Day 12 - Dredge Number 4

It was a slow start this morning.  Nothing really to do but eat breakfast (cereal bars and coffee, this crazy hotel doesn't have a restaurant), then catch the complimentary taxi to the airport.  The taxi driver was a Croatian ex-army utter nutcase.  He spent the entire 8 mile journey bemoaning the human race and informing us that we were all doomed to die in religious and race-hate terrorism (and I'd thought the people of Inuvik were a model of how different races can live together in some semblence of cooperation).  His lunacy was only further emphasised by the fact that, even though he had a thick eastern European accent, he kept dropping Canadian "eh?"s into his sentences... "Ve are all doomt, hhhlisten to me, vot I say is ze trute, eh?"

Inuvik airport is slightly larger than Dawson City airport in that it has a real baggage carousel instead of just a hatch in the wall through which the luggage handlers push your suitcases.  We were there about an hour and a half early, again before the Air North terminal had opened, but there were more passengers around and the time seemed to pass faster than it had at Dawson yesterday morning.  Soon enough we were called to Gate 2 (I believe Gate 1 is where we arrived yesterday), which was held open by one of the airport employees with her foot as we stepped through.  "Step around the wing," she called, "step around the wing... oh hang on, I've given you the wrong boarding pass stub, come back!"

We managed to get seats next to each other this time (actually the plane was far from full), and took off on time, landing back at a beautifully warm Dawson City Airport just after lunch time, lunch being a better-than-Bruce's sandwich on the plane.  Arthur was there where we'd left him, in the long-stay carpark (which was just a gravel patch across the road from the airport).  We fired him up and headed back to town, with two stops planned before we came back to the hotel.

First was the Midnight Dome, a viewpoint from the top of the hill behind Dawson City.  I'd seen no pictures from here during my internet searches, so had no idea what to expect.  What we got was a jaw-dropping view over the valley with the Yukon river flowing south to north, the tiny-looking Klondike joining from the east, and Dawson City itself looking small and cosy adjacent the two.  It was truly spectacular, and made me wonder what any of the feverish and frantic Gold Rush stampeders would have thought of it all had they made their way up there.

Second, after filling Arthur's tank for the second time this holiday, we set off in search of Dredge Number 4.  The Klondike Gold Rush lasted about two years, then another strike was announced in Alaska, and most of the miners and prospectors left Dawson City for new pastures.  The population of the town dropped from 30,000 down to about 2,000, but those who remained were a different breed.  Not for them the pain-staking manual labour of panning and shovel-mining, these guys brought in the big guns, the mechanical mining systems.  The most avaricious of these were the dredges, which effectively performed the same function as a prospector's sluice box, but on a much more massive scale.  The first of these dredges appeared in 1899, but the biggest of them (technically the largest wooden-hulled bucket-lined dredge in North America) was built in 1912.  This was Dredge Number 4. It operated in the Klondike region until 1959, and on one record breaking day alone in the 1920s it produced gold worth over a million dollars.

These dredges would run 24 hours a day for between 6 and 10 months of the year, tearing through the Klondike fields: the landscape around Dawson to this day is reformed from the Gold Rush days, piled high with miles of discarded rocks (known as tailings) from the dredges.  Number 4 is enormous, and at 8 storeys high far bigger than I imagined it would be.  I thought it might be a cast-off piece of machinery, but in fact it's a lovingly restored relic maintained by the superb Parks Canada.

From Dredge Number 4 we came back to the hotel room from which we've been absent for the last day, and dropped our things off before going over to the main hub of this multi-part hotel for beer o'clock.  We were sitting out on the decking when the first real rainstorm we've experienced this holiday hit, and drove us inside.  We've had great weather for the last couple of weeks, but the rest of the holiday looks a little cooler with perhaps more rain.  I can't really complain, I was more unsure about the weather in this part of the world than anything else.

Tonight we ate, of all things, Greek, at The Drunken Goat Taverna.  It looks small and unprepossessing from the outside, and when you get inside it's still small but very lively.  We had the sample plate, and it was fantastic, beautifully cooked meat with rice.  Very impressed.

We still have a couple of days left in Dawson, and there are lots more interesting nuggets to discover.  See what I did there?