Category: Venturing Out and About

The next morning after we arrived, we took a walking tour of the city with a Parks Canada guide.   It was very informative and they also take you into a few restored historical buildings that you cannot enter without a guide.   There was a saloon, a bank, and a post office.   The saloon was amazingly restored to match a picture taken at the turn of the century, even up to finding the original painting that had hung over the bar.

 

 

Turns out Parks Canada put out a request to townsfolk  with descriptions of certain things they were looking for.   One of the paintings was found in the attic of a hotel in town.

They also explained why we see a lot of the buildings up on cribbing.  It’s due to the permafrost.  All the buildings that were built directly on the ground started falling over due to the heat from the buildings thawing the permafrost layer which destabilized them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The place is a “building preservationist” dream.  So many of the original buildings are still there in various states of disrepair.  One of the banks right on the river had a facade of pressed tin (steel?) to make it look much more like ornate stonework from a major bank in a large city.   I had never seen anything like that.  But it would have probably fooled anyone who saw it during its heyday.

 

 

The streets are dirt in the whole town, except the Klondike Highway which runs next to the Yukon River between most of the downtown and the newish dike.  We were told the town used to flood regularly and there was a particularly bad flood in 1978, so the government built a 10′ tall and not too long dike next to the river to protect the city.   There is a nice walking path on the top with an occasional park bench to sit and watch the river and boats plying the water.

 

We heard from folks in town that we should visit #4 Dredge.   I really wasn’t too sure what to expect as the only dredges I remember as a kid sucked up muck from the bottom of rivers to make deeper channels for boats to navigate.   That is not what we found when we drove 12 km into the wilderness on a bumpy dirt road.

One of the first thing you notice as you get closer to Dawson City are huge mounds of dirt and rock lining both sides of the highway and they look to go on for long distances in all directions.   I guessed it was tailings from mining, but there was so much I had no idea how they could have made so much.

Then we got out to the dredge.  It was a massive “ship,” for lack of a better term.  Very tall and wide, made out of wood and had two large appendages sticking out of it.  The front side had what looked like a large chainsaw blade but with 2.5 ton buckets for teeth, and the rear had a long and tall conveyor structure for spewing those tailings out the back.

Now the tailing piles were starting to make sense, but not how they appeared to zigzag across the landscape.   We opted to take the tour as I had never seen anything resembling this thing.  It was basically a massive machine that scooped out all the dirt in front of it down to bedrock then dumped it into a rotary drum with different sized holes drilled in it for the gold to drop out into sluice ways for letting the gold settle to the bottom onto what looked like cocoa door mats.  For the stuff (rocks)  too big to go thru the holes, it went out the back of the drum and onto that large conveyor to be ejected out behind the behemoth.   It was built in 1912 to ply the Klondike River.  It all ran on electricity generated by a hydroelectric dam they built for it.   It literally floated on a small amount of water so it could move about by being pulled along by two huge winches that were tied to trees or dead-men placed in front of it.    It would run those buckets down to bedrock where the gold was thought to be, and they used the winches to pivot it to the right and left till everything in its reach could be scooped up.  Then they would winch it 12′ further forward and start all over again.   The pivoting of the buckets side to side explained to me why the tailings were in that zigzag pattern as the back of the “ship” would go back and forth the opposite direction of the front.  And this went on for years,  usually running May thru October,  24 hours a day.

There was a lot of other stuff going on to keep this monstrosity running.  One major thing that had to occur was the permafrost had to be thawed ahead of it.  I assume the buckets could penetrate the  permafrost but the gold would have probably gone out with the tailings had they not thawed  it first.  The most impressive thing of all was this huge dredge was crewed by only 4 men.  I thought it would take 50 after walking thru the whole thing.  I was really surprised to hear it was only 4.   The tour takes you from the bottom to the top of the thing, which is a tall 4 stories with very steep stairs, all wooden, but similar to the steepness on a modern navy vessel.  Dusty was afraid of the open-backed stairs, so Kathy held him going up and down the stairways.  He hung on for dear life!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After touring the dredge, we had reserved tickets for the side wheeler that plies the Yukon River from  Dawson to Moosehide, then back up river to the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike rivers.   It was a beautiful afternoon to get out on the river and the little boat was pretty nice.   The Yukon is a very fast flowing river here and going down river to Moosehide was pretty quick.  Moosehide is a very small First Peoples village with no roads leading to it, so anything they need comes by the river.   We loitered offshore for about 5 – 10 minutes while the tour guide yammered on about how it all came about.   Then we started back upstream and that was fairly slow going against the swift current.  We motored over to what they call the steamboat graveyard.  From the water you can only see one ship, but we were told there were a lot more further back in the trees.   The ship we could see had definitely seen better days.  Apparently it was dry-docked there back in the 50’s once the roads were put in allowing trucks and cars to get to Dawson City.

