Days 38 & 39 (June 21 & 22). Dawson

From: Carmacks, YT

To: Dawson City, YT

Miles today: 222, 0

Total miles: 8956

On Sunday I pulled out of Carmacks and drove part of the Klondike Highway (YT 2), which was nominally all paved but had two long stretches of treacherous “construction.” (I put that term in quotes because the miles of gravel road had no construction equipment or workers on them.)  It started out following the Yukon River, then pulls away to the north, and finally rejoins it again near Dawson, where the Klondike River joins the Yukon. The Klondike River is really more of a creek, but it is attractive, and of course has a storied history in terms of gold.

Outside of Dawson I came across a house with an old C-band satellite antenna.  These point right at the satellite, where as the more modern Ka-band antennas tend to be “offset.”  Dawson is at about 64 degrees north.  Check out the elevation angle on the C-band antenna (the big one on the top of the mast) in the photo below; almost pointing at the horizon.  This may be about as far north as geostationary satellite service is practical. 

C-band Antenna (top) pointed just barely above the horizon. 64 degrees north.

Dawson City is a lot like Williamsburg, Virginia.  The core is essentially a preserved city from the past, but here of course it is a 1903 Gold town rather than a 1760 Colonial town. Like Williamsburg, much of the town in now a (Canadian) National Historic Site, and federal dollars are used to support it in various ways.  There are a lot of empty buildings, but you can tell that efforts are being made to preserve them.  The streets have been left unpaved and the sidewalks are planks of wood; you do sort of feel like you are in the period walking around.  Here are a couple of shots from the streets.  The big scar on the hill behind the town is apparently ancient; it is not a remnant of an overeager gold extraction attempt.

Dawson City, Yukon. 

Interestingly, all of these buildings were built in the years shortly after the gold rush; mostly 1900-05.  They were built by a group of people that wanted to encourage foreign (European) investment in large-scale gold dredging operations.  They built the town (after almost everyone had left!)  to make it appear that the town was thriving and that investment dollars would not be wasted.  Amazingly enough, this rouse actually worked!  They got the investments, they created a huge industrial dredging operation, and managed to make money for everyone by extracting a fairly high amount of gold for decades.  The industrial extraction of gold around Dawson ceased 1966.  Perhaps ironically, there are still gold miners in the area; they are once again small individual claim holders who work the areas themselves, albeit with machinery.  I will have to check the TV show “Yukon Gold” when I get home.

Dawson has a permanent population of about 2000 people.  This makes it the second biggest city in the Yukon.  (Whitehorse, the capitol, dwarfs this with 27,000 people, about three-quarters of the total population of the Yukon.  Watson Lake is the only other city with more than 1000 people; it comes in at about 1500.)  But the place was packed when I got here; I didn’t make the connection that the summer solstice would be a good reason to visit.  The first night, the solstice itself, I ended up staying is a lovely old building called “The Bunkhouse.”  It had tiny rooms, with bathrooms and showers down the hall, and it made me feel even more like I was back in 1903.  I loved it.  (But I did move to another, more modern hotel called the El Dorado the second night.) 

My hotels in Dawson.  Left; The Bunkhouse.  Right: The "Eldo," as it is called there.  

Knowing that I had a day off from riding on Monday, and since it was the Solstice, I spent the afternoon and evening going from one bar to another getting into conversations with people.  Some were tourists, who came by RV, car, bus, and many on motorcycles.  People from all over; some Canadians and Americans, but just as many Germans, Poles, and others. I heard French being spoken.  I had a long conversation with the manager of one of the restaurant/saloons, who lived in Winnipeg most of the year but was from Greece and intended to go back there. 

I talked to an interesting couple for a while.  The guy was a self-employed geologist who took samples of people’s claims for a fee and analyzed them.  The woman clued me in on the real story; there wasn’t much gold left here, but Canadian law requires that some effort be made on any given claim every few years or it reverts to the state.  So often they are paid by people who don’t care what they find, they just want them to poke around and charge them so they can hold on to the rights to it. But they both love going out in the field and digging holes (with an auger machine), so it all works out.

Back at the Bunkhouse I talked for a couple of hours with a German motorcyclist only slightly younger than myself who was taking an entire year off to go ride; he was going to South America after Canada and Alaska.  I talked to a number of bikers; it is interesting to hear the stories of deep gravel and slick chip seal while the terror was still fresh, before they evolve into the canonical legends that they must eventually become.  The lessons I am learning are that (1) it’s not just me, some of these roads are really difficult, even for experienced off-road riders; and (2) don’t ride on chip seal when it’s wet.  I have days of chip seal riding ahead of me; it rains less in the morning, so I better get to bed now. 

By the way, here is a view out of my room at The Bunkhouse, Dawson City, at about 2 am on the Solstice. 

View of the sky from Dawson (2.3 degrees south of the Arctic Circle) at the sun's lowest, on the solstice.