Let’s make sure there are no trucks on the road,” says pilot Dave Sharp, banking the seven-seat Piper Navajo to the left. The Alaska Highway below is deserted, but I spot another hazard.
“It’s a bit bendy, isn’t it?” I ask timidly.
“Yeah,” says Sharp, “but there is a straight stretch coming up.”
Thankfully, Sharp is a seasoned bush pilot and he lands the tiny plane onto the highway with ease. As we touch down, I notice that the road, a major thoroughfare, is not even tarred. “It can’t be,” Dave explains. “It would all crack up in winter. There is permafrost right underneath.”
We’ve landed in Canada’s Arctic Circle during the summer solstice, when the midnight sun kisses the horizon before bobbing up into the sky again. We have flown in from Dawson City, a speck of a town in the state of Yukon, to see this phenomenon.
Fiery red and purple clouds catch the sunrays and diffuse them to a golden halo. These are the same rain clouds we’d avoided just a few minutes ago, lingering above Tombstone Territorial Park with its dramatic slabs of granite that remind me of my hastily filed folders back home, edging this way and that.
To say that the Yukon is vast is an understatement. Up here, toasting the sun at midnight, we’re hundreds of kilometres from the nearest town and even farther from where we began.
Dawson City, located at the junction of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers, was built on the proceeds of gold. Before the mineral boom, people settled here to fish for salmon and hunt moose up the Klondike Valley. After the discovery of gold in the late 19th century, a massive influx of prospectors from neighbouring gold-rush sites (San Francisco and Alaska were the closest) created a conurbation of unexpected proportions and the locals were moved to Moosehide, five kilometres downriver, to make way for the new residents.
Dawson acquired city status in 1902 and became the capital of the new Yukon Territory. Canvas tents were replaced by hotels, saloons, opera houses, churches – and later on, schools – transforming the original mining camp into the biggest city west of Winnipeg and north of San Francisco.
Strolling around town today, I can’t help but feel as though I’m on the set of a Western. The facades of buildings are ornately decorated and weatherboard houses and shops are painted in a rainbow of colours, from subdued pastels to brilliant oranges and reds, linked by raised boardwalks. I pass old-fashioned shops bearing their original names with period dresses in their window displays, similar to the outfits town guides wear to recapture the mood of times past. It turns out there’s a good reason for the boardwalks: much of Dawson is a frozen swamp.
At the height of the Canadian Gold Rush in the early 1900s, Dawson earned a reputation as the Paris of the North.
Most payments were made in gold dust and in busy places such as saloons, there was so much spilled gold that a profit could be made just by sweeping the floor. But for every lucky prospector, there were many more that failed to find fortune.
The majority of the “stampeders” arrived far too late, when the gold fields were in the hands of big companies. After suffering incredible penuries to get to Dawson – whether they’d climbed the treacherous Chilkoot Pass laden with enough provisions to last each of them a year (a government requirement) or risked their lives on boats that, more often than not, sank – most found no stakes to claim and had to return home or stay on in Dawson as labourers. The winter weather contributed to their despair. I learn about all this firsthand from TRVL editor-in-chief, Kieran Meeke, whose grandfather, Henry McHenry, once called the Yukon home.
McHenry had run off from home in County Antrim, Ireland, at 16 to join the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897. He was adopted by two prospectors and put in charge of their mules.
Animals played a vital role in the Klondike. A good team of dogs was worth at least CAD$1,000 (CAD$27,000 in today’s money); a top set could reach CAD$1,700 (CAD$46,000). They were the only means of transport in the area and prospectors’ lives depended on them.
McHenry’s most enduring memory was putting the mules’ heads under his coat, close to his chest, to warm them up and so he could pull icicles from their nostrils. After his time in the gold fields (and with a gold pocket watch encrusted with a big nugget to prove it), McHenry became an engineer with the Canadian Pacific Railway and eventually returned to Ireland to marry his sweetheart. He lived to be 83. His nugget watch, inherited by his eldest son – now living in Canada – is back where it began.
Extraordinary tales of gold-rush women also abound in the Yukon – women who traversed the Chilkoot Pass, shot the rapids and finally arrived at the isolated community with its harshly cold climate. They came as entertainers, madams and, in a few cases, entrepreneurs; their modern-day incarnations include locals such as Wendy Cairns, a onetime can-can dancer who (with Kim Bouzane) bought the rotting 1900 Bombay Peggy’s building 14 years ago, slowly transforming the former bawdy-house into a themed boutique hotel in which every room is decked out with period furniture.
On a crisp morning in neighbouring Whitehorse (530 kilometres south of Dawson), I find myself sitting beside a camp fire in the company of a group of women who have come to a retreat of a different kind: Beverly Gray’s stunning 2.4-hectare property in the mountains overlooking Rat Lake.
Beverly is an herbalist, an aromatherapist, a natural health practitioner and health-product formulator, and my companions are all here to learn about local plants and their medicinal uses. Gray has a kettle on the open fire and passes around herbal concoctions that we drink from recycled jam jars before following her along a mountain trail to pick spruce buds for our salve-making session in the afternoon.
The following day, I attend the launch of her book The Boreal Herbal: Wild Food and Medicine Plants of the North, a guide to harvesting, preserving and preparing herbs and flowers, at the Aroma Borealis Herb Shop she owns in Whitehorse.
Later, I take to the Yukon River for a canoe trip followed by a hike. The beauty is overwhelming. We retrace the steps of early prospectors just before the Whitehorse Rapids and find the remnants of a makeshift log tram once built to transport provisions. In the distance, we spot a group of schoolchildren learning how to kayak.
They breed them tough from an early age in the land of the midnight sun. •
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