Yukon Ho!(pt.2)

After leaving Whitehorse elated with the past couple days, the drive to Dawson did barely anything to calm us down. We had heard stories of Dawson being a city of freedom and borderline madness. To an extent, it’s true. The drive is really long, the city is small and beautiful, and Dawson sits on the joint of two rivers in the middle of nowhere. The two rivers are the Klondike and the Yukon, two very opposing forces of nature. The Klondike is crystal clear and sparkling, the Yukon is silt-filled and the color of fresh mud. Where they meet at Dawson there is a split, and the two colors run alongside one another, swirling in little eddies reminiscent of a cup of coffee.
The city itself is pretty picturesque, though it needs something to drive it forward. Right now, it sits on it’s laurels of the Gold rush so entirely that it is almost depressing. The people at the tourist information still wear traditional garb, and the buildings have been rebuilt to appear as they did when it was the infamous “Paris of the North”. The past is important to Dawson, because not only was it the most populated time, but also a time when, for purely mineral reasons, Dawson had the attention of a continent. It is impressive and depressing all at once. To see a city like Dawson, sprawled on a lakeside swamp and proudly full of history, is impressive. To see a city with barely a future prospect at all, whose largest economy remains gold mining and who can’t seem to find a further drive for something new, is depressing. I think global warming might help Dawson. That’s only sort of a joke. They won’t have to melt as much ice for gold mining, and the climate will be nicer in winter. This is not a small bear.

All in all, we had a great experience there. We met up with our favorite Albertans(so far) at the local internet café, and rocked out a dinner of Tom and Simones pig cheeks with them. Checked out the Dawson City Museum, which was intriguing to a point. To see the extremes to which people went to get here is awe-inspiring. Almost nobody found gold beyond the first people to arrive, so most of the massive voyages here were useless. These men had to haul at minimum 1000lbs of goods through the Chilkoot pass, which is not pleasant at all. The RCMP weighed your equipment, and anything less than 1000 lbs was not allowed to enter, as adequate provisions to survive a Yukon winter weighed in to a thousand. After the museum we decided to try some of the local activities. These include drinking, yelling loudly at bars, and general revelry. Post-hitting the town, hopping from bar to bar to gambling hall, then back to a bar appropriately called ‘the pit’, at which there was a great live band, including banjo. I was impressed. Me and Rob went swimming in the Yukon, which is a really bad idea if your drunk and it’s late, which we were and it was. The river is extremely fast moving and at least one hapless tourist gets sucked downstream every year. I think I was hoping in the back of my head it would be me. Would that ever be a story to tell. Anyways, neither of us were bad enough swimmers to be that lucky tourist, so we just froze a little. Once we got out we discovered it was once again almost 4AM. This no light shift thing is a difficult sell. At 2AM when the bars go out, the sun is barely going down. It bothers your head. I’m so geared to sleep when it’s dark, and don’t often check time, which doesn’t lead to a functional lifestyle in the Yukon. We checked out the dredges and gold mines the next day, looked for farms on the west side of the river, met some Australians gold panning, and called it the second night of Dawson. It was an interesting day. The dredges are huge beyond imagination, like a steamboat, just in the middle of a pit of gravel. They are the monster machines designed to get to the gold and take it out once the rivers had run dry. Gold panning is an exercise in monotony. The Aussies had been at it for hours, and got nothing but sore backs. We tried for five minutes, decided against it, and sat with them joking around for a half hour or so. Good sorts.

Whilst in Dawson we also saw the cabin’s of Robert Service and Jack London, Dawson’s two literary claims to fame. They were somewhat a pique of interest, but without the right timing, we missed to reading at Robert Services cabin and Jack London cost too much to look at pictures on the walls. We decided Dawson was to be cut short, and headed back to Whitehorse to get back to civilization.

Back in Whitehorse, though late, we went straight to Tom and Simones, who I had called earlier to let them know we would be back this eve. A note on telephone use in the Yukon. A 15 minute card anywhere civilized gets you one minute in the Yukon. When we arrived they were out, so we went down the street to make ourselves dinner. First we prepared an appy of beef liver with apple and radish salad. Fried liver on croustini with a little julienne apple salad to match. Damn decent canapé. Dinner was the chicken from slaughtered a few days previous. We rubbed it in herbs and seasoning and oil, and I built a big campfire to cook it in. We made roasted garlic polenta and buttered peas to accompany the chicken. However, we didn’t know how hot the fire was, so the chicken had an unknown cooking time. When I checked in my trust cooking companion(Harold McGee, ‘On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen”, possibly the best book I own) it appears that red hot coals at typically in the range of 1100 C. When we discovered this and the fact that the tin foil was cracking, we pulled it out to check. It was exactly perfectly cooked. The only issue was the skin, which was roasted beyond edibility. We peeled it, and ate what turned out to be a sumptuous feast. Just as we had finished washing out dishes, Tom and Simone pulled up, and we went to their house to punish a few bottles of wine. The wines were of the sort you don’t get without lots and lots of money. Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, Les Grands Vins de Leoville, Chateau Margaux and others. We opened the first bottle, which was corked. The second was oxidized and tasted a bit like caramel and cardboard. The third was an extremely nice bottle of wine and we punished it and one other before calling it a night. All the while we had poetry recited dutifully by the son of the house, and conversations ranging from food to clothing to anything. To fully demonstrate how much of a badass maniac Tom is, the next story must be first told and second believed. It is a true story. I now sleep on three bottles of wine that are each much older than me. Not light travel for them, but I hope they’ll do well. Tom traded us the three bottles for a promise. The promise is that we’ll create a book with recipes, each indicative of the local food we found to be of top quality in the province we made it. Basically recording, in the form of recipes, our campfire highlights. At the end, we are to send it to him by snail mail. We’re going to go a little bit all out on this project, as him, Simone and Graham went a little all out on being hospitable to us. It was an amazing experience for us in the Yukon, and I could have stayed a lot longer than we did. There are deadlines ahead, sadly, and the Stampede calls. The next morning we awoke, made a huge breakfast of ham and bacon and Tom’s signature potato pancakes, and headed South into the mountains. The Yukon was a phenomenal place. I’m jealous to all those who call it home. More jealous of anyone who call Tom and Simone a neighbor or friend who they see on more than two occasions. Thanks so much for the welcome, the experience and the generosity you showed us, I promise that recipe book is going to be the only thing that enters the Yukon that can rival the bad-assery of the Rudges. Yet another slew of people that I have no doubt I’ll see again in my lifetime, and can’t wait for when I do.