4. AK, BC & YT — Dawson City

I had eight rolls of film that fell into a black hole somewhere between Alaska and Seattle that documented this tour. They’re gone, but I struck my own gold while-while writing this post. Internet gold that is — stumbled across Sue Thomas’s ideally suited website.

Sue and her husband have toured Yukon and Alaska extensively in a mobile home. Her website has excellent photos of many of the same routes and places I’m writing about. I’ll be weaving them into my narratives, and integrating them with some previous posts too. I’ll do that by adding a [photo] link at spots where there’s a relevant photo. Click those links and use her list of contents, or scroll/swipe, to find the pertinent photos.

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Dawson City is merely a shadow of what it was during the short heyday of the Klondike gold rush — 1,375 people vs. 40,000. The compact commercial district is the primary remnant from those days — some of it old, some of it new, and much of it derelict. Echoes of the Klondike, prospectors and miners, George Pantages, Jack London, Call of the Wild, sternwheelers, Robert Service, et al., are still almost audible in Dawson City. [photos]

The map below shows the devastation that gold dredge operations left behind at Klondike Creek. Zoom in on the map and center it to see more detail. Those worm-like objects are huge gravel piles left behind by gold dredging. The topsoil is buried 20 feet under the gravel. Sad.

I went on a tour organized by the RV park the next day after arriving there. We went up Bonanza Creek and saw some small scale placer mining operations first. Next, we went to see Dredge #4, which is the largest one ever built in North America — placer mining on steroids.

The dredge is a barge equipped for continuous placer mining. It has a big chain of buckets in front — much like a ditch digger — to feed the soil and gravel into the processor. The processor is a series of screens and sluice boxes that separated the gold from the waste. The waste was distributed in a continuous pile by a conveyor belt at the back of the barge. The whole thing floated along in its own pond, chewing up the landscape and spitting out the gold. [photos]

We went to downtown Dawson City after visiting the gold field. It was interesting to see what permafrost does to buildings there. I came away from the tour with a good idea of what to explore the next day. After the tour I made some changes to my bike to get it ready for the ride to Chicken, AK. Then I went back downtown to get groceries and a canister of bear spray for the ride. More about that later…

I spent all day downtown the next day. I started off at the Robert Service and Jack London cabins. They are next to each other There were informative and entertaining curators at both of them. I took a bunch of pictures around town, including those cabins, but you already know the sad outcome of that enterprise. [photos]

Robert Service was the original Rolling Stone. I mentioned before that he is the Canadian counterpart of Robert Burns — often referred to as “Bard of the Yukon.” He had a cabin in Dawson City after the gold rush where he wrote his novel The Trail of Ninety-Eight and his poetry collection Rhymes of a Rolling Stone.

His cabin is a preserved historic attraction in Dawson City. Entertainers recite his poetry and tell other tales of the Yukon there. One of my companions on a tour to Jasper recited Cremation of Sam McGhee, so I knew who Robert Service was. It was nice to hear more about him and more of his poetry at the place where he wrote it.

Jack London came to the Klondike in 1887. He rented a tiny cabin there from two mining enginers, one from Stanford and the other from Yale. The cabin was discovered in the woods many years later. Half the logs (plus new ones) were used to rebuild one in Dawson City and another in Jack London Square in Oakland, CA. The little building on stilts is a bear-proof storage shed.

I read half a dozen of Jack London’s books in grade school. They were engrossing to say the least. Today they seem a little juvenile. I imagine they made me long for that kind of adventure though.

Like many people in the Klondike, London came close to dying of scurvy. There was little to no fresh food there in the winter, so they weren’t getting Vitamin C. Nobody knew rose hips contain a lot of it. Many wild roses grow there, and some rose-hip tea would have fixed them right up. Or they could have just ordered sidecars at the bar. 😀

Many old buildings in Dawson City show the whimsical effects that permafrost produces. Other than that they are well preserved in that climate. Permafrost causes the soil to heave and subside with the seasons. The only way to maintain a building in this envionment is to level the foundation each summer. And most empty buildings don’t have anyone with enough interest to get out the jacks. [photos]

I had dinner at the Triple Jay Hotel. My notes say I had Tortellini but didn’t know why. It was a puzzle because pasta was one of the main staples on the tour, but evidently the meal was quite good. Then I went to the Palace Grand Theatre to see the Klondike Follies. An elegant dinner-theatre date with myself. [photos]

The follies were a lot of fun. The theater had been replicated board-by-board in exact detail from the ground up. Permafrost had ruined the original. I bought a box seat, which gave me a splendid view. It even had a stove pipe in the corner that came up through the floor from a wood stove and exited through the roof. [photos] [PBS webpage/video: Palace Grand Theatre]

A black fellow wrote and directed the Klondike Follies for their Gold Rush Centennial. He was also one of the main characters and did some first-class tap dancing too. It was all about nuggets, Mounties, miners, dance hall girls, etc. Very provincial. The place was packed, and there were laughs aplenty.

I rode back to my tent sometime after 10 pm. Of course, there was still plenty of light to ride by. The next day was going to be a big ride. I hoped to get over the border and camp in Alaska. I was anxious to see what the big, bad road held in store.

[PBS video: The Klondike Gold Rush]