Where rivers are lined with gold

In 1896, George Carmack, Dawson Charlie, and Skookum Jim Mason found gold in the riverbeds of Bonanza Creek, an offshoot of the Klondike River outside of Dawson City, Yukon. After news of the discovery spread, a stampede of prospectors from around the world arrived on Front Street to stake their claims. By 1898, the town’s population of 1,500 had ballooned to 30,000.

For more than 100 years, Dawson City has lured adventurous souls and nomadic wanderers with the promise of golden opportunities and the possibility of striking it rich. Today a diverse community of miners, artists and First Nations people remains.

“This place has always retained really independent characters, colourful people,” said Dawson City’s Mayor Wayne Potoroka. “It adds a flavour to the town that is really unparalleled anywhere else in Canada.”

Dawne Mitchell seemed destined to end up in a place like Dawson City. As a young woman, she would often stare at her globe and point to places in the world that were far from anywhere she had ever been and imagined what it was like to live there.

Before arriving in Dawson City in the summer of 1977, Mitchell had left her family’s farm on the prairies of Saskatchewan to travel the south-western United States. She worked odd jobs for extra cash, content on exploring the world as a means of an education.

When a distant cousin told her about an opportunity to work on Bonanza Creek teaching tourists how to pan for gold, she packed her bags and headed north. Even though she knew little about the region – or gold mining – her wanderlust took over.

“I never even really heard of Dawson much,” she joked. “We, Canadians, don’t know much about our northland.”

Nestled at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers in the north-west pocket of the territory, Dawson City is cradled by the Ogilvie Mountains, a primitive mountain range that spans 2,000 sq km and protects a variety of wildlife, like caribou, grizzly bears and moose.

It can take up to seven hours to reach Dawson City along the Klondike Highway, a 533km road that begins in Whitehorse, the territory’s capital. The drive traces the route miners took during the Klondike Gold Rush and winds through many geographical environments.

Bordering Alaska, British Columbia and the Northwest Territories, the Yukon is the country’s least populated province or territory with the majority of its citizens residing in

Whitehorse.

Intrepid travellers and seasonal workers arrive every year to Dawson City; some visitors simply want to escape modern life and explore the nearby landscapes, while others hope to strike it rich in the local goldfields, where for decades prospectors have shovelled sand into buckets, dunked their pans into icy waters and prayed for a golden fortune.

Over the last century, the price of gold has fluctuated, but today it sells for about $1,300 per troy ounce, which measures to be roughly the size of a teaspoon. It’s pulled from the Yukon River and Bonanza Creek in a variety of shapes and forms, like flakes, nuggets and chunks.

BBC