Epic Alaska Adventure - Spring 2024
<< Leg 8 - Dawson Creek, BC to Watson Lake, YT | Trip Home | Leg 10 - Whitehorse, YT to Juneau, AK >> |
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We're Ryan and Katherine, and we flew to Alaska and back in Spring 2024 with our dog Magic 🐶.
<< Leg 8 - Dawson Creek, BC to Watson Lake, YT | Trip Home | Leg 10 - Whitehorse, YT to Juneau, AK >> |
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After we explored what little can be seen on the airport, I saw that the darkening skies to the southeast threatened our good weather may not last!
Not wanting to push our luck with the apparently great weather, I got our flight plan filed and we departed quickly towards Whitehorse.
The scenery on this leg is now starting to be even more beautiful, with much of the mountains now being totally snow covered, even at lower altitudes, and very interesting elongated lakes in the valleys. As we approached Whitehorse, at one point I could see down one of the valleys towards Carcross and the White Pass to Skagway beyond, and the weather looked great!
I knew we were now less than 100 miles from Alaska, and I began to think it was very tempting to land in Whitehorse and then try to immediately press onwards to Alaska, but the difficulty of making all the necessary customs arrangements in time quickly made me dismiss that idea. We called up Whitehorse tower and landed.
ATC very helpfully directed us to the fuel pumps (where I again added only the necessary fuel) and directed us to the transient ramp at the base of the ATC tower.
I paid (in Canadian cash, in an envelope) our overnight fee and we got a taxi to a hotel in Whitehorse. As it turns out, Whitehorse is a fairly busy airport and a decent-sized town, with quite a lot of options as far as hotels, restaurants, and other businesses. We walked around the city some and got some dinner.
We had now been on the road a while and I saw that our hotel had a guest laundry facility, so I set to work on that.
We waited for laundry and watched some TV, then we finally went to bed, closing our blackout curtains to keep the 11pm sunlight out. Alaska would have to wait another day! I was prepared to wait as much as a week in Whitehorse for good weather, but it seemed we might get lucky as soon as tomorrow...