The trailer spring breaks again

When we got up in the morning I started making pancakes while Ryan went to ask if we could stay in the campsite past the checkout time of 11 and just pay for the one day because he was hoping to get the spring welded and trailer into working order by noon. He came back pretty quickly, and we got the trailer down and pulled it into their parking lot because they double booked us. They had let us into that site for 2 nights when we checked in but had sold the second night to someone else and wanted us out of there by 11. Ryan removed the spring in the parking lot while it was raining and took it to get welded. He asked the guy about the orange camper couple since he was one of the towing outfits in town and he said the guy had hitchhiked to his shop but he had to send him to someone else because his tow truck was broke down. Once our spring was welded he brought it back to reinstall but it didn't fit! He had to go back and get the guy to do a whole bunch of grinding. Once the spring was installed we did our laundry, dumped all our water out of the trailer, moved other things around to make it lighter on the welded spring and drove to the George Johnston museum there in Teslin. 

 The woman we paid on the way in gave us each a "Yukon Gold Explorer's Passport". These passports are similar to regular passport size, and the various participating museums and visitor centers stamp a designated page with their stamp, although some have a number posted for you to mark down, instead. If you got 10 sites visited, you are entered for 1 oz of Yukon placer gold, if you have 20, you are entered for both 1 and 2 oz of Yukon placer gold. We kept these passports with us for quite a while, so we will reference them in future posts. 

The museum itself was quite interesting. It has displays about the Tlingit (pronounced to rhyme with klink-it) people who live/lived in the area. We learned that they have an interesting system for relationships; all the people are either from the wolf clan or the raven clan, and you were supposed to marry someone from the other clan. Then all the children would be from the mother's clan. One way to keep the genes a little healthier!! There was a lot of beautiful beadwork, which I absolutely love; I really want to go home and try some of the amazing patterns out now, myself! The museum is named after a man named George Jonston (in English, he had a native name, as well). This man loved new things; he got a camera, and took lots of pictures of the Tlingit people he lived with; pictures of hunting, and groups of people he knew, doing everyday things, or just hanging out. The museum is worth going to just to see the pictures. Then in 1928 he decided he wanted a car, so he travelled quite a ways to a dealership in Whitehorse and convinced to store owners to sell him a car, even though there were no roads at all anywhere near Teslin where he lived. He brought the car to Jonstown (named after his family) on a sternwheeler which had to be altered to fit the car. Then he convinced some other Tlingit men to help him build a 3 mile road, by promising them rides. He'd pick people up and taxi them along that 3 mile stretch for $1 a ride. In the winter, he used the 125km of Teslin Lake for a road, and he even painted the car white in the winter, so they could hunt all over the lake with it! This was before antifreeze was used and it was a liquid cooled car, so when he shut it off he drained all the coolant out and kept it warm over a fire. When he was ready to drive again he would pour the warm water back in and start the car. He painted it back each spring, so that when he finally sold it back in mint condition, it had layers and layers of paint on it. They actually have the car itself in the museum, stripped of the extra paint, and I'd advise you to pop in and check this place out, if you are ever in the area.

This is another shot of the bridge into Teslin:

We went to a neat wildlife museum, next, with really amazing displays of moose, wolves, bear, etc, but they had boxes of souvenirs piled up everywhere around the display windows, to such an extent that I do believe that, unless they sold like hotcakes, there could be no way of selling it all within the space of 2 or even more years!! The displays were quite nice but most of Ryans photos through the glass didn't turn out all that well.

After finishing at the wildlife museum we had lunch and then drove slowly and carefully toward Whitehorse: however the very first bump Ryan missed broke the spring around 100 km from Teslin.

He was frustrated at that point and there was nowhere nice nearby to set up the trailer so we could stay while he drove to Whitehorse. So instead he put a couple blocks of wood between the axle and frame and drove even more slowly for the last 100 km to Whitehorse.

We got the very last usable unserviced campsite at the RV park we went to. It had a fairly steep slope but we managed to level the trailer by borrowing more wood blocks from a couple across the road.

We had a nice talk with them and they lent Ryan some tools to make changing the spring go quicker. He took the spring off right away so that he could go first thing in the morning to get a new one. It ended up being a late night and it was the summer solstice so it was very bright out at midnight. Ryan said it was bright enough to easily work under both the car and the trailer at midnight with no flashlights. This photo is from just after midnight