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Last update 28/10/2007

What Happened Next

Stories from former Rannoch people

The Moose Hunt
by T. Alastair Findlay  

The approaching Yukon winter of 1966 was a bad time for Dave Harder to ‘get religion’.

            And it wasn’t just any old conversion to a faith - but right into the Baptist version in the most sincere and intense way. Among other things, it meant giving up his job at the Caribou Hotel which involved handling the ‘demon drink’; and with a wife and three young children to care for he had a problem; for there was no other work in Carcross at the time.

            Food was his first burning necessity, so I was inveigled into helping him try to get a moose for the family.

            For Dave it was a simple matter altogether; what with his experience of outfitting and his inherent toughness steeled in the hard school of rodeo before that; but for me it was a minor adventure and I was keen to go.

            Being out of season we had to be a bit surreptitious, (although imagining how anything could be done in secret in Carcross leant more to hope than to realism). There was no Mountie in the village in those days during the winter though, as John, who manned the post in the summer, was on his Baffin Island tour that winter, (which I later heard involved visiting three villages by dog team on a thirteen hundred mile circuit. Do they make Mounties like that these days?)

            With no Law around, and feeling pretty sure no one would report us anyhow, we nevertheless set off very early - but for exactly where I can now no longer remember. I do however recall driving for hours in the dark on the back of a ski-doo with a sled towed behind way up into some valley above Nares Lake.  I remember too the great cascades of snow from above as we ploughed our way through the snow-laden firs. In the words of Robert Service, the great poet who captured for all time the spirit and hardships of the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898 in his poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee” …“Talk of your cold; through the parka’s fold, it stabbed like a driven nail…..”

            We killed the engine at some point near where Dave thought we might have a bit of luck; and that wonderful, glorious “silence you most could hear” closed in and enveloped us like a cloak with that faint, almost ringing sound, that I have only ever experienced in The North.

            Pretty soon we espied a small herd on the other side of the valley and headed down below the tree-line to come up on them from downwind. What was very unusual was that the rut still seemed to be on – or the bulls were just having a fight. At what seemed like a hell of a distance, Dave fired one shot. The kill was quick and clean.

We skinned and gutted her where she fell and made our way back to the ski-doo and then headed for home.

The journey back the next day was no less cold, and we had to stop twice to light a fire. Here I learned something from Dave which the following year maybe saved my life. To light a fire when there is nothing but snow on the ground and the spruce trees are  heavily laden - you have to get your hands on something tinder dry. And it was all around. Just under the lower bows of the ubiquitous firs are the tiny dead twigs from the early growth-years which can be easily lit with a match.

We found our moose but minus the heart and liver which had been ‘purloined’ by a wolverine. (Bless its cotton socks – I hope its unexpected meal helped it face the long winter). The carcass was rock-hard and rung like a bell when we hit it, and stupidly we had forgotten to bring an axe of all things; and it proved impossible to cut it into sections for transport. Have you ever tried trying to tie a smooth, rounded, quarter-ton block of ice onto a narrow sled!!? We lost count of the number of times it slid out from under its moorings and I was sometimes nearly in tears with despair. (From ‘Sam McGee’ again: “It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: you may tax your brawn and brains; but you promised true, and it’s up to you to cremate these last remains…>…God! How I loathed that thing!”)  At least we were warm with the effort of continually man-handling and struggling through the deep snow beside the ski-doo trying to keep it on!

We eventually made it back to Carcross and somehow lugged it down to the basement of the teachers’ house. It took a day or two to thaw enough to butcher – but we had several hundred pounds of meat at the end of our efforts. Our portion we put in the porch being the only deep-freeze we had, and, suffice to say, I don’t care if I never eat moose again!

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 From Robin Norwell

I have enjoyed Elk which I imagine is similar to Moose? in Sweden not to mention some other poor wee birds that are otherwise pretty rare in other parts like in Scotland (Ptarmigan and Capercailzie). The nearest I got to an Elk was sliding through some freshly fuming dung while on a skimobile trip. Saw plenty more at a safe distance and certainly would not like to hit one.

