A Yukon Mosaic
Eleanor Millard’s story is a familiar one. She came to the Yukon in 1965 and got captured. She has mostly been here since…
A Peek At The Yukon During ‘The Quiet Years’
Aside from just being a darn good read, this book covers a period about which very little has been written.
Looking Inside the Insider
Christopher Ross writes about his journalism experiences at the Dawson City Insider from 1997-1999 and what happened after.
The Bookshelf: When Dawson Made Hockey History
The Dawson Challengers had a dream to contest for the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup (better known as the Stanley Cup.
Dawson’s Fridays Are A Time For Music!
Fridays are live music days in Dawson, this summer, with concerts at Riverside Park Gazebo and at the KIAC (Dënäkär Zho) Ballroom.
Spring Reflections in Dawson City
In a previous edition of the KK, I commented on the amount of snow we received here this winter, how it narrowed and raised the street levels. This column is about the flip side of the equation, when the white stuff becomes wet stuff. Except for Front Street, which is part of the Klondike Highway, …
Meanderings: The Steeles wandered at random around the world
Peter Steele begins by defining his terms: “’Meander’ reads ’To wander at random’” This is very definitely what happens in this book,
Exploring fading memories at the ODD Gallery
The opening of the recent exhibit at the KIAC ODD Gallery was unique with a mixed live & virtual talk for the Gathering/Tethering exhibit.
A Klondike Korner: Sometimes life imitates art
Sometimes art imitates life. Sometimes life imitates art. There are two really clear illustrations of this idea in Dawson City at the moment.
The Bookshelf: Seeking Redemption on the Yukon Quest Trail
Journey of 1000 Miles chronicles Hank DeBruin and Tanya McCready-DeBruin’s attempts at the Iditarod and the Yukon Quest.
Robert Service’s great-granddaughter honours her ancestor
Robert Service’s great-granddaughter honours her ancestor. Charlotte Service-Longépé wrote Robert W. Service La Piste de l’Imaginaire.
Klondike Korner: DCMF 2021 is reborn in a smaller, later version this COVID year
September 10 to 12. DCMF is a bite sized three day event spending days in the Waterfront Park Gazebo and nights in the Palace Grand Theatre.
The Bookshelf: A poetic memoir of northern travels
Poetry with a bit of a difference, it has a strong ecological bias. Goodbye, Ice: Arctic Poems by Lawrence Millman
Timelapse scenery at the ODD Gallery
Dan Starling’s exhibit “Unsettled histories: the transformation of a print” imagines the landscape of a Rembrandt evolving over centuries
Friday is Concert time at the Gazebo
Most Fridays this summer, whether there is rain or shine, it will be concert time at noon at the Front Street Gazebo, in Dawson City.
Learning how to cope with fear in overdrive
By the time you’re reading this column, the paperback version of Eva Holland’s fascinating study of fear will be out from Penguin Canada.
Spring clearances in Dawson
In some ways, our streets are better in the winter. Spring makes it harder to get from the street to the boardwalks. Dawson is not a friendly town for people with mobility issues.
Live music returns to Dënäkär Zho
COVID-19 pretty much shut down live music in Dawson in 2020. This year the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (Dënäkär Zho), in partnership with the Dawson City Music Festival, has been trying hard to bring some of it back over the last few months.
The Ice pool Contest is a go for 2021
The Ice Pool Lottery, officially known these days as the Dawson IODE Ice Guessing Contest, has been around in various forms since 1896. The Dawson Chapter of the IODE officially took over running the event in 1940 and has managed to keep it going in spite of pandemics and other natural disasters.
An indigenous fable for all ages
Teiakwanahstahsontéhrha’ (We Extend the Rafters) is the latest exhibition at Dawson City’s ODD Gallery. The machina animation style movie is projected on the east wall at the far end of a metal frame structure which mimics the look of an Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) style longhouse.
Dublin Gulch
The present book, one of several projects Michael Gates has had on the go since he retired, is one he was commissioned to write by Victoria Gold, the owners of the Eagle Gold Mine.
Navigating Dawson’s streets last summer
We are in the third season of a mammoth upgrade project to deal with the deficiencies in the town’s sewer and water infrastructure. That has meant that getting around town has been interesting enough for those of us who live here. For visitors, it’s probably been a mite of a mystery.
Jack London imagined a virus
What’s of particular interest to readers in this year of the COVID-19 pandemic, is that London managed to predict the spread of a virulent disease three years before the so-called Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.
The Klondike Gold Rush Steamers
In these days of highways and 1000-year level flood dikes, it’s easy to forget that the best way to get to Dawson used to be by sternwheelers. While most of the stampeders made their way here in small boats and rafts in 1898, a sizeable number cruised to the fledgling town from St. Michael’s, Alaska, in riverboats and steamers and, once the White Pass chugged into Whitehorse, still more hopped on boats from there.
