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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
