Visitors, and fire update

What a great couple of days! Pat and Dale, my uncle and aunt, were in town with a tour group! They started on a cruise ship and then took the extended bus tour from Skagway to Whitehorse, then up here to Dawson City for a couple nights, and then off to Fairbanks, Alaska, Denali, and Anchorage.

… Isn’t it amazing that we can have so many friends and family visit when we live in such a remote corner of the country?? Just last week, my best friend’s mother was passing through town on her vacation and I was able to meet her for a coffee (no, not literally a coffee, you know I don’t drink that stuff!). I signed out of work for an hour to do so, and a coworker was perplexed at how I could be meeting someone who was travelling through my town. Ha!

I took a day off work so I could show Pat and Dale all the sites! Then I joined their tour group on the Klondike Spirit paddle wheeler boat on the river for an afternoon cruise.

Here are our best pics from the day. You can ignore my white pale skin, I fixed that nicely wearing a tank top on the boat in the 30°C sunshine. Maybe also ignore my furrowed, squinting eyes in a couple of them. The sunshine was scorching my retinas.

It was really fortunate that while they were here, the smoke really dissipated during the day, making it a lovely warm day! Today it is smokey enough again that I’ve closed all our doors to keep the smoke out.

The forest fires situation is still extreme here. There are two large fires burning within a kilometer of the North Klondike Highway (the only road coming north to Dawson). Our power lines run along that highway, and our fibre optic is buried along side of it (for internet and phone and cell).

Plans are in place to make sure we’re all okay up here though. No fear!

They are trying to backburn a fire from the highway to prevent it from hitting the road, but the wind conditions haven’t been favourable to do so yet. If the fire burns our power line, we’ll be okay for power for awhile since the town has a generator system and plenty of fuel. I don’t know how deep the fibre optic cable is buried, but not very deep I expect. If it is interrupted, I’ve made plans with a contact at work to use our In Reach satellite communication device to send a message with an update so they know if I can work or not.

Here’s a tweet from our Internet Service Provider (ISP) acknowledging we may have a disruption:

They are using pilot vehicles on the highway to guide traffic through the smoke along the fires this afternoon, so the traffic hasn’t been cut off yet. Today’s grocery truck made it here fine (the general store gets a truck to re-stock twice a week in the summer, once a week in winter).

If we get cut off from the rest of the world, I’ll tell you all about it when we get reconnected!