A delayed Short Film Festival will happen in October
After a few months of working at home, Dan Sokolowski is finally back in his southeast corner space at the KIAC (or Dënäkär Zho) Building. There, he’s busy downloading videos for this year’s late version of the 2020 Dawson City International Short Film Festival, which will take place over two weekends in October.
Authors on Eighth overcome COVID-19
Each year there is a writing contest called Authors on Eighth connected to an annual walk along the Writers’ Block along Eighth Avenue in Dawson City.
Pandemic Parades Take to the Streets
Summer is generally the time for two major parades in Dawson: Canada Day in July and Discovery Day in August. The latter is the larger of the two events, but neither one takes any longer than 15 or 20 minutes to pass any given vantage point.
An ABC Aviation Adventure
There are all sorts of ABC books out there, but they are seldom as focussed on a particular subject as this one, which manages to do the job of introducing all the letters while remaining firmly in the air.
From South to North with the Erebus
Let’s begin at the end. “On 9 September 2014, at a press conference in Ottawa, Prime Minister Harper announced to the world that one of Franklin’s ships had been found.” It was a few days later when it was confirmed which of the two ships from the fabled Franklin Expedition it was – not the HMS Terror, …
Dawson in the deep freeze
The most annoying thing about being fully dressed to walk outside at -45 degrees Celsius is that I can’t see my feet.
The Percy DeWolfe committee is ready for its last race, but the event will carry on
In its present form, the Percy DeWolfe Memorial Mail Race is a 210 mile (338 km) run from Dawson to Eagle, Alaska, and back. If you can do that, then you can try your hand at the Yukon Quest or the Iditarod.
Seventy tales from the Yukon, Atlin and Tibet
Peter Steele’s book arrived on my desk at just about the time in my cataract affliction when I was unable to read it, the white glare off the paper turning the printed words to grey smudges. Eventually I was piqued enough by this that I sought it out in the various e-book options and found …
Dawson’s Thaw di Gras
Dawson celebrates almost spring, sort of end of winter, with a local event called Thaw di Gras. An obvious play on New Orleans’ Mardi Gras.
Hiking to Siberia
Lawrence Millman has written 16 books, including Hiking to Siberia. The latter is the subject of this column and the source of most of the stories Millman read to an attentive audience at the Alchemy Café when he visited Dawson City.
Dawson entertains itself at monthly coffee houses
It’s Coffee House/Open Mic time at the KIAC Ballroom once again. This is a monthly event that usually takes place on the first Saturday of every month from September through to May. It is one of those things that the community does for itself, as contrasted with all those special events (partly for visitors) that …
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Dawson Invitational Volleyball Tournament begins another 40 years after celebrating the creator’s last winter
The next 40 years of the Dawson Invitational Volleyball Tournament (DIVT) kicks off on Oct. 25 in Dawson City. The DIVT celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2018 with a special mass assembly to honour the years of success and the two teachers who started the whole thing.
Time marches on, but backwards sometimes
Looking west – that hill cuts an hour off an hour of direct sunlight every fall There’s a significant date that is fast approaching. No, I’m not talking about the election on Oct. 21, though that is an important date. A week or so later though, on Nov. 3, we’ll face the annual chore of …
Missives from One Bucket Creek
For 20 years, from 1994 to 2014, Al Pope produced a regular column for the Yukon News. It was called Nordicity. He said it started because he had written so many letters to the editor that Peter Lesniak, who held that position at the time, invited him to become a regular contributor. This origin story resonates …
Changes are not always welcome, even if they are historically accurate
Sometime before the beginning of winter, the old CIBC building on Front Street will turn grey and I’m quite certain that some people will be upset. The building has been going through changes since the town bought it for $170,000 back in 2013. I don’t think we had any idea how much potentially toxic material …
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A stroll along the Writers’ Block
Dawson City would not be nearly as well-known as it is without the writings of three men who lived here for parts of their lives. This year we will once again be celebrating all of their lives and works with a stroll along the Writers’ Block, that portion of Eighth Avenue where they once lived. …
Friends of the Palace Grand plan 21 shows this summer
A scene from the 2018 production of the Cabin of Curiosities. Canoers meet The Collector at his cabin – Faith (Joey O’Neil) and Keeton (Sam Connolly) meet The Collector (Robin Sharp) The Friends of the Palace Grand (FotPG) has existed for a number of years. Originally under the umbrella of the Dawson City Arts Society …
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Want to win gold for your writing?
