Like already described we reached Dawson City over the Top-of-the-World-Highway shortly after we entered Canada again. Dawson, the city of gold seemed not to have lost any of its wild western flair since the last gold rush. Gravel roads, sidewalks out of wooden planks and colorful wooden frontages along the road.
Going for a walk through the historic Dawson City.
There was only missing, that there were horse-drawn carriages still on the roads. But like anywhere else, of course, there are lots of cars on the streets nowadays. On the very first day, we took part in a city tour, that got us a lot of knowledge about the history then and now and made it possible to access some of the historic buildings.
Then and now, the bar is always a good place to be at in Dawson.
To stay in contact with the rest of the world you had to visit the post office.
Dawson is, like back in the time, still, a town of a manageable size which made it really worth it for us to hike on the Midnight Dome and get a bird’s eye view over the city and the huge Yukon River.
Dawson City from above! And the huge Yukon river next to it.
We just arrived here and already felt really comfortable at this place! Maybe it was also a bit because of the bright and sunny weather, as summer definitely has arrived here already. For the next day, we planned to visit the surrounding area of the city as we wanted to see the gold fields, too.
View on the gold fields in the Klondike Valley and the Bonanza Valley in the background.
So we visited the Dredge #4, which was the biggest floating dredger ever used in North America. The guided tour was free for us thanks to the 150th anniversary of Parks Canada.
The Dredge #4, the biggest one in North America.
In TV-Shows I already saw a lot about dredges but being in one of them and seeing the mechanisms, that were used at the beginning of the 20th century, was just amazing.
The huge gearbox,…
…the inside of the control tower…
… and the large sluice boxes inside the dredge. Awesome technology for that time.
Unbelievable, how much effort the people back then put into getting the gold out of the ground. We heard a lot about digging gold already but now it was our turn to try our luck. I bought a mid-sized gold pan in one of the gift shops nearby and equipped with a shovel and the pan we made our way to the public claim.
Professional gold panning nowadays.
We washed several pans full of dirt and, as you can probably imagine, we weren’t successful at all. The purchase wasn’t completely futile anyways, as the gold pan got another function for us soon afterward. More about that will be told in the next post. For us, the time in Dawson was over now and we left the city on the Klondike Highway, turning on the famous Dempster Highway shortly afterward. What we experienced there? Well, be patient for the next post!
