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Although greater Whitehorse spills along the Alaska Hwy for several kilometres, the old downtown core is a forty-block grid centred on Main Street and mostly sandwiched between 2nd and 4th avenues. Though now graced only with a handful of pioneer buildings, the place still retains the dour integrity and appealing energy of a frontier town, and at night the baying of timber wolves and coyotes is a reminder of the wilderness immediately beyond the city limits. Nonetheless, the tourist influx provides a fair amount of action in the bars and cafes, and the streets are more appealing and lively than in many northern towns. The main thing to see is the SS Klondike (May-Sept daily tours every half-hour 9am-6pm; $4; tel 667-4511), one of only two surviving paddle-steamers in the Yukon, now rather sadly beached at the western end of 2nd Avenue at 300 Main St, though it has been beautifully restored to the glory of its 1930s heyday. More than 250 stern-wheelers once plied the river, taking 36 hours to make the 700-kilometre journey to Dawson City, and five days to make the return trip against the current. The SS Klondike was built in 1929, sank in 1936, and was rebuilt in 1937 using the original remnants. The largest of all the river's steamers, it then battled against the river until 1955, ferrying 300 tonnes of cargo a trip and making some fifteen round trips a season. Bridges built on the improved road to Dawson increasingly hampered river traffic, though the SS Klondike 's end came when an inexperienced pilot ran her aground and condemned her to museum status. Beached at Whitehorse in 1960, the boat is visitable by a 25-minute guided tour only. Before or after a tour, take in the twenty-minute documentary film on the riverboat story in the theatre alongside. Elsewhere in town you could pop into the MacBride Museum , housed in a sod-roofed log cabin at 1st Avenue and Wood Street (May to late Sept daily 10am-6pm; call for winter hours; $4; tel 667-2709), for the usual zoo of stuffed animals, an old WP&YR engine, pioneer and gold-rush memorabilia, as well as hundreds of marvellous archive photos and a display on the Asiatic peoples who crossed the Bering Straits to inhabit the Americas. Another in-town sight is the Old Log Church Museum , 3rd Avenue and Elliot Street (late May/early June to late Aug/early Sept Mon-Sat 10am-6pm, Sun noon-4pm; $2.50; tel 668-2555, www.macbridemuseum.com ), a modest museum devoted to the pre-contact life of the region's aboriginal peoples , whaling, missionaries, children's toys and music, the gold rush and early exploration. You may find it easy to resist the widely touted Frantic Follies stage shows at the Westmark Whitehorse Hotel however - expensive (May-Sept; $20) vaudeville acts of the banjo-plucking and frilly-knickered-dancing variety that have been playing in town for close to thirty years, but if this sort of thing appeals, call 668-2042 for details of "music, mirth and magic, gay Nineties songs, cancan dances and humorous renditions".
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