Royals go to Carcross, a mystical place that inspired a great artist
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The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are in Carcross, Yukon, today, and I am jealous.
If Vancouver Island is a Markgraf painting, the West Coast’s muted blues and greens melting into one another, Carcross is all Ted Harrison: vivid colours and stark contrasts, big mountains looming over big lakes under a brilliant blue sky. It takes your breath away.
Harrison, who came to Carcross as a school teacher from England in the late 1960s, captured the tiny village perfectly.
He had moved to Whitehorse by the time I arrived in Carcross at age 16. He picked me up hitchhiking a couple of times, though, as he still kept a cabin by a lake. I would occasionally creep up there with a friend and watch the beavers cutting across the water in the moonlight.
Other nights the northern lights would ripple and surge across the sky in improbably luminous greens and violets and pinks. By contrast, one Halloween it was so perfectly black that my buddy Brian walked face-first into the side of a moose. It was magic. It is also as foreign to Victorians as it is to William and Kate.
If this royal tour has done anything, it has reminded us of how diverse this side of the country is, taking us on vicarious adventures to places we might never otherwise see. Carcross, Bella Bella, Haida Gwaii, mothers battling substance abuse in the Downtown Eastside, Syrian refugees — in a single week the duke and duchess are getting glimpses into realities that many of us, looping in our own orbits, locked in to our own perspectives, will never encounter.
This was done by design, with Kensington Palace and the governments of B.C., Yukon and Canada collaborating on an itinerary meant to introduce the couple to as many people as possible, with a focus on environmental stewardship, mental health, healthy active living and indigenous culture. Carcross, pop. 300, was chosen in part because the youth of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation have built cycling trails on Montana Mountain that have become a tourism magnet.
A Toronto-based reporter phoned the band last week, asked if people in the village were prettying up their flower boxes in preparation for the royal visit. The woman in the band office laughed. “Flowers? We have snow on the mountains.” In fact, they’re just praying Kate and William don’t get snowed off Montana Mountain today. Chances are that won’t happen. It’s supposed to hit a balmy 9 C.
Too bad the royals weren’t visiting in the winter, relying on cordwood hauled on flatbed trucks across frozen Nares Lake to fuel their hippie-killer stoves. That’s the full-on Yukon experience.
Too bad we couldn’t have shared the January day when the high — the high! — was –41.7 (Environment Canada dug this up for me yesterday) and the low was –48.9. That’s 56 below on the more impressive sounding Fahrenheit scale, so cold that you couldn’t start the truck without warming the oil pan with a blow torch, because the oil was thick as peanut butter — something as unknown to the average duke, or the typical Victorian, as square tires, kinnikinnick tea, grease bannock, or a herd of migrating caribou (Carcross is a contraction of Caribou Crossing) cresting the mountain. I once saw a wolf lope past my window, ignoring the three big dogs nipping at its flanks. You rarely see that in Fairfield.
Ruth Foster says the climate isn’t as harsh anymore. “We got minus 30 two nights last winter. That’s as cold as it got.” She works at the visitors centre in Carcross, where tourism became a big deal after they opened the highway to Skagway, Alaska, and its cruise ship passengers.
It’s the royal visit that has visitors buzzing this week. People have driven up from central B.C. to see the duke and duchess. Others who couldn’t be there bought Carcross T-shirts just so they could say they were in the same town. Everybody is excited about seeing Kate and William — just as Kate and William are, reportedly, excited about seeing them.
This is a key point. They could have chosen to spend their whole trip doing the champagne-and-tiaras thing with people who were a reflection in the mirror. They didn’t, and they’re richer for it.