DAWSON CITY In an unusual display of haste, the Yukon River flushed itself clear of ice at 9:35 Friday morning. just four days after the IODE stopped selling breakup ice pool tickets.

Frank Wilps, of Whitehorse, is the lucky winner this year.

With the earliest date on record being April 28, in 1940, this was an early breakup.

According to Joyce Caley, who is the official clock watcher for the IODE, it has gone out twice before on this date, in 1989 and in 1993. April 30 has been hit four times, but the river is more likely to break up in May.

Rumours of an early breakup hit Whitehorse last Thursday. These, however, may have been a misunderstanding about the flooding which took place at Flat Creek along the Klondike Highway last Wednesday.

This is the same wide corner of the highway that flooded last year, though this year's incident only slowed traffic instead of halting it.

Caley was called by Glenda Bolt, who works at the Danoja Zho Cultural Centre.

'Glenda phoned me from the cultural centre where she was at work and said, You better get down here, Joyce. The river's just a-flowing by.''

The retired Grade 1 teacher hopped on her bicycle and pedalled down from her home on Fifth Avenue, carrying a ladder on which she could climb up to see the stopped clock.

'By the time I got down there, the river was flowing and there weren't any huge ice chunks,' she said. 'It wasn't really crashing and churning as far as I could tell.'

Bolt was alerted by another worker at the cultural centre, and at first, she thought it was just a joke, because the initial movement of the ice was so gradual.

'At first, we thought, is it moving or are we? It gave you that queasy feeling for second,' she said.

The entire pan which had been the site of the past winter's IFSS dogsled races moved in a solid mass, heading down the river all at once.

'It was like a long, winding sheet rounding the bend and heading down to Moosehide,' Bolt said. 'We kept saying to each other that it looked like tarmac or like a seven-lane highway banking that curve.

'After about 20 minutes, you could see the slush from the Klondike River joining the flow.'

There was a dramatic moment when Tim Gerberding dashed over the bank to rescue a canoe that someone had left in a poor location.

There were problems with the clock again this year, but not because of the setup. There had been a power outage earlier in the morning, about an hour before, so when the clock did stop, it read 9:03. To get the right time, Caley obtained the exact length of the power outage, 32 minutes, and added it to the time on the clock.

After she arrived, Gerry Crayford, with the territorial highways branch, ran across to the fire hall and sounded the siren.

Not long after, daycare workers brought their children down to the river and the students from the Robert Service School arrived with their teachers. It has been a few years since the river broke up so conveniently in the morning, so it was a novel experience for many. Last year's breakup, for instance, was at 12:06 a.m.

Bolt said there were a number of tourists in town who had come to see the event.

One family came to visit a son who works here and made it with a day and a half to spare.

She spoke with a couple from New York who had not realized there wasn't a bridge to continue their journey on, but they were planning to spend some more time here any way.

Ticket sales were down by several hundred dollars this year, Caley said, so the prize will be less. Last year's sales were $2,960, while this year's were just over $2,500.