Changing seasons and accommodations

Time travels fast and so do we! And so do the seasons! We've seen winter turning into sunny spring and occasionally very hot early summer. We've had almost non-stop sunshine for weeks and the fire danger reached moderate before the first rain in weeks poured down. We had a cold spell and saw fresh new snow on the mountains and it still gets very cold during the nights. But other than that it's very summery here in Whitehorse, Yukon. 






With the changing seasons we've moved from Tagish to downtown Whitehorse, from a small housesitting house to sharing an apartment with two young German guys. The former place came with a funny cat and Wii, the latter one with single mattress and interesting stories. Next step was a single (read tiny) room in a student residence with shared kitchen and bathroom. Pros included hot bath every day, cons meant restless nights. 

After only about one month in town we were already moving to the fourth accommodation, this time a big fancy house with four cats to take care of. With fully equipped kitchen Piia got creative and tried making hummus, tortillas and pita bread from scratch, and Julien enjoyed biking the humongous uphill coming back from work. It was easy peasy life.

Vaquita, Tuni and Chuvi. Panzi was hiding under the bed.

Annie Lake Cabin

Then it was time to change our lifestyle again and move 60 km out of town, to a cabin without electricity and water. 





Cons are listed in the previous sentence, the pros can be seen from the pictures. The cabin is located beside the Annie Lake and surrounded by beautiful mountains. Just by moving there we've been able to really witness the change of the season. Migrational birds are either residing or just stopping for a while at the lake. Bears and wolves wonder in the near forests and mountains are losing their snow cover. It's not bad to wake up in the morning with these views, even though you still need to make a fire after a cold night. 

Views from and near our cabin

From the Red Ridge

From Mt. Skukum hike

Commuting gone wild

Laughing Eyes Kennel

After three weeks our cabin life escape was over and we headed back town. Towards the summer we go, by enjoying our new home and new roommates. Piia also started volunteering at the animal shelter and Julien keeps selling bear bells for tourists. Hard life eh?

Life in Yukon continues

It was the 14th of February, Valentine’s Day, when the last mushers of Yukon Quest arrived in Whitehorse and Piia’s plane landed on the Whitehorse airport. You can check out Julien’s pictures and stories along the Canadian side of the YQ race from our previous blog post that Julien will be updating still.

After Julien’s awesome adventure with the race and Piia’s valuable time at home in Finland we were facing the question many people were asking us: What now? We didn’t have a place or a job, just our car, sleeping bags and box full of food. In summer that would have been just a cheap way to get through the first days, but as the temperature dropped below -30 we knew we couldn’t count on our car anymore. We tried it once, wasn’t worth it.

After lots of e-mails, requests and internet search we finally found a couch surfing place near down town and considered us saved. The hosts were nice enough to let us stay a few days and we couldn’t be happier just to have a warm place to be in.

Julien started to look for a job right away but the first days didn’t bring any results and we were questioning the reasons to actually stay in Yukon. It seemed it was very difficult to find work.  We had to make a choice to either stay in town, rent a place and hope to find a job really soon, or to find another solution. With our budget we couldn’t really take big risks and finally we felt we just wanted a break, a time-out to think our options through. 

We were extremely lucky to have friends whose place we could use for a couple of weeks, and that’s how we ended up visiting the Tagish Lake Kennel again, now located in remote spot outside Tagish.

While Michelle was doing her 5^th Iditarod race and coping with the extreme conditions there, we were enjoying sunny and cold weather at the kennel, together with their handlers Marie and Hannah. 

We got a chance to... 

Run the dogs on beautiful Tagish Lake 

 

Train the yearlings

Have a night time bonfire

Hike on the mountain close to the cabin

Play with the husky puppies, all the other dogs and horses

...give a hand with tourist tours and do all we could to help with the everyday kennel chores. Unfortunately Julien had hurt his neck earlier that kept him from fully participating and Piia got sick later so we can’t say we were much help. But we appreciated everybody’s hospitality and were grateful to have a place to stay.


Then we got lucky: Julien finally got a job! Now he's working at the Coast Mountain Sports and uses his expertise on hiking and outdoor gear to convince people to go outside and enjoy the sunshine! So for the moment we are living in Whitehorse in a student residence (cheapest in town) and life is pretty regular. It gives us a lot of time to plan the future...