Dawson City, Yukon Territory

Tonights post is going to be hastily thrown together as I'm running out

of time to get it done.

Our visit here in Dawson is coming to a close - tomorrow we head out over

the Top of the World Highway (google it) and I want to try and give you

a small taste of what we experienced here.

Our campground - The Yukon River Campground (Yukon Govt) was

fantastic.  The great thing is that the Yukon Govt Campgrounds still provide

free firewood which makes life so much easier for us modern day pioneers.

Since the campground is located on the opposite shore from Dawson we took the ferry

back and forth as needed.

Dawson is a neat town that was mostly a soggy Moose pasture until the gold

strikes of 1897.  Once the gold rush began it grew to over 30,000 people in a year.

Today it has a population of only a few thousand.

It retains much of its old charm - much of the historic buildings are restored or

preserved, and all but one of the streets are still dirt.

In town alongside the Yukon River is the preserved Steamer Keno.

It was much like the Klondike that we visited in Whitehorse - only smaller.

As I said previously - the steamers were an important part of life here in

the Yukon until about the mid 1950's when the Klondike Highway (which we

traveled to get here) was completed.

This afternoon we headed up the Dome road to see the views from

the top of Dome Mountain.  On the way we saw this Fox.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and call it a Black Fox.

Our self portrait from the top of the mountain.

You can see Dawson City and the Yukon River Below.

Later we went to the Gold Dredge #4.

This massive machine was a gold processing monster.

It dug for gold along the bonanza creek.  As it dug, it created its own pond

over 50' deep.  It slowly inched forward eating dirt, processing it and spitting

it out the back end (minus the gold it extracted)

In about 14 yrs it processed 800 metric tons of gold.

Last night we had happy hour (s) over at our rig along with a campfire.

I took this picture last night behind the camp.

It was taken at 12:30  (yes 30 minutes after midnight)

Tomorrow we head off over the Top of the World Highway.

You can see it below winding its way west towards Alaska.

We will once again be out of cell and internet range for a few days.

Once we get down to the Kenai Peninsular I'm hoping that my

Verizon MiFi will kick in.

Till then...