On an other trip with Husky dogs, I did not realise how much dogs farted in there efforts - I much prefer to be on a snowmobile.

I have enjoyed sailing, Paragliding and snowboarding over fairly recent years although the later has been replaced by getting back to skis since I have a hip replacement now.

I took some paragliding friends sailing up the West Coast of Scotland one summer and flying over quitely grazing deer in the Northern dusky light of summer pretty near to midnight was very memorable.

On another occasion I climbed the Piton de Neige on the island of La Reunion in the Indian Ocean, just over 3000 metres or for some people about 10000 feet with the intention of flying off the top. It is an old volcanic crater and on the first attempt we had to climb back down because the wind conditions were not safe.
Three of us decided we still wanted to do this but on the second occasion, we opted to be dropped on the summit by helicopter (much easier). Being the least experienced I had the pleasure of throwing myself into space first and it was probably one of my most memorable moments ever. I eventually landed not without some difficulty because of the strong thermals. The next person landed eventually in a grave yard where I eventually found her and we were invited into a small local hut where we were offered some home grown coffee.

It took quite some time to contact the third member of the group who had tried to find a thermal to help him fly out of the crater and home by another route. We eventually made radio contact with him and determined that he was hanging on the edge of a gully with his canopy holding him up because it had been snagged on some thorn bushes. Luckily for him together with the local rescue service we were able to get him out of trouble but it was a close thing.

La Reunion was a wonderful place for adventure with some great scuba diving available also although not as good as the relatively nearby Seychelles. I did do some heliboarding in the Coastal Range of British Columbia and managed to avoid getting too close to some hibernating bears.

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A story on the dangers of ExRs ‘going back’. Believe me – it can be painful. Haddie

Some Thoughts From an Old Sourdough

Upon Returning to The Yukon After 41 Years

by T. Alastair Findlay

So much has changed in the Yukon Territory since the 1960s when I spent several years in what can only be described as God’s Country; and I was only partly steeled for the changes I witnessed. My natural romanticism made it impossible in my mind’s eye to accept all the changes I saw and felt, and there were times when I wept almost uncontrollably at the loss of what had once been.

                                                       In the summer of 1966 my wife Isabell secured a post as a teacher in the Yukon and we drove the two thousand odd miles from Vancouver in a 1954 Chevvy that I bought for $150; and with a sleeping bag she made out of old army blankets, a very second-hand tent, and a rifle for all the wolves and bears that would be heading straight for us every night, we made our way north – destination Carcross. The journey was an adventure for a young Scottish immigrant couple just starting out, as all manner of dire warnings went unheeded whilst in the comfort of Vancouver. My aged great-uncle George came to our flat armed with temperature charts of the Yukon in a forlorn attempt  to put us off; while his wife, my aunt Anne, just sat in a corner muttering ‘there’s nothing up there – there’s nothing there’.

We made it to the Yukon however in about six days as I recall; four of the traveling days being on a thousand miles of gravel and dust of the fabled Alaska Highway. This road of over sixteen hundred miles from Dawson Creek in northern British Columbia to Fairbanks in Alaska which cuts through the southern Yukon was built in eight months by the American army during the war to provide supplies and fuel to Alaska following the attack on Pearl Harbour. The picture shows our rather ignominious crossing of the B.C./Yukon border!

      Dawson. Dredge No 4.

                                                     Eventually we reached Carcross, a village at the eastern end of Lake Bennett with a population of forty white people, a hundred Indians and four hundred malamute huskies! We soon discovered the delights of a wooden sidewalk, brushwood lazily rolling down the dusty ‘streets’ and, of course, Watson’s Store. (Who really needs a Wal-Mart?).  The teachers’ house was unfinished so we camped by Tagish Lake for about a week and many a gopher became a friend as they weren’t long in sussing out soft touches. We became friends with an old lady who used to have the trading post at Tagish and were mesmerized by her tales of being strapped warmly onto a dog-sled for the trips Outside, (as anywhere south of the 60^th parallel has always been called); and I remember thinking even then at the ripe old age of twenty-three how terribly ‘civilised’ everything had become.

