Dawson City

The ferry across the Yukon River to Dawson City is free. It’s also the only way in from the east unless you backtrack. The government runs it, no charge, around the clock in summer. You wait at a dirt pullout, a flat barge appears out of the river current, and four minutes later you’re on the other side in one of the more improbable small towns in North America.

Dawson City had 40,000 people during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898. Now it has about 1,400, and most of them seem to be running a bar, a hostel, or a heritage interpretation site. The town is built on permafrost, which means the buildings tilt at angles that would concern a building inspector anywhere with a stable foundation. Here it’s just part of the aesthetic.

Walking the Wooden Sidewalks

The boardwalks are what get you first. Actual wooden sidewalks, raised above the mud and gravel, warped and uneven from decades of frost heaves. I walked Front Street along the river in the evening — technically evening, though the sun was still doing laps — and counted the saloons versus the churches. The saloons win. The Westminster Hotel has a sign that says it’s been serving since 1898 and you absolutely believe it.

Diamond Tooth Gertie’s is the dance hall. It’s a casino, which is slightly jarring, but the cancan shows happen three times a night and the bartenders are in period dress and somehow it doesn’t feel cheap. It feels like the town decided to keep performing its own history because the history is genuinely that good.

The Gold Rush Landscape

The Klondike River meets the Yukon right here, and the surrounding hills were dredged for gold for decades. You can still see the tailings — enormous ridges of gravel left behind by hydraulic mining operations — stretching for kilometers outside town. Dredge No. 4 is preserved about ten kilometers up Bonanza Creek, the original discovery creek. Standing next to it, the scale is hard to absorb. This machine ate mountains. Gold did that.

Robert Service’s cabin is in town, tidy and small, where he wrote “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” Jack London’s cabin reconstruction sits nearby. These men came here for the gold rush and stayed for the material. You understand why, walking around. The place writes itself.

The Sour Toe Cocktail

I should mention the Sour Toe Cocktail. It is a real drink served at the Downtown Hotel bar. It contains a real human toe, preserved in salt, dropped into your drink of choice. The rule is that the toe must touch your lips. I did it. The toe is leathery and strange. The shot of Yukon Gold whisky afterward is the best part. Several toes have been swallowed over the years — each costs the swallower a significant fine — which explains why there’s a toe acquisition program.

This tells you something about Dawson City as a place.

The Midnight Dome

The hill overlooking town is called the Midnight Dome and during solstice the sun barely dips below the horizon from its summit. I hiked up in the late afternoon, slow going on a gravel road through spruce forest, and came out above the treeline with the whole Klondike valley spread out below — two rivers, the dredge tailings, the tilting wooden town, the endless boreal in every direction. The scale of the wilderness surrounding this tiny, improbable place is the thing you carry home.

When to go: June to August for maximum daylight and river access. The Dawson City Music Festival in late July draws an unexpected caliber of artists and fills every hostel in the territory. Come September, the crowds vanish and the aspens turn gold. The road in from Whitehorse (the Klondike Highway) is paved and manageable in most weather.