2004/08 Yukon trip - The road home - Keno and the Wernecke Mine |
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Sunday 15th August
We woke up to a drizzly morning so we thought we’d just have a quick look around the Keno area and head on back to the main road. We took a look at the nearby Highet Creek Road for rocks, but all the likely spots turned out to be mines or claims and off-limits to us. On our way to Elsa and Keno we met a coyote on his way home from the hunt, with a mouth full of snowshoe hare. He hid while we drove past and then came out on the road behind us.
The town of Elsa was almost invisible, just a few people living on in a mining camp. Keno City though was a pleasant surprise. It is another town that’s dying but it has a great museum. They’ve not only preserved the mining history and equipment, but also the lifestyle of the 20s through to the 50s, with displays of a cabin, kitchen, 
office, and transport. They even have a motorcycle that was designed for travel in mud and swamps, with front-wheel drive. Mining finished here in the 1970s, but not because they ran out of ore. There’s still plenty in the ground but the problem was the plunging prices for silver and lead. The main market for silver was in photographic film, but the digital camera has since killed that. Lead was mainly used in plumbing, but most of that is plastic today.
This all looked interesting, so we decided to stay in the area for bit longer. The museum curator suggested that we drive up Keno Mountain on the old mine road. By now the sky was clear except for a little smoke, and it was a great drive up to 6000ft. The mountain top was originally mined for silver, but now it’s famous for its signpost that gives distances to all the world cities that were represented in a mining conference there.
The whole mountain top is a mass of jagged rocks. Some of that is natural, due to frost action, what the Germans call a felsenmeer, a “sea of rocks”, but mostly it is residue from the mining operations. Sandie wanted to bring the whole mountain back as there were rocks and crystals of all colours and shapes, so I left her sorting the rocks while I climbed the next mountain over and went to look for marmots and pikas. I could hear them whistling around me but I saw none.
It was late when we came down, so we camped at the town’s campground on Lightning Creek. The price included free panning for gold. We got well-washed very cold feet but no gold.
Monday 16th August
This was Discovery Day in the Yukon, a public holiday to celebrate the anniversary of finding of gold in the Klondike. This had no impact on us as Keno doesn’t have banks or post office or shops anyway! It was another perfect warm day so we decided to stay a bit longer in the area and drive to the old mine at Wernecke. This would have been another ghost town left to die when the price of silver and lead declined, but another company believed there was still a profitable vein of silver to be mined. They bulldozed the town flat, much to the disgust of the museum’s curator, but they never found the vein.
Unlike the road up Keno Mountain, the Wernecke road is “unmaintained”, which means that nobody clears the landslides and fallen trees, or fills in the holes, or fixes up the damage that streams do in the spring. It wasn’t too bad, but just about on the limit of what the Tiger could negotiate in four wheel drive. Our main worry was the width as the bushes encroach on the road and the roadway was narrower than the camper. Luckily we didn’t meet anything on the road other than a few ptarmigans.
The mine site is a maze of holes and heaps, with just a few decaying buildings left. There was even 
an outhouse on top of the hill with a splendid view out over the lakes and mountains. The miners must have been a friendly bunch: it is a two-holer.
Sandie was having a great time with all sorts of lead and silver and copper based rocks and crystals, all shapes and colors. We were there for a few hours and nobody came up the road to join us, though the bear and moose tracks showed that it is popular spot with the animals.