Dawson City, Yukon

 On the Yukon River

 Up on the dome road you get a good view of Dawson City and the confluence of the silty Yukon and clear Klondike rivers.

The Yukon River flows about 2,000 miles from down south near Skagway to Dawson, across Alaska and then it empties into the Bering Sea on Alaska's west coast. If you started from Dawson when the ice breaks up in May, you could float the whole thing just before it freezes again in October...

In the winter they stop running the free ferry and drive heavy trucks over the river to the road to Chicken, Alaska.

The native people caught King Salmon here every summer until the 1898 Gold Rush when 50,000 stampeders arrived to look for gold. You can see where the Klondike river bed was dredged up into vast fields of rock in the search for gold....the salmon runs have been badly depleted by that and by commercial fishing downstream...

In the evening we go back to see Diamond Tooth Gertie and her dancing girls. Later we gamble, drink Diet Coke and I pay the girls a dollar a dance from midnight to breakfast....we smell whiskey and fried moose burgers in the air....

The natives have intermarried with the miners. This is a picture of Georgette Macleod in a birch bark canoe on the Yukon...

We take a tour of the Yukon River with Tommy, our native guide.

Tommy caught over 1,000 chum salmon last year to feed his 52 sled dogs though the winter...

Tommy lives in this cabin about five miles downriver from Dawson. In the winter he travels overland 25 miles to Dawson for supplies by dogsled or snowmobile....

 I am a lumberjack and I'm ok...

Lot's of fixer-uppers are available in Dawson...

Mrs Phred above Dawson...

This is Tommy's fish wheel...

Tommy shows us one of the King salmon in his fish wheel trap....he built the fish wheel himself.

Tommy keeps his winter food in this outdoor cooler.

Tommy's guesthouse cabin...

Tommy has a sense of humor...

The buildings in Dawson that were built on the ground suffer from melting permafrost...the heated buildings melt the permafrost unevenly...most of the newer buildings are constructed up off the ground...