After a good night's sleep, we drove into Whitehorse for laundry, some grocery shopping, and to use the high speed internet at McDonalds (next to the laundromat) and Starbucks (next to Walmart).
With that taken care of, we returned to the Takhini Hot Springs Campground, got our bathing suits, and drove over to the Takhini Hot Springs. It's walking distance from the campground, but it's a good little hike and we didn't want to walk quite that far after soaking in hot water for a couple hours.
The entrance fee is $12.50 for adults ($11.00 for seniors), but campground guests get 20% off. We must have looked like seniors 'cause they gave us the senior rate and our camping discount, so our cost was $8.80 CAD/person (about $6.60 USD). Not bad at all.
Just like Chena Hot Springs, you take your shoes off before going into the locker rooms and put them on racks (or you can carry them in and put them in a locker). Then you shower before going into the pools. A covered walkway leads from the locker rooms.
We first entered the larger lower pool which felt nice, but the smaller upper pool was hotter, ....
and we quickly moved into it.
These are concrete pools that don't have a lot of character and the whole place needs a paint job, .....
but we enjoyed the soak and the little benches around the edges of the pools where you could sit submerged made a big difference. Though Chena Hot Springs has a more natural-looking rock pool with a gravel bottom, the lack of places to sit was a drawback.
Here, the "Pool Rules" had one rule we aren't used to seeing around pools - "No snowballs".
That gave us a good laugh.
We met people from all over and had long conversations as we soaked, got out to cool off, got back in, and repeated.
It was certainly worth the price, and we stayed longer here than at Chena simply because the comfort level was higher.
And, they are in the midst of a complete remodel of Takhini Hot Springs. The renderings of the new facility look quite impressive and completion is hoped for September 2020 although expectations are for later in the year.
Back at the campground, Linda whipped up a fish chowder using Rockfish we caught in Seward and substituting mild, white Daikon radish for potatoes - you couldn't tell they weren't potatoes in the finished soup . There's another dish we can add to our Keto menu. It was wonderful.
When we checked in to this campground, they told us not to leave anything out because they have a fox population that tends to steal things. We followed that advice, and tonight we saw a beautiful black fox with a white tip on its tail poking around our site before trotting off. Wish I had gotten a photo of it - it was one of the coolest animals we've seen on this trip.
The rest of the evening we looked at possible campgrounds in the Watson Lake area. Nothing is settled thus far, so tune in tomorrow to see where we end up.
Comments