Day 9 - Keno City

We were up holiday-early this morning, and when we drew back the curtains the sun was blazing down, and all the other cars that had been outside the motel the night before were gone.  Arthur was there all on his own.  Before loading him up we went back down to the river and took some more pictures, this time in the sunshine instead of the gloom of yesterday evening.  It's a stunning spot, one of the real stand-out views of this holiday.

There doesn't seem to be much else to Mayo.  We couldn't find a supermarket, or indeed just a minimarket, to buy any food, so, having packed our tat into Arthur, we drove out to the gas station to refuel ("you can't miss it, it looks like it's about to fall down").  It had three pumps.  One was diesel, one wasn't working, and the other one only had one working dispenser (the other was padlocked to the pump).  A small queue of vehicles had formed, none of them in a particular rush.  Eventually it was our turn.  At first I thought the pump had been installed by Moses it was that old, but then a guy who showed me which bits of it to press to make it work told me of another, older, pump he knew out someplace that was still handcranked.

We paid for the fuel, and also bought a ghastly sausage roll (which we warmed in the garage's microwave) and two cups of coffee.  I have to say the woman running the gas station was really friendly and helpful, asking us about our travels and giving us some information about the trips we would be doing today.

Finally - having breakfasted by the side of the road overlooking a fantastic lake view - we were on our way to Keno City.  While the big attraction in this part of the world is !!THE GOLD RUSH!!, actually mining and prospecting had been going on in the Yukon and Alaska for about 50 years prior to the discovery of large amounts of relatively easily obtainable gold in the Klondike River.  People had been taking silver out of the Stewart River valley long before gold was the "in thing", and the road from Stewart Crossing to Keno City is known as The Silver Trail.

Heading towards Keno City from Mayo, the road soon goes from paved to dirt-packed.  It's a good road in the dry weather, I'm not sure it would be so forgiving in the wet.  When Canadians have asked us where we're going on our travels, as soon as we mention "Keno City" you can see their lips twist slightly in a wry smile. It's the word "city" that does it.  It's as far removed from being a city as a baboon is from being a heart surgeon.

Mining pretty much dried up in Keno in the 1970s, but at one point it had been a thriving town.  These days a group of die-hards remain, and are doing their best to turn it into a decent tourist attraction; they're doing a pretty good job, too.  Sandon, British Columbia, take note.  We got there just before noon.  The weather was, again, as nice as you could wish for, the sun beating down, the air clear and fresh. We visited the museum, and the interpretive centre next door (which basically just holds a massive stuffed grizzly bear that scares the pants off you when you open the door).  Then we sought out and found the Beer Bottle House, as recommended by the lady from the gas station that morning.  It's not a house made of beer bottles, but insulated by them.  Geordie Dawson, who bought the house in the late 1960s, saw that all the old timers used stacked bottles instead of windows, so he started to layer them around his house.  It took him four years and 32,000 bottles, but he finished it.  You just can't buy that sort of dedication to a task.

Having finished our tour of Keno City, we headed on up Keno Hill.  This is an 11 km drive up the worst road I've yet seen in Canada; not really a road, more a brick path, very bumpy, and almost washed out in places.  At the top, a signpost with arms pointing to cities all over the world.  That and the most spectacular view out over the McQuestern River valley and the Ogilvie and Wernecke mountains.

11 bumpy km back down, and we had lunch at the Keno City Snack Bar. It looked grim from the outside, but Mike Mancini the proprieter was another of those wonderfully warm people we've met in the Yukon.  He told us about the recent history of the town, and how people like him are trying to make a tourist attraction of the place, even though the government wants to let everything go "back to nature" (as if there wasn't enough nature in this enormous territory).  We sat outside eating pizza that had been homemade by Mike, and neither of us wanted to move on.  What a captivating little place, what a beautiful moment in our holiday.

But another city was calling, Dawson City this time, and the hub of our Gold Rush experience.  Back down The Silver Trail we drove, until the road became paved again, then at Stewart Crossing we got back onto Highway 2, the Klondike Highway, and started the drive up to Dawson (it's Dawson or Dawson City, depending on how much air you have left in your lungs by the end of your sentence).

We got here at just after 7 pm, unpacked, showered, then ate a pretty decent meal at our hotel, the Westmark Inn.  It's a nice enough hotel, but has the distinction of being the first place, in all of our trips around Canada, where there hasn't been an internet connection in the room. So I'm typing this up in Notepad, and in a moment I'm going to pop across to the main part of the hotel (there are at least three separate buildings) and cut and paste it into my blog.  I'll probably do it sitting out on the deck with the other internet hogs.  It's 11 pm as I write this, and there are a few of them out there.  You see, the sun isn't due to set for another hour and a half...

Tomorrow, we explore Dawson City, and pin down the story of the Gold Rush.