Travel dike, a restored sternwheeler, permanently docked in Whitehorse Conductor stands by caboose with White Pass & Yukon Route sign Washing pans of gravel at Claim 33 Gold Panning Two ounces of glimmering gold Gold fever We admired beaded First Nation octopus bags at the MacBride Museum after we returned to Whitehorse. (The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince William and Kate visited the museum and Carcross in September 2016.) Stricken with gold fever after viewing MacBride’s dazzling nugget collection, we travelled to Dawson City, a 75-minute flight northwest of Whitehorse. From the Midnight Dome summit, we overlooked the city of 2,158 people at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers. During the Gold Rush, it was the largest city north of Seattle and west of Winnipeg, with a population of 30,000. We found the largest bucket-line, wooden-hulled dredge in North America beside Bonanza Creek. For 60 years, the four-storey machine dug up earth for miners who extracted gold. Dredge No. 4 National Historic Site now rests near the spot where it stopped operating in 1960. Prospectors still mine gold in the Yukon. About 80 mines are small family-run businesses. At Claim 33 Gold Panning, we joined other visitors leaning over water troughs, swirling pans of gravel. The owner showed us a pan containing two ounces of gold. Although we found only a few glimmering specks in our pans, we headed to a Dawson saloon to celebrate, like countless prospectors before us. Dredge No. 4 National Historic Site CSANews | SPRING 2017 | 21
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