There’s gold in them thar hills… it’s Klondike gold 125 years.
Or while we wait, golden nectar… Yukon beer to sip while we get brought up to speed with Yukon 125th year celebrations.
Our frontiers have never seemed so out of reach or so seductive as they do in these Covid times.
All of which the frontiersmen of old felt.
And which I have been learning about in the excellent bestseller Gold Diggers by Charlotte Gray which was also sent to me.
Tramp around Yukon
We know the Klondike in popular culture from Jack London and Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush.
These days, of course you won’t have to endure the snow storm, rickety shack or having to eat the sole of your shoe.
Whisper it but Whitehorse is in the south of the province Yukon in Canada which borders Alaska.
Nor the weeks along desolate, dangerous tracks, and in canoes… you can fly from Frankfurt with Condor into Whitehorse.
And because you’re in this neck of the woods (and there are a lot of them) you can even drive up to the Arctic on the Dempster Highway.
You will, of course, be a novelty to the locals because there are ten times more moose, bears, wolves, caribou, goats and sheep than people.
Dawson craic
Dawson City is where you want to go to see what life was like in an authentic goldrush town.
Helpfully the good folk from Yukon have furnished us with some expeditions for our enjoyment.
On the Klondike Trail: So you follow the Trail of ‘98 which we’re reliably informed takes two-five days.
And you’ll get to enjoy national historic sites, museums and cultural centres.
Discover Dawson City – ‘The Paris of the North’: And we’ve been promised that we’ll hear stories of riches made and lost.
While we’ll also get a tour of the goldfields.
Personally I have always fancied staying in one of those old saloons.
And that was only heightened by playing a game of poker with the locals at Knott’s Berry Park in Southern California.
But I hear the campsites out of town is the way to really take in Yukon’s Great Outdoors.
From all those who talked through the history, Klondike gold 125 years.
Just watch the bears. It wouldn’t do to end up on an animal’s plate just as you’re about to cash in on your fortune.
MEET YOU AT THE GOLDRUSH
