George K. Ilsley's Blog, page 11

yukon river bottom

Orignally posted November 6, 2007

This time of year, the river is at its lowest. This flat section where I'm walking would all be under several feet of water during spring and summer.

The river is not yet frozen over.  The rougher strip of white from the left is chucks of ice flowing in the stream.  This stream of ice makes a hissing noise.  Because of climate change, freeze-up is happening later and later each year.  The ferry across the river was pulled out a couple of weeks ago, but it has t...

decor for hoardings

glad i took this photo when I did, because then the tree was pruned and this paper graffiti became torn, shredded, defaced.

gray jay day

Originally posted November 5, 2007

Today was gray jay day.  At a rest stop overlooking the scenic but foggy Tintina Trench,  the gray jays were very bold.  Used to charming the tourists, no doubt.

The Tintina Trench is an avian flyway and rich in wildlife.  A linear valley, it marks the line between two tectonic plates.  And the meeting of those tectonic plates explains the gold found in the Klondike.  Everything on earth is constantly recycled.  The gold in the crust is brought to the...

bone cross

Originally posted November 3, 2007

I keep seeing new things in places as I walk around.  This is a bone tied to a stick with a ribbon.  Other than that, I don't know what it is.  The hillside above Dawson is marked by the passage of many people.  The town now ends at 8th Avenue, but during the gold rush there used to be 9th and 10th Avenues.  You can still see little platforms dug into the hillside, and bits of rusted this and that.  It is astonishing to imagine living through a  Yukon winter ...

Something for everyone. The ladies playing squash with raw...

Something for everyone.  The ladies playing squash with raw liver, however, is not suitable for vegans.

birch frost

Originally posted October 2007

Ice fog in the Yukon creates a spectacular, surreal landscape.

kinsey's enthusiasm

Alfred Kinsey is famous of course in the field of human sexuality (the "Kinsey scale"), but before this, Kinsey was known as an entomologist.

Kinsey studied large numbers, in order to see the pattern of nature displayed on the bell curve.  The moral here, the moral of the story of nature and natural distribution and large numbers, is that in a continuum of expression, everyone has a place.

Kinsey's specialty at first was gall wasps.  And then, he branched out.   "Men," Kinsey declared...

spiky frost

First posted, October 17, 2007

A local asked me, Haven't you seen ice frost before?  I guess I haven't.  Not like this.  This is a closer view of the spiky crystals that coated everything this week.  This birch is growing  on the banks of the Yukon River.   Dawson City is built in a moose swamp, near the convergence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers, and is prone to flooding in the spring.  A dyke now protects the Town of the City of Dawson (the official name).

kinsey's first obsession

Alfred Kinsey is best known for the Kinsey Report on Human Sexuality, an in-depth survey of thousands of people and their sexual expressions.  This report gave us the famous Kinsey scale, which recognizes that people are not always clearly heterosexual (o) or homosexual (6) but might be somewhere in between (a 2, or a 3 or a four).

But first of all, Kinsey was an entomologist and became an authority on gall wasps.  His study of gall wasps was the template he then applied to studying humans:  t...

summer kitchen in winter

In 2007, from October to December, I was the writer in residence at Berton House.  I loved it, I loved Dawson City, and I loved the Yukon, even though I only saw a tiny bit of it.

I had a blog at the time on a social networking site which has since been terminated (new owners with a very strange concept of networking and branding).  As I find time, I will be reposting here the pictures and text from that time.

As a start, here is a picture which I never posted before.  Mmm, snow.