We rode up past Caveman Bill’s place on the opposite bank (West Dawson) of the river.  We couldn’t see much of his abode thru the trees, but were told the man found a cave on the edge of the river about 20 years ago and has lived in it since.   If you google him, there are a few articles with pictures.   I was expecting to see a 90-year-old guy with a 3-foot beard.  That is not him…

Once we got further upriver to the confluence, I was awed by how far a finger of clear water jutted into the muddy/silty Yukon River.  Hopefully you can see what we saw in the pictures.  It looked amazing to the eye.

Luckily this was only a one-and-a- half-hour tour.  You know what can happen on a 3-hour tour, Gilligan!

While we were camped at the local Albuquerque Cummins dealer awaiting our new radiator to come in we ran across the breaking bad motorhome in Old Town.

We snapped a few pics, I especially liked the bullet holes in the door covered over with duct tape.  Afterward we decided to go find the car wash from the show.   I was curious to see if the cash was still there.

I couldn’t believe how large that car wash was.  It was massive!  I’m pretty sure you could fit a Saturn 5 rocket in there with room for a space shuttle or two.

I looked all around while we were in Albuquerque but never saw Bryan Cranston or even Mike in his old Chrysler.

We arrived in Caldwell, Idaho, in the early afternoon Sunday and got the couch set up to live in.   It was over 100 when we got there and it got hotter as it got later.   We drove over to Susan and Jeff’s house in the late afternoon and had a great dinner with the family.

Monday morning I booked campsites for Winnemucca,  Carson City, and Lone Pine,  for the drive home.   Still need to make a rez for somewhere near the Cajon Junction, but I never did make one as we just wanted to get home and not cook another day in the desert.

We then drove over to see Jeff’s construction site.  It was a huge project with 22 large apartment buildings, 290 units, way larger than what I was thinking.    We went out for burgers at a place called Famous Dave’s.  I had never heard of him, so maybe he isn’t as famous as he thinks.   After lunch we dropped Jeff at his office and we headed over to the capitol building, which was gorgeous inside with all the white marble, then the Old Penitentiary and Botanical Gardens.

 

 

 

The riverfront park or Boise Greenspace,  as it is called here, is pretty incredible with its 25 or so miles of pathways for walkers and bikers next to the Snake River.  There were lots of folks in rafts and tubes floating by while we were there.

After hanging in the shade of the Greenspace for a while, I wanted to drive down to the basalt cliffs southwest of town, but I missed the turn and stumbled on a very large earthen dam on the Snake River just a few miles from Boise before we could find a place to make a U-Turn.  It was complete with a hydroelectric power station.  We drove over the top to the boat launch area.   It was a big lake with lots of power boats pulling kids on rafts and tubes at high speed.

On the way up to the top of the dam, we spied a large cove at the bottom with a big water jet spraying up maybe 50 feet in the air and lots of people all around on kayaks, rafts and tubes trying to keep cool in the high heat of the afternoon.   We drove down there, but ended up turning around as all the signs said no pets allowed.   As we got close to the kiosk at the gate, one of the signs even said no pets allowed in the car either.    So we turned around and drove back toward the cliffs I had come to see in the first place.    Just prior to the turnoff for the cliffs, I spotted a small dam, so I stopped to take a look at it.   Kathy wouldn’t get out of the car it was so toasty outside.  She stayed in the air conditioning and I walked over to it in the sweltering heat.

We also found a diversionary dam further back the way we came.   It appears to take some of the water from downstream of the dam and divert it into irrigation canals.   We snapped a few pics of the basalt cliffs and headed back into town to find Freak Alley.   Kathy told me it was closed today, but that sounded a bit odd to me.  How would they close an alley?    It turned out to be one of the most interesting places in Boise.   What Kathy had read was closed was a place called Freak Alley Gallery, a store next to one of the entrances to the alley.

It was a great place to spend twenty minutes walking thru and looking at all the crazy paintings on the building walls.  There are some excellent artists’ paintings there.  The alley is about two blocks long.  I am sure my pictures won’t do it justice, but if you are ever in Boise, it’s a must see.

 

On Tuesday I headed out alone to see  the Warhawk Museum.   On the way I mapped out a much needed car wash for the toad.   To my surprise, it took a long time to find an actual full-service car wash.   Each “full-service” spot I drove to was self service, but included some free time on the vacuums. Appears that is what they call “full service” here in Idaho.   I had almost given up when I happened to drive past what looked like a regular car wash.   Pulled in and it was!    They did a great job getting all the dead bugs off the front of the car.   Now that I think of it,  we hadn’t washed it since leaving home.    The interesting part of the car wash was the gas station, regular gas was $3.35 a gallon and next door to them regular gas was $2.91.  That’s a pretty large difference for two name brand stations next to each other.

BTW,   I wanted a full-service place since it was about 106 degrees outside.

