Yukon's Emerald Lake

Several RV'ers we know had told us that the drive down the South Klondike Highway in the Yukon is so blessed with magnificent scenery that it is impossible to find enough superlatives to describe it. One RV'er couldn't stop talking about Emerald Lake.  So, as we drove south toward Skagway on Tuesday, May 31, 2016, we expected to see a very pretty lake.

We still weren't prepared for what we saw.  The colors were astounding.  The photos in this blog entry haven't been retouched.  If anything, they're a little washed out because the sunlight was so bright.  But the deep blues, emerald greens, purples, lime greens and whites still come through.  The color derives from light reflecting off white deposits of marl, a mixture of clay and calcium carbonate, at the bottom of the shallow waters:

We were so excited by the lake that we had to get closer to it, touch it, move around it, look at it from different angles.  So we locked up the truck at the overlook and started hiking down the road to get to an access road lower toward the bottom of the lake.  Here was our view as we looked north, back up the lake:

The purples and whites at one point of the lake were just too beautiful not to focus in on:

Down at the bottom of the lake, we found access, as we hoped we would.  Here, in the shallower water, the glacial greens, white and clarity of the lake water began to show:

We caught shadows of the fir trees above us reflecting on the lake, while the water was so clear that we could also see the rocks on the bottom:

Looking back up the lake toward where our lookout was, we felt the lake left one of its best surprised until the last, and felt amply rewarded for our exploratory hike around the southern shore: