Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Day 6: Whitehorse to Dawson City
…but first we drove to the Whitehorse airport so I could pay my respects to the world's
largest weathervane, a Douglas DC-3. It flew in the Yukon from 1946 until 1970, when
some cretin put it on its nose. The Yukon Flying Club and the community of Whitehorse
restored it and mounted it on a pedestal twenty feet above the ground and there it sits
today, nose always in the wind.
And here we leave the tale of World War II construction and take up the tale of the
Klondike Gold Rush. You all know the story, right? How George Washington Carmack's
trading post on the Yukon went belly up in 1896, when he moved his family to the Forty-
mile River where he could feed them on salmon and sell wood to buy everything else?
How that summer (on August 16
th
, to this day a holiday in the Yukon Territory) Carmack
saw gold in his pan after so many years of lying about it that he was nicknamed Lying Ge-
orge? How that year they pulled a ton of gold out of the Klondike and its tributaries and
piled it on boats and a month later the gold was in Seattle and San Francisco and the stam-
pede was on?
The stampeders wouldn't recognize the road we're driving but the valleys and moun-
tains and rivers are little changed from that day. We stopped at Carmack's, named for Ly-
ing George, and at Five Finger Rapids, the worst rapids on the Yukon, the sign says, the
rapids dreaded by all Yukon paddlewheelers, but the river was so high from snow melt be-
cause of the warm weather that there weren't any rapids. Lupine and wild sweet pea car-
peted the roadsides in purple and magenta, a nice backdrop for a grazing grizzly sow and
her cub.
We rolled sweatily into Dawson City at 5 p.m., a town of two thousand on the corner
where the Klondike flows into the Yukon. We visited Robert Service's cabin and Jack
London's cabin (they're half a block apart). We walked around town reading signs of what
the buildings used to be, many of them the previous residences of women who sold what
one reporter of the time called “the slow, juicy waltz.” We looked at gold rush era pictures
at the visitor's centre, where they have a model of a gold dredge so detailed it might actu-
ally work. Then even Sharyn, a Texas native, threw in the towel. There was a fan in our
hotel room.
That day, 345.7 miles, and I was praying for rain.
