Dawson City

After my visit to Skagway, I became interested in the Gold Rush that occurred in this area in 1898-1900, so I detoured north to Dawson City, which is where all of the "stampeders" were heading. This was a town that sprang up "overnight" due to the influx of people hoping to strike it rich. Just before I arrived in town, I spotted a huge porcupine and an otter playing in the river:



The town still had some very old buildings left over from the Gold Rush days:



There was also a very large, and very old, cemetary where many of the original townsfolk are buried:



There were many graves that were unmarked, some of the old wooden crosses had writting too faint to make out, and I was surprised of the number of children who only lived a very short time, i.e., 1 day, 3 days, etc.

Well, enough of that! I also had to try my hand at panning for gold. I drove out quite a ways to a working goldmine called Goldbottom. The modern way to mine for gold is to literally sift through tons of rock, gravel, and sand to find a few slivers of gold. There are many steps to removing the gold from all that muck. It starts with a backhoe depositing huge amounts of dirt into a giant machine that shakes and washes the dirt, producing a concentrated "sluce". After two weeks of effort, generating about 100, 5 gallon buckets, the sluce is then refined by hand to finally separate the gold dust and flakes. Here is the backhoe and giant shaker machine in action:



And here's the old fashion way:



I panned for about an hour and actually got a couple af flakes! It was back-breaking work! Very fun little tour though!