Diamond Tooth Gertie’s town

Saturday, June 30, 2007

DAWSON CITY, YUKON — Wooden sidewalks, leaning shacks with tin rooves, emporiums with gold for sale and the raw backdrop of the rugged Yukon hills have captured our imaginations this evening, after a short drive through this historic town. As I sit here and digest my dinner of Pacific salmon and sourdough bread, the midnight sun hovers well above the horizon. We are in the town that the Gold Rush built, on the eve of Canada Day!
It’s a hopeful sign for tomorrow that the sun is up there shining — we saw very little of it on our journey today. More low clouds and plenty of steady rain washed over our rig as we pulled away from our free night’s campsite in Pelly Crossing. Our late night with the Mounties last night gave us a bit of a later start, but we didn’t have a huge distance to cover this time anyway.
The highway was surfaced with oiled gravel most of the way, which gives a solid base on which to roll, but is a bit harder on the tires than asphalt. There were a few "dipsy-doodles" in the road, as one camper we spoke to called them, when the rig rocks fore and aft over a dip in the road and the couch jumps six inches from the wall in the trailer behind us. For quite a few kilometers, the brush was growing fairly close to the shoulder of the road, and every now and then a stalwart fireweed plant would pierce the hard shell of the road and sprout defiantly a good six inches inside the traveled portion, seeming to say that Mother Nature could easily take over if left for a couple of years to her own devices.
Road crews put an end to that kind of thinking further down the road, where a wide swath was cut into the bush on either side of the highway, and huge piles of shredded trees and roots stood, every 100 feet or so, like giant bonfires waiting to be lit by some unseen torch. We wondered if this wasn’t done to provide a firebreak; there was evidence of several forest fires at various stages of regrowth along the way.
We trotted through the drizzle and in the door of the Moose Creek Lodge for lunch, and were presented with bowls of hot tomato-basil soup and thick sandwiches made with home-made bread, as we sat on wooden benches in a cozy nook of the log-cabin style building. The gift shop carried little jugs of local birch syrup, and there were gooey butter tarts and date squares for sale by the cash.
Once on our way again, we passed a lot of stands of black spruce and poplar, growing in sandy loam or gravelly soil. Every now and then there was a small creek or stream, bearing the names of early prospectors and other characters; Stewart, McQuesten, Barlow, Hunker.
As we got closer to Dawson, we pulled over at a couple of turnouts to take in some sweeping vistas to the west as well as to the east. The most spectacular one was the Tintina Trench Lookout — this geological phenomenon is the largest fault in North America. It was laid out before us like a huge trough, spreading miles and miles to the north and south, fringed on either side by pine trees, and off into the distance to a row of purple-blue mountains over which hovered anvil-grey thunderclouds. Looking at it made us feel very small and insignificant.
Once we had unhitched from the trailer at the Bonanza Creek RV Park just south of town, we drove in to look around and get our bearings, plus find a spot to eat dinner. The town is nestled between two mountain ranges to the east and west, and in front of the western range flows the Yukon River. There was a crowd of people gathered next to the river, and we realized that these were friends and relatives of the paddlers we had seen setting off in Whitehorse last Wednesday on the Yukon River Quest. A large board displayed all the teams’ names, and most of these were crossed off indicating that they had either been eliminated or arrived yesterday, but there were stragglers who still hadn’t made it through, including the all-female longboat team who were in the race for the first time this year. We spoke with two relatives of this group, and they said there was no way of contacting them en route, so all they could do was wait. They were still waiting there when we had finished our dinner and headed back to the trailer park.