Dawson City

In 1898 Dawson and the goldfields around it held perhaps thirty thousand people, most of whom had walked over a mountain pass and boated down the Yukon to get here, and for a moment it was the largest settlement west of Winnipeg. Most of them were gone within a year or two. What remains is a small town of around fifteen hundred where the streets are still dirt and the pavements still wooden boardwalks, kept that way deliberately, with false-fronted buildings leaning at angles as the permafrost beneath them shifts. Dredge No. 4, a wooden-hulled gold dredge eight storeys high, sits where it was abandoned in the creeks. Gold is still mined in the valleys, and you can pan for it yourself.

History

The Hän-speaking Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in and their forebears hunted and gathered here, and the heart of their homeland was Tr'ochëk, a fishing camp where the Klondike meets the Yukon. Joseph Ladue founded the town in January 1897 and named it after the geologist George M. Dawson, who had mapped the region in 1887; the gold rush made it a city of 16,000 to 17,000 by 1898, it was the capital of the Yukon from 1898 into the early 1950s, and fires swept the downtown in 1897, 1899 and 1900. In 1978 a construction dig uncovered more than 500 forgotten films from the early 20th century on flammable nitrate stock (Wikipedia, Dawson City).

The main sights

• The boardwalks and dirt streets - kept as they were, buildings leaning on permafrost.
• Dredge No. 4 - an eight-storey gold dredge left in the creek bed.
• The Midnight Dome - the hill above town, with the whole river confluence below.
• Panning the creeks - claims where visitors can work a pan themselves.

When to go

June to September is the season, with almost round-the-clock daylight at solstice and Discovery Day celebrated in mid-August. The Dempster Highway north starts here and is a summer proposition. Winter is dark and cold and most visitor businesses close.

Things to know

It is six hours from Whitehorse on a highway with few services, and getting there is most of the commitment. Many visitor operations run only from late May to early September. The town leans hard on the gold rush story and some of it is staged. The Dempster Highway beyond is gravel and hard on tyres.

Nearby

Tombstone Territorial Park is two hours up the Dempster; Whitehorse is six hours south.

Key facts