Pretty flowers!
Yesterday I finished fastening the panels to Minnie’s roof and today I connected up all the wiring. With the wire I had left from the stand out panels I made a jumper cable that I can charge my engine battery if it gets low.
I guess tomorrow I will head for Dawson City. This has been a nice camp but I’m beginning to wonder what’s up the road. It will be easy to break camp with no solar panels to put away and no satellite dish to take apart. I’m getting closer to Alaska.
Room for one more panel.
I got a little ambitious this morning and started the process of mounting my other two solar panels on Minnie’s roof. I worked a few hours removing the old legs from the panels, cutting mounting bracket from a piece of stock angle iron, and attaching the brackets to the panels.
The place on the roof where the new panels had to be attached was occupied by my tanker trailer, so I had to remove that first. Then I hoisted the new panels up on the roof with a rope and set them in place. The sky was starting to look like rain so I put off gluing and bolting them down until tomorrow. Then it will be just a matter of running wires to tie all the panels into my charge controller.
I have lots of battery capacity traveling here in the north. The main two things that keep me charged is all the daylight hours of solar power and the fact I’m not watching TV very much.
Can you see Minnie below?
I found a hiking trail up the road a bit from my campsite. The trail cuts up steeply along the hill and comes out high above the river. From the top there are nice views in three directions. You can tell that the mountains are not as majestic in this area as they are along the coast but it’s still pretty in its own way.
I explored a back road behind Mayo that took me out to a gravel bar beside the Mayo River. I grabbed my gold pan and did a couple test pans but didn’t find anything big enough to keep.
Dredging the river.
Later in the afternoon I talked with one of the inspectors working on the river a few hundred feet from my camp. Every day they have an excavator digging out the river and loading it into dump trucks. The inspector said that the town has had some flooding because of ice building in the river and they think that dredging it deeper will help with the flow.
I told him that they should be running that river gravel through a sluice to get the gold out of it. He laughed and said they were joking about the same thing. He said that one of the machine operators had tried a pan and found a little bit. They have been piling the dirt up behind the campground so I may sneak down there later and try my luck.
A lot of sunshine!
One of three buildings
I road Honda to Keno City today. Keno is 35 miles northeast of Mayo, at the end of a gravel and dirt road. The loose gravel road made it seem longer than 35 miles and it took me almost an hour to get there. I was bundled up in three jackets because the temperature was in the 60’s, but I kept warm by keeping my speed down. Whenever I met another vehicle I would have to stop until the dust settled.
Keno City was founded when silver was discovered in 1919. The silver ore was one of the richest deposits in the world, and the town of Keno and the town of Elsa nearby, grew with the mine. There is still some mining in the area but the town of Elsa didn’t survive the closure of the original mine.
Photos and artifacts
There is a large and diverse museum in Keno, and that is what I went to see. It took me two hours to browse through all three buildings that house the museum. There were artifacts, photos, old mining equipment and everything else you can imagine.
Old dozer
Before silver was discovered in the area, gold prospectors took many ounces of gold in the rivers near Keno and Mayo, but the gold was small and not as rich as other areas so the miners moved on. I talked with the manager of the museum and asked if I would be able to pan for gold in the rivers. He said no one would care. He even told me of a guy that lives up the road that would let me pan in his stream and show me where some good places are. I didn’t have my gold pan so I thanked him anyway.
Good but expensive coffee
I left Whitehorse this morning and drove north on the Klondike Highway for about 200 miles. It drizzled most of the morning with heavy fog in the mountains. The road was not too bad but once in a while there were a few rough spots. I don’t mind the rough spots near as much as the dips and raised pavement; those places give Minnie a good rocking and rolling.
Yukon River
I stopped at a couple places to read signs. One interesting place was a view of Yukon River where it passed through some rapids. I think they called it the Five Fingers because of the rocks in the river creating the passages. Many rafts and boats were smashed while navigating through there in the gold rush. Later they used cables to pull riverboats upstream through this section of rapids.
Dale by the river
I’m now just outside the little town of Mayo in a town park called McIntyre Park. The park only has 5 sites, but Minnie and one other RV are all that are here. It sits right on the bank of the Mayo River. Tomorrow I will explore on Honda. The Milepost Guidebook devotes two pages to this town and Keno City, a few miles up the road, so I should have plenty to see for a couple days.
I saw three more bear today – a mother and two cubs. I had to come to a complete stop because the cubs were playing in the road. Here is something that puzzles me: the mother and one cub were black, the other cub was brown. Do black bears breed with brown bears?