North to Alaska: Day 7

Alaska Day 7

Dawson City, Yukon Territory

August 30, 2011

We slept until 10 AM Yukon time. This would be the equivalent of noon back in Minnesota. I don’t recall sleeping this late in my adult life. All of that sitting on the bus must have really tuckered us out. What a treat. We had considered taking a side trip to Territorial Park but had decided against it because we didn’t think the scenery would be much different from what we had already seen. Nothing against trees, but we had seen a few billion of them by now. Thus, having managed to sleep until this record breaking hour, we were happy to have skipped it. The compounding sleep deprivation debt I have been accumulating over the past few years got a small repayment that night.

We eventually got going and walked down to the riverfront for breakfast at a coffee shop. We took in the local culture and happily they accepted our VISA card. Next it was on to the visitor center to help plan the day. After that we made it over to the Jack London museum where the caretaker gave us a short talk about his life. He lived in Dawson City, briefly, and his cabin (or at least half of it since they used the original bottom logs to reconstruct the cabin here while the upper logs were taken to Oakland, California to build an identical one,) sits on this property. We then went a few houses down to Robert Service’s cabin. Robert Service, aka “the bard of the Yukon” was famous for writing “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” There, we were treated to an excellent talk about his life and the reading of some of his poetry. The two things I will remember about him were that he was an exercise nut and that his goal in life was to save enough so he wouldn’t have to work and could live off his interest. Pierre Berton, author of the definitive accounting of the Klondike gold rush called Klondike Fever, also lived here. Who would have known that Dawson City was such a literary hotbed?

After the talks and the readings, we headed up a trail to the top of Midnight Dome. The Midnight Dome was a place where the townspeople gathered 110 years ago on the summer solstice to celebrate the midnight sun. However, as it turned out there were only 22 hours of daylight on that day and the sun had set just before midnight. You would have thought that people would have known this in advance but in those days, people would go anywhere in search of a party, especially if alcohol was involved. Anyway, about an hour into the hike, the trail got steep and Kris had had enough. After it was clear that she wasn’t going any farther, she graciously allowed me to continue on to the top while she descended back to the hotel hoping she would not be eaten by a bear. I did make it to the top, about 30 minutes later, and was treated to a spectacular view of the surrounding area. Then I started downward, banging two rocks together every 10 seconds to make my presence known. Soon I was back at the hotel, happy to have eluded any man eating grizzlies and happy to have seen no remnants of Kris along the way.

We had drinks at the rooftop lounge later in the day and then went to Klondike Kate’s for dinner. Our entertainment for the evening was to have been watching Randy, our tour leader, drink a Sourtoe Cocktail. This drink is a bizarre tradition here in Dawson. Its two ingredients are Yukon Jack and an embalmed human toe dropped into it. The rule was that you had to have the toe actually touch your lips while you drank this, for it to be “official.” If you were to happen to swallow the toe there would be a $250 fine, apparently the market rate for embalmed toe replacements. Anyway we waited at the bar at the appointed time of 9:30. By 9:45 it was clear that Randy wasn’t showing up so we went back to the hotel. The next morning he insisted that he was there and drank the drink. Having been at the bar at 9:30 we didn’t believe it but didn’t press the point. Later we found out that others claimed they had witnessed it so we concluded we somehow ended up at the wrong bar which was hard to believe since we went to the bar that was “Home of the Sourtoe Cocktail.” I guess they did not have exclusive rights to the drink. The demand for this drink is so huge that it’s apparently too big for one bar to handle.