But the Alaska Highway is no longer a magnificent thousand-mile ribbon of gravel and dust clinging to the contours so that you felt you were at one with the land; a road that felt that she and her tributaries was taking you with her deep into the heartland of the North. Now it is a soulless ribbon of asphalt straining from one crest  to the next; all gutted from the land -  straightened, infilled and cut and lined with advertising boards; a piece of technology that seems divorced from the land it courses through; a mere connecting route for the Mighty USA. No longer an adventure – just another road. Even the Watson Lake signs have been aligned all prim and proper as if the way they were once placed was an affront to the tidiness demanded by conformity.

Mining now seems to be a dirty word in The Yukon. (Have they forgotten what brought the Territory into being and into life?); and I was appalled to see signs that read “This Company Supports Placer Mining – Placer Mining Supports this Company” What an indictment! And why did they allow the great Anvil Mine to cease to be? If you use almost anything made by Man, from whence do you imagine its metals came?

I overheard the wonderful Yukon balladeer, Al Oster, being described as passé, and thought later that his haunting and evocative ‘Buckets of Steel’ might be the closest Yukoners of today may now ever get to the lure of gold, being content now to live life vicariously by selling gold pans, nugget trinkets and the like. The whole of the western world seems in the grip of a corrosive Greenness and Political Correctness aided and abetted by the legal profession which has found a very rich seam indeed; but I harboured the hope that Yukoners might have held out against it as they once had and made their own lives in the way they wanted. (Some of us remember The Great Whitehorse Parking Meter Fiasco of the late 1960s when the ‘authorities’ got a bloody nose. The capitol City (pop. 6500) decided to put parking meters on Main Street, but few people bothered with them. They were either fed, ignored, or, in some cases, enterprising souls worked them loose with a 4x4 and chucked them into The Yukon River. I came armed with seventeen unpaid tickets when eventually hauled before the judge in what must have been his most crowded session ever. Wisely, he said he was doing nothing about it and more or less said it was up to the City Authorities to sort it out. Our cudgels were then taken up by Norm Chamberlist, a local hotel owner and something of a frustrated lawyer who eventually managed to take the whole business all the way to the Privy Council in London and won our case under the British North America Act of 1867. All in all a perfect example of how ‘authorities’ all over the world should be dealt with by those who believe that George Orwell’s ‘1984’ was a serious warning and not a handbook for local or national governments; as it seems that ‘public servants’ so easily and seamlessly slip into the role of public ‘masters’).

    Burma Rd nr Takhini

I came away this time with a memory of a few true characters, and, quite naturally, fewer old timers, but more of a body of administrators all administering each other (and the few others left over) for all they were worth. It was as if the enclave of Whitehorse was being deliberately isolated from its history and its surrounding beauty and vastness by an army of bureaucrats hell-bent on creating a bland sameness with its southern counterparts, and who are forever dreaming up rules and regulations and bylaws to fix things which aren’t broken and has everything to do with control of those under them. And how in Heaven’s name can they require so many lawyers and a court building the size they have for a mere 20,000 people? It is undoubtedly a splendid piece of architecture, but more suited to a populace of a quarter million.

   Robert Service's cabin

If mere administration is subtracted from the Yukon of today, what else remains? Apart from those who clear and maintain the highway that links one part of the United States to another, what does anyone else in the Yukon produce? Tourism perhaps – but that is only a living for a tiny handful of people for a few months of the year. (And time will tell if your average tourist will want to sit in a bar where he can’t even have a smoke). Did Robert Service, that wonderful poet who captured for all time the spirit of the Gold Rush of 1898 and the North foresee and fear all this when he wrote:

    “They have cradled you in custom, they have primed you with their preaching,

    “They have soaked you in convention through and through;

    “They have put you in a showcase; you’re a credit to their teaching -

    “But can’t you hear the Wild? – it’s calling you.”

