July 10, 1966 – “You may be a novice riverman, but the raging waters of Miles Canyon, terror of the Klondike goldrush, needn’t daunt you. They’ve been tamed considerably by the power dam
at Whitehorse, which backs up the water for 25 miles.

One result is that the boat craze reached Yukon’s capital. Hydro Lake buzzes with outboard motors. Sailboats skim over cold green waters where Squaw and Whitehorse Rapids once foamed.

The galloping white waters that gave the northern city its name were a life-and-death
challenge to the sourdoughs (experienced northerners) of the turn of the century, but today, even a Cheechako (tenderfoot) can make the trip.

From mid-June to September a new 40-passenger diesel-engined cruiser, MS Schwatka, makes a daily excursion from its dock in Hydro Lake. The 3-hour cruise, costing $8 an adult and half that for children, includes coffee and doughnuts in the lounge.

Schwatka (named for an American explorer) leaves the two-mile lake, churns upstream between sculptured yellow cutbanks into the Devil’s Punchbowl, a bay of boiling eddies. The engine throbs louder at the narrow entrance to Miles Canyon. Here you can feel the cruiser fighting the turbulent current, sometimes within arm’s reach of the basalt walls.

This river trip is included in package deals combining a cruise up the Inside Passage
and a train junket from Skagway over the historic White Pass railway.

Such tours include the historic sights of the capital itself – Indian gravehouses, old sternwheelers drawn up on shore, a sample of the wooden tramway that once hauled boats past the rapids. There’s also Sam McGee’s cabin, the Old Log Church and the museum that was Yukon’s first telegraph office.”

(The Corpus Christi Caller-Times – Corpus Christi, Texas)