2004/08 Yukon trip - The road home - |
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We were now back in Dawson City after our 8-day trip on the Dempster. We stopped there long enough to do some shopping and then headed along the Bonanza Creek Road into the Klondike diggings. Bonanza Creek was where the big Klondike strike was made back in the 1897 Gold Rush. Some of the area is preserved as “historic” and some is still being actively mined. Parks Canada has a display at Dredge #4, which is an enormous machine, a relic of the early mining era. See the size in comparison to our camper. Imagine that monster chomping its way along the valley.
The Klondike Visitors Association owns claim #6 on Bonanza Creek, about a half mile above 
where the great gold strike was made. Visitors are allowed to mine on this claim free for a maximum of three days a year, so we spent a few hours digging up sand from the cliffs behind us and then swirling it though a gold pan, all to little financial gain. Sandie had made a friend of a local prospector who seemed to have more advice and beer than wealth, but he did locate a few tiny flakes of gold in our pan. We camped nearby at the confluence of Bonanza and Eldorado Creeks listening to the water burbling over all that gold.
Friday 13th August
It was a cool night and we woke up to fog, thick enough to blank out the surrounding scenery. As we hadn’t found enough gold to pay for new clothes it looked like we’d have to wash the dirty ones, so we headed back into Dawson City to the historic laundromat, and postponed further sightseeing until we could see the sights. One of the sights is the building in the picture, built directly on permafrost without any insulation or pilings.
The fog burned off in mid-morning but the smoke remained. We drove up the Midnight Dome to
have lunch. This is where the town of Dawson parties on the longest day. It’s south of the Arctic Circle so it only sees the sun for about 22 hours, but it’s still a great excuse for a party! It also has a great view of the Klondike River flowing into the Yukon, and of the gold diggings. At least, it does on a clear day, but on this day it was too smoky to see much detail.
We stocked up on the usual necessities and headed off for about a week’s trip to Watson Lake to rejoin the Alaska Highway. But first we drove the 60-mile gravel road loop that connects all the mining operations with Dawson City. It begins at Bonanza Creek, skirts Eldorado Creek, winds around King Solomon’s Dome, and ends up at Hunker Creek. Because the creek gravels are loaded with gold, 
the assumption has always been that the dome contains the mother lode, and there have been many attempts to drill into the mountain. The mother lode has never been found, and all the current mining is done on the gravels, either with a bulldozer or with placer mining. Placer mining involves the use of a high velocity water jet that just wears the softer mountains down and reduces them to gravel. It sounds horrible but after over a hundred years of mining there isn’t much scenery left to destroy in this area.