The winners of the contest are announced annually at the final stop of the Authors on Eighth Walking Tour, which always concludes at Berton House Berton House during the 2018 walking tour. Anakana Schofield, writer-in-residence at the time, read to the assembled group. The Klondike Visitors Association (KVA) and the Writers’ Trust of Canada have …
How real life can inform fiction
In the course of his Massey Lecture series in 2013 (published as Blood: The Stuff of Life, from House of Anansi Press), Lawrence Hill used a fair amount of autobiographical information for anecdotal evidence to enliven his research material. In this way, we learned that he once hankered to become a professional runner and was stopped …
Joanna Lilley feels most herself when she’s writing
Joanna Lilley has always loved reading. She’s one of those people that you’ll find in the theatre reading a book before the movie begins. It fits that she would also enjoy writing. “As a child, I also always loved writing in notebooks and diaries and the physical act of writing with pen and paper.” Later on, that …
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Consumed by craft
Heather O’Neill is pleased to be returning to the Yukon this year for another engagement during the Yukon Writers’ Festival and Young Author’s Conference. She was last here In 2016. “I love the sunlight in the Yukon,” she said. “Everything seems surreal to me. I hope to meet more of the people in this strange …
The saga of Dawson’s street clearances
The melting season is upon us with a vengeance, spoiling all the plans I had for a series of columns about street clearances in Dawson.
Sigmund Brouwer says put your character in a problem situation
With over 100 titles and four million books in print, Sigmund Brouwer is a bestselling author of books for children, young adults and adults. He will be one of the mentor authors at this year’s Young Authors’ Conference on May 2 and 3, which is part of the Yukon Writers’ Festival taking place that week. Brouwer …
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David Geary says to “be hungry for other people’s stories”
David Geary is no stranger to the Yukon. He was here to work with Gwaandak Theatre a year ago last February. Now he’s looking forward to seeing what Whitehorse is like when it’s warmer. Geary is originally from New Zealand, where he has mixed roots which he describes as “Maori from the Taranaki iwi tribe, …
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Watching the River Thaw
Members of the Yukon Order of Pioneers (YOOP) have placed the Ice Pool Tripod on the ice of the Yukon River and the tickets for the IODE Ice Guessing Contest, generally just called the Ice Pool, will be on sale at various places between Whitehorse and Dawson City until April 15. The tripod is anchored …
Fear should never be a deterrent
Jan Redford describes herself as a compulsive journal writer who always knew that she would like to be an author. “I remember filling pages with squiggly lines when I was about four or five, pretending I was a writer. As I got older, writing is what grounded me, clarified my experiences, allowed me to trust …
What is the Yukon Writers’ Festival?
In 1990, a number of organizations joined together to merge the Young Authors’ Conference (YAC) and the National Book Festival into the more far-reaching Yukon Writers’ Festival. The goal was to highlight Canadian literary arts in the Yukon. Five writers, including one from the Yukon, will participate in a week-long series of events (May 1 …
Dawson City International Short Film Festival celebrates two decades of short films
Dan Sokolowski is about three weeks away from launching the 20th edition of the Dawson City International Short Film Festival (DCISFF) when we sit down in his corner of the building that’s home to the Klondike Institute of Art of Culture. (KIAC.) A lot of work has already gone into this year’s event. The 85 films …
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A Commemoration of the Yukon’s WWI Fallen Soldiers
This slender volume contains brief biographies and photographs of the men from the Yukon who fought and died for Canada between 1914 and 1918. Seven of the enlisted died in 1919, but are recorded as still being in active service. Many of their names are recorded on cenotaphs or memorial plaques in Dawson City or …
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The Aurora Trail offers a second set of house concerts
The second half of the Aurora Trail lineup of the Home Routes program began in February, with three house concerts planned between Feb. 1 and April 14. Home Routes sends performers out to do about a dozen house concerts, six times a year, in 11 different touring zones from the Maritimes to the Yukon. We …
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Thaw di Gras is Coming Soon
[two_third] It’s perhaps still a bit wintery by March 15, but that is the annual date when Dawson City celebrates what is nearly the end of that season with its Thaw di Gras “Spring” carnival. The event runs over a weekend, from March 15 to 17. If climate change doesn’t make too many changes there …
A Trip to the City of the Lost – Returning to Rockton
Somewhere in the Boreal Forest, there is a small community called Rockton. It’s sometimes called the City of the Lost because it’s inhabited by people who, for one reason or another, really wanted to get away from it all. They may be in a witness protection program. They may be running away from some danger in their …
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Ready for Christmas Eve
The cast including shepherds, angels, wise persons and citizens. PHOTO: Dan Davidson What would Christmas Eve be without carols and a pageant. All are invited—shepherds, angels, wise persons, citizens, family and friends—to St. Paul’s Anglican Church A traditional Christmas Eve in Dawson City begins with an ecumenical carol and pageant service at St. Paul’s …
Nature’s little automatic defroster
One of the most annoying things about the fall and spring seasons is the need to scrape the frost off your vehicle’s windows before you can drive anywhere. In the summer, you only have to worry about a little bit of fog; and in the winter, there’s often too little moisture in the air for …
Murder and romance in small-town Alaska
With over 225 novels to her credit, Nora Roberts is a bestseller by any definition. Wikipedia says the books are all romance novels, so I’m not sure if that number includes the 47 mysteries in the In Death series. These sit on the light end of being science fiction and are clearly police procedurals, though …
Autumn sunlight and shadows
We’re past the halfway mark in October as I write this. The sun rose today at 9:16 and will set at 18:49 (6:49 for most of us civilians), so we’re down to less than half a day of actual sunlight. That’