The Warhawk Museum is a small place crammed full of stuff from WWII.  Planes, vehicles and small vignettes with personal stories of GI’s.  The most amazing thing I saw in the museum was a glider from the D Day invasion force.  I didn’t know any had survived, and from the looks of this one, it may be the only one.  It was in pretty bad shape but really gave you a sense of how small and vulnerable to gunfire they were.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sure hope it’s a lot cooler back in San Diego as we should be there in less than a week!  (It wasn’t)

Heading for Winnemucca (the armpit of hell it turns out) in the morning.

We left Dillon, MT, and headed south on the I-15 freeway till we hit Dubois, Idaho, where we turned right for the long desolate trip over to Arco, Idaho.   We passed a lot of nothing for most of the way there; but then coming over a small hill stretching out before us were a lot of green fields, obviously irrigated, in extreme contrast to mostly brown everywhere around it.   Eastern Idaho is similar to eastern Washington:  basically a desert with some irrigated areas.

We got to Arco. and as we drove thru the town, I spotted a conning tower from a nuclear attack submarine with the hull number 666 on it.   That was a pretty strange site since we hadn’t seen a drop of water anywhere near there.   We drove thru the small town, and on the other side we found our destination, Mountain View RV Park.   I went inside to register and it smelled very good in the office.   Turns out it’s also a restaurant open for dinner on weekends specializing in smoked baby back ribs.

We registered and pulled the coach into our campsite to deploy.  It was rather hot in Arco, so the first thing that got hooked up was the 50 amp cable to power both the A/C’s to get the heat under control.

After we were finished setting up, I mapped a route to EBR-1, the local nuclear reactor/museum 20 miles east of the town that was built around 1949-1951.  Harry Truman, the sitting president was there for its dedication.  It was the first reactor  built to generate electricity.   It was successful and generated about 300 KW.   It used what I thought was an odd system to keep the reactor cool,  liquid metal, not water. basically sodium and potassium that was pumped around by magnetic pumps mounted on the outside of the pipes which seemed ingenious.  If they broke you didn’t need to dissemble the piping to fix them.

We followed the signs to a single building way off in the distance with nothing else to be seen in the surrounding area.    As we drove up, there was an ambulance and fire truck.   Not the best sign when arriving.   The firemen were just hanging around talking to the young women working there, from what I could tell.   Probably not much to do out here for them unless there is a fire,  which didn’t seem to be a problem this day.

We just happened to get there as a reactor tour was about to start.  It was very fascinating to see a decommissioned nuclear power plant up close and personal like this.   Standing on top of the reactor vessel and looking down inside,  it is filled with concrete now.  Something I learned while there was this was also a breeder reactor, it made plutonium too.   They used that plutonium in another reactor designed to run from plutonium to make power.   If you are ever in the area, you must stop and take a tour.  They are free and well worth the time to drive a bit out of your way to see it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next morning there was smoke in the air.   We got an early start to visit the Craters of the Moon National Monument as it was supposed to be very hot again today.   The park was about 20 miles west of town.  As we drove out of the campground, we were wondering where all the smoke in the air was coming from.  Kathy was told it was coming from the fires in Northern California by a ranger at the visitor center, but I thought it was more likely coming from the large fires a bit north of Boise, as they were due west and much, much closer.

We drove into the park and picked up a map.   It was another $20 saved by the park pass we bought last year for $10.   All the roads inside this park were newly paved and in excellent shape.   Pretty much a first for that.  The area you can drive is a short loop, about 7 miles, and the overlooks were pretty cool, but you have to remember this is an ancient lava field.   Nothing has happened here in many millennia.    We took lots of pictures, but for all intents and purposes, it was a bit underwhelming to me.

But there were a couple cool spots,  the splatter cones and hillsides of miniature buckwheat plants that appear to have been planted on some sort of grid system.    It was still fairly early in the morning but was well on its way to being 102 degrees when we got there.

On the way back, we stopped by the conning tower in Arco and noticed on a large cliff face above the town lots of numbers painted on the stone cliffs.  Turns out they are the work of each year’s high school class.  The graduating class climbs up there and paint their years number.    Whatever happened to S mountain…  Hey,  that’s our blog’s namesake,  S mountain,  aka Cowles Mountain.

 

Kathy spotted the most oddly painted motel off to the right of the park hosting the conning tower so we had to take some pictures of that too.

Arco is a quirky little berg.    Oh, and Arco is the first town in the world to have been powered by nuclear energy.    That appears to be its claim to fame.    The Idaho National Laboratory is located 20 or so miles west and they are responsible for all the research on our country’s nuclear power generation systems past, present and future.

We had a pretty good dinner at the campground restaurant,  smoked baby back ribs were their specialty.  It wasn’t Phil’s ribs, but they were pretty good.   Especially considering we were in a “hole in the wall” town in the middle of nowhere.

Tomorrow we head for Boise!