I had my doubts about this weekend. I was being sent to an Arts Summit in town and was apparently signed up for it even before I had arrived in Whitehorse. Granted, much of the conference did end up being a review of things I already knew, or had experience with, and the first morning began with the over-used and terribly cliche "mind-map exercise", nonetheless, it was a good experience. I was able to introduce myself to many of the poeple with whom I'll be working and generally make myself known to some of the Yukon arts community. And, perhaps most importantly of all, I did glean some insights and ideas from a couple of the sessions, in particular, the session on getting results from your endeavours, and the very poorly attended (or should I say 'intimately' attended?) session on voluntarism. The latter was quite interesting for me as the Gallery has a serious shortage of volunteers, as in, none. It was also interesting because the executive Director of the Centre sat in on this with me so we basically went back and forth and used the YAC as our model. In the end, we came up with nothing definitive, but I now have a tentatively scheduled meeting with the voluntarism consultant later this week.

Yesterday, there was a session for which neither myself or the intern had any interest. Succession Planning is not an issue that touches us quite yet. As the hour long session butted up against a fifteen minute break, we decided to hop into the YACmobile and take a drive up the Alaska Highway. And so, that is exactly what we did. We drove about half an hour north of Whitehorse and before needing to turn around to head back. Within seven minutes, we were out of the city and in the middle of... well, I hesitate to say 'nowhere'. When you're surrounded by rank upon rank of mountains, rising one above the other, and there are nearly sheer drop-offs on either side of the two-lane highway filled with spruce, jackpine, poplars and birch, and there are fluffy clouds rolling down the sides of the higher mountains... Well, anyway, it certainly felt remote (which is is) and despite the "9-1-1 will no longer work" sign informing you of your remoteness, the surreality of the scenery does not make it feel like a nowhere. We took some particularly stupid tourist photos at a look-out, and then turned around and headed back into the town. Just that little foray into the wilderness was enough to make Whitehorse look like a booming metropolis.