Dawson City, Yukon

DAWSON CITY

Gas $6.61 a gallon!!!! Ouch.

We decided to have lunch at Sourdough Joe’s on the main drag. Halibut and chips is what we ordered, and was it ever terrific!

There is a walking/biking path around town alongside the Yukon River. The day we were there was a native celebration of some kind.

Outside the city limits is a dredge. It’s the largest one in North America. What a spectacle. The tour took us through all the inside operation. This thing is huge. The guide asked people to guess how many people it took to run such a huge piece of equipment. There were guesses of as many as 24 to as few as ten. The real figure was four. One watches the tailings on the conveyor belt, one is an oiler, one watches the buckets at the front, and one in the control room with the winches. The interesting thing about the dredge to me was that it was constantly moving right and left on a huge pivot. When the dredge needed to move forward, the pivot was raised, dredge moved, and the pivot run back into the center. It started out as steam driven, but wood was scarce, the riverboats consumed a cord of wood per hour and of course miners burned a lot for heat diminishing the supply of trees in previous years, forced them to find a new method. A hydro-electric plant was built for the main purpose of powering the dredge. A spin-off was that Dawson got electricity before most other parts of the country. I’ve included a picture of some of the gears, just wanted you to notice the people in the picture, it gives you an idea of the size of the gear.

Some locals in town told us it would be okay to spend the night in the parking lot of the dredge, and go to the tour in the AM. That’s what we did. It’s located up a pretty badly maintained dirt road about 12 miles in.

Just before you enter the town is Dome Road off to the right. Be sure to take it up to the top. Go in your toad or class-C. Not a road for a big-rig. At the top is a remarkable view of the whole area. We considered staying at the top that night, but decided it might be lover’s lane to the locals.

The only way to continue on to Alaska is to take the free ferry across the Yukon River and catch the Top of the World highway we’ll get to that next. We gather that the ferry landings are so crude is because the river must be continually shifting things around. It is just a crude dirt landing pad on both sides and they had a big pile of sandy soil that we figure they use to continually repair it.

We later spoke to people that had waited 3 hours for the ferry so we thought we should add that we didn’t. It was going the other direction as we pulled up in line but we were then on the first one leaving from our side of the river.