On the subject of tourism, may I make a comment for the debate on the perhaps-to-be-built bridge over The Yukon River at Dawson City? It seems to me that if tourists want to see The Yukon Territory or Alaska they want to go home and talk of the adventure they had and of the places that comparatively few have visited. They want differences to the norm of stop-and-gawk tourism. They have already been deprived of the dust of the Alaska Highway; they have already been confronted with enough of the convention and political correctness they can find at home - so why deprive them of a ferry, or of that faintly weird sensation of driving across the ice above a fast-flowing river? It’s what they want to give that little extra edge to a trip to The North. Don’t build it!  All that will happen is that someone who already has enough will become that little bit richer, and posterity will have just another bridge - to pass over, and forget.

It was good to come across a nice piece of irony though. In the latter part of the 1960s when I worked with General Enterprises as estimator and project manager, I oversaw the construction of Hougen’s building on Main Street. It was at that time built as a single department store, and sadly involved the demolition of one or two rather old traditional buildings which upset me a lot at the time. And today? Up go the ersatz 1898 fronts on the façade I built.

Perhaps the saddest experience of all came to me when I went to Carcross to see what had changed, (and I was happy to see that there at least very little had); but the school house we used to live in was different.  As Cheechakos in Carcross, Isabell, as one of the two teachers, received many little gifts of cakes and fruit which were left inside the porch as thoughtful gestures of welcome. The porch, (which we used as a deep-freeze for a moose which we shot illegally out of season), is no longer there today – a canopy had replaced it. But, the main door now has two stout locks in contrast to being told we were being laughed at because we bothered to use the one flimsy lock at all. I found that sad, but it is alas almost a world-wide thing, and not restricted to sub-arctic villages.

You will have noticed that I refer to The Yukon as she used to be called, and not just Yukon which seems to be the title in universal use there today. It is such a bland word on its own and imposed as if to rid the mind of the Territory’s once turbulent, adventurous and dangerous times. It makes the place no different from Saskatchewan or Ontario or the others as it trips off the tongue. Imagine if suddenly there was to become The Saskatchewan? Would you not subconsciously hesitate and wonder why The Saskatchewan – and what was so special about it that warranted the epithet? That little word ‘The’ made The Yukon ring with what it was – separate, different, mysterious; or in Service’s words again – “Lofty I stand from each sister Land, patient and wearily wise…..”

Thank God there is nothing the bureaucrats can do about ‘The Great Alone’ which will still be there long after they are gone and having lived out their pointless existence in a land that never needed most of them in the first place, and to take their pensions – and run.

------------oOo--------------

This little article was written for a Canadian magazine a few months ago following an abortive trip to Canada to try to salvage something of what I experienced there back in the 1960s. I did actually buy a house in Faro – four bedrooms, garage, large sun deck, the works,  for £30,000 – and then sold it again almost immediately. To get there involved 240 miles of driving over snow and ice-covered roads and I saw three vehicles on the way there and none on the way back. Will I ever learn…!!?

The Time Before Faro

 T. Alastair Findlay (Haddie)

I remember Faro when it was just a name for an area and not even on a map; (there were no maps of the Yukon then anyhow); and when we first tried to fly there we flew around for ages just trying to find what was to be the site for the great Anvil Mine. We found it eventually – bang in the middle of hundreds of square miles of nowhere. It was an adventure, and it all started in the offices of General Enterprises in Whitehorse where I was the estimator and embryonic project manager at the time, and my boss was the legendary Bob Warner. The year was 1968.

Bob came into my office one day and handed me a piece of quarto-sized paper from the Ralph M. Parsons Construction Company of the U.S. whereupon was the longitude and latitude of a place near Ross River called the Anvil site followed by three short paragraphs asking for a quotation for huge volumes of blasting and vast quantities of reinforced concrete and steelwork with the final paragraph stating that our price should “include all necessary overheads required to carry out the work”.

I laughed…..Bob didn’t.

No drawings, no specifications, no nuthin’ – just those three little paragraphs to try and come up with a firm quotation within a few short weeks.

