Keno

Keno City; I use city loosely as it consists of a museum, cafe (where 6” pizzas are $11 and milkshakes $6.95), public showers, and two cabins for rent (one of which we are staying). Now you may be wondering why we are staying here, in the middle of nowhere, for not one night but two in a cabin that has a toilet, no shower, kitchen, and TV featuring one channel, an aboriginal channel. Keno lies at the end of the silver trail and was from the 1920s to 1980s a boom town for silver mining. I love silver as much as the next girl but we did not come here for that alone. The hiking and scenery is breathtaking. The first day we drove up a winding, narrow, potholed dirt road to the top of Keno Hill to observe the signpost that points out the distance to all of the countries that had scientists visiting the town in 1956 during the International Geophysical Year. From the signpost there is a 360 degree view of the surrounding mountains and valleys. Devon and I decided that wasn’t a good enough view and hiked an additional 300m above the 1850m height at the signpost to see what we could see. The landscape was interesting to hike on because there were basically no trails but we weren’t worried about getting lost as we were above the tree line and could easily find our way back to the car. The ground was either sharp large portions of shale like rock or moss that we would sink into, there were also tons of different wildflowers in bloom and mushrooms that we didn’t try although we had been informed almost all of the Yukon’s mushrooms are edible. Abandoned mine sites and homes dotted the hillside and made for some satisfying photography. The wind was very strong but it was warm day, around 25, on the hillside there is permanent snow/ice pack that we had to avoid as we stumbled our way down the mountain.
The second day we spent wandering up and down the one street in town taking photos of the old buildings. We also had breakfast at the lone cafe, it was delicious, and went to the amazing mining museum. Devon decided he basically didn’t want to do anything else and so I went on a three hour hike up to an abandoned mining camp, which turned out had been demolished in the last year, and an old rail track use to transport waste rock out of the mine all in all very pretty. I braved bear, moose, and marmot in this epic trek for photos and exercise.

Km- 319