Wild Places and Open Spaces

Next stop – Dawson City. Our first impression of the place was great; a quaint place with lots of historical (authentic) looking places that hadn’t succumbed to tourists. It was a place Jim had always dreamed to be because of the goldrush adventures of the past. The town lived up to it’s impressions…we loved it.

First things first though. We immediately found a guy to repair the crack in the windshield before it spread. Oh yeah, didn’t I mention that? A seemingly small stone was tossed up at our car windshield on the way to Dawson City and it cracked the windshield smack dab right in the drivers view. Up until this time we thought our windshield was made of bullet proof glass due to the number of boulders that had knocked up against it, but guess not. Anyways, we found a nice guy, who was a Jack of all trades it seemed….unfortunately repairing windshields did not appear to be one of those trades. He meant well, got $40.00 out of us, but our windshield is far from perfect. When the sunlight shines just right, the reflection from the crack is blinding to the driver. (however, sunshine is few and far between these days! more about that later…) Oh well, here’s hoping it doesn’t spread til we get home.

The government campground we intended on camping at was on the Yukon River, on the other side of Dawson. In order to get to it we had to take a little ferry across the river which runs 24hrs a day and is considered part of the highway service, so it is free. In the winter, there is an ice bridge there so people can drive across the river. However, for 6 weeks in the spring and 6 weeks in the fall – melt and freeze up – the river is inaccessible. Therefore, the people that live across the river or along the river are somewhat stranded. The ferry itself is more like a tiny barge that can carry about 8-12 vehicles across at a time. It appears to be somewhat difficult to drive because the river is flowing so quickly and the boat never really stops at the landing where you drive off – it just runs into it and keeps running into it to stay there.

After setting up, we made our way back across the river to explore Dawson. We toured the S.S. Keno – a paddlewheeler that in its day would be a joy to the residents of Dawson because it would be the first boat up the river in the spring to bring them supplies. The rest of the season she shipped silver ore and gold, then early fall she’d be the last boat out of Dawson for the long winter.

Had dinner out – what a treat! Jim ordered a roast beef sandwich and I ordered a “special” salad…my salad tasted good, but only took up about a sixth of my plate and I would have needed 6 more to feel full – oh well, such is life when you try to order out on a budget.

At night we went to Diamond Tooth Gerties for some typical Frontier entertainment: can can girls, gambling and booze. Ran into Mike – our pizza/former Mayor/museum curator acquaintance – again here. Was nice to see him again – familiar faces are extra special when one is traveling. Last show was at 12:00am and much to Jim’s delight each show the girls had become more scantily dressed! Afterwards we headed across the river to camp – it’s great here because it doesn’t matter what time one rolls home at….it’s always light out!

Next day we toured the Dawson City Museum where we watched a film on Dawson City’s history that was narrated by Pierre Burton. Pierre Burton lived in Dawson with his family until he was 15yrs old. Their house is small and cute, although it cannot be toured as it is a private residence. Jim has read practically all of Burton’s books, but embarrassingly I have read none. Now that I have so much history behind me of the goldrush and the area, I’ll have to get myself reading because I have no excuse not to read books from such an exceptional writer/Canadian.

We drove up the famous Bonanza Creek Road – leading to the very spot (or so we thought) where Carmacks and Skookum Jim, on poor Henderson’s advice, struck gold and started the Klondike Gold Rush in 1896. Unfortunately, there was not much of a memorial there (a little plaque somewhat near the creek), and in fact we aren’t really even sure exactly where they actually struck gold. Typical…another major historical spot that is not respected by our government; here a major event in Canadian history (it’s even in recent history) is hardly even observed. No statue, no interpretive boards, no arrow pointing to where they struck it rich. There were even what appeared to be artefacts around the area – which may or may not be there on purpose – that were not labelled or taken care of. In fact the most notable part of the ‘heritage site’ is a filthy stinking outhouse and overflowing garbage cans! We hoped nobody would bother driving the extra couple kilometers to visit the dirty little Canadian embarrassment. (In America, all Lewis and Clark had to do was step foot on soil and any State/place in which they did is now a national monument with proud bells and whistles everywhere).

The next tour was of a restored dredge – Dredge #4. Dredging was the “new way” of mining for placer gold after the goldrush; basically a large backhoe at one end and a huge sluice box at the other. It was much more efficient at finding large quantities of gold, not to mention completely changing the landscape around it. A total environmental disaster. (By the way, dredging does still take place in many places around the world). Very interesting, and worthwhile restoring, but we were left wondering why so much money was spent on this when it would have only taken a few dollars to give the Bonanza Creek site (which actually was the spark that ignited the eventual dredging) the significance it deserves?

Next stop – the Dempster Highway. We decided to drive up the highway that afternoon. The Dempster is a dirt/gravel road for nearly 800km to Inuvik. At ~400km, it crosses the Arctic Circle. For about a month we had been hemming and hawing whether we should drive it in our little Saturn Ion, which by now we had been treating like it was a 4×4 Pathfinder. It’s hard not to when driving places we’d been. We had heard various reports/warnings about the road from “it will be absolutely no problem in a car”, to, “it’s practically impassable and if attempted be sure to have at least 2 spare tires”. We decided to take our chances with the former advice…we had our donut just in case. Jim was dying to fish the waters along it and get to the Arctic watershed, not to mention seeing the wildlife the area boasted. We couldn’t pass up the chance…it’s all about the adventure, right?

This entry was posted on Friday, August 4th, 2006 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.