It was a nightmare - but we did have a little going for us however, because Parsons were required by the Canadian government to award the greater percentage of the work to Canadian contractors; and as we were the biggest contractor in the Yukon in those days, and realised that southern contractors got very scared ‘north of 60’- we knew we had a chance. Somehow I came up with a price; and as luck or otherwise would have it, we got the job. Then the fun started…..

Mobilisation took months and involved little matters like Cat-trains overland (and over frozen lakes) to bring in the basics, constructing an airstrip to take a Dakota, setting up radio communications, building a twelve-hundred-man construction camp - the list was endless and fraught with ‘snafus’ and ‘fubars’. There were many occasions when I remembered Bob Warner’s words to me when he took the chance of taking me on. They were: “If you’re right more often than you’re wrong you’re a good guy, and we’ll pay you lotsamoney. If you’re wrong more often than you’re right, there’s a chunkawood on the wall there and it’s called a f------g door!”  He stuck to that simple formula with everyone who worked with him, but I have to say that he was the best boss I have ever had. Utterly ruthless, but always fair; and to me, the greatest hard-bitten construction man I have ever known. I loved him.

Ross River was the ‘railhead’ as it were, and the jumping-off point for Anvil, being accessible from the South Canol Road, (which was built during the war as a spur off the Alaska Highway to service the small oil pipeline from Norman Wells on the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories). In those early days Ross River was a heaving, bustling little town that could in my mind’s eye have stood comparison with Dawson in the days of the Gold Rush or of the Wild West. Choppers landing on the dusty main street forcing us to rush to the windows and slam them shut against the swirling dust; the single Mountie, John, breaking up bar fights single-handed and cuffing the worst offenders to the steel bar across the seats of his Chevvy to cool off. There was one time I was having a peaceful drink with Chris Findlay, the then Yukon Territorial Geologist, when a bar stool flew over our heads and smashed into the wall behind us. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to just grab our drinks, upturn the table, and carry on our conversation behind it ‘till the mayhem subsided.

With the camp built, the itinerant workforce on site, and the infrastructure under way, the professional gamblers moved in.

 The whole of western Canada in the 1960’s seemed to be in the grip of an almost frenetic rush to construct and build - and there was no shortage of manpower. From Britain, Europe, and the then communist states, and with emigration easy, they moved in; and all who had a mind to earned big money in the camps. Depriving them of their hard-earned dollars were the gamblers, and they moved in on Anvil, (as they did wherever easy money was to be had). Some of our men had been ‘taken to the cleaners’, and although they had nobody to blame but themselves, G.E.’s’ President, Harry Frome, decided he should do something about it. He flew out there, incognito, and cleaned a lot of them out. For you see, they didn’t know that Harry’s ‘hobby’ was going to Las Vegas with a pile of money - and usually coming back with more!

Somehow the mine and the new township of Faro got built, but I wasn’t there to see it finished. A crazy youthful notion finished up with my owning the Yukon Daily News for a short time, (which just about killed me), and after that a period of limbo before heading north-west to see what Alaska was like. Within this period however, I carried out my first (and only) piece of industrial espionage.

The Ralph M. Parsons Company didn’t get rich by playing by the rules all the time, and they were refusing to pay us for the fuel used on our heavy equipment.  Their reason for withholding payment was that we could only produce a photocopy of the agreement on the fuel and not the original (through some sleight-of-hand on Parsons’ part). Bob asked me to get a job in the site offices at Anvil, and thus, for a short period, I had the most mind-numbing work imaginable. I printed off construction plans – day after day after day, and had to pretend that the lines thereon were beyond my ken being in such a menial position. I did however manage to purloin the necessary original fuel agreement and put a photocopy back in the file and was stunned by my reaction. The shaking and sweating I went through convinced me that a thief must indeed be a different kind of being. Either that or have nerves of carbon steel! Once the deed was done I immediately quit and brought the agreement back to Whitehorse. Bob gave me a thousand bucks then booked himself on a flight to Los Angeles to collect the company’s $120,000.

These are my memories of the early days of Faro.