank overlooking the Yukon River, then winds its way back along the clear waters of the creek. Although this is a salmon spawning river, I saw no migrating fish, but if they were coming upstream, they would be easy to spot.
It was raining during my walk, and it continued to rain off and on throughout the night. Our tent fly was again thoroughly soaked, though the tent itself is perfectly dry. As it didn’t look like there would be many sights to see today, the clouds hanging low obscuring the tops of the mountains, we decided to spend some time in the Beringia Interpretive Centre. We watched a couple of videos, and looked over the displays, spending a couple of hours in total there.
Noon brought us to the “marge of Lake Lebarge” so we drove to the lake, and walked down to its shore. We ate our lunch as we drove on. In early afternoon we drove into a tremendous downpour just south of Carmacks. I pulled in for gas, and waited for a few minutes for the rain to slow down before getting out to fill up.
Next we stopped to see Five Finger Rapids. It wasn’t raining, so we walked down to the river. There are 220 steps down, and a total walk of a little over a km to the rapids. Frankly, the rapids aren’t much, though they have a strong current, there is no white water at all. In some ways they remind me of Silent Rapids. At one time though they were a much larger rapids, but the obstructing rocks were blown up to allow steamboats easier travel through. It began to rain just as we reached the river, so it was a good thing we had worn our raincoats. We were still quite wet by the time we got back to the parking lot.
It continued to rain squall, and looked like it would be a poor camping evening. We thought about finding a hotel room, but there aren’t any at the small villages along the way, so that wasn’t an option anyway. By the time we got to Pelly Crossing the rain was over. We stopped for a short time at the cultural heritage centre and looked at the interesting displays. There was some beadwork for sale there, and a number of artifacts from years past.
We arrived here at Moose Creek campground, and the weather was starting to improve. It is now a very nice evening, and we just got back from a few km walk on a nice trail to the Stewart River. The river is very wide, and the water runs swiftly. Coming back we met a botany student who is studying invasive plants. She was set up in the camp kitchen where she was scanning the leaves of plants onto her computer. There were several thousand samples in small envelopes in the window of her vehicle. They were drying so that she could take them back to UBC and finish the measurements of their mass and area there.
The trembling aspen all through the Yukon look very different that those I am familiar with. I thought they might be a sub-species, so asked the botany student if she knew the answer. She told me that the aspen here have leaf miner which is why they look so different. The leaves are very silvery grey, almost dusty looking. The bark is chalky white. I believe that both of these differences in appearance are from the stress the insects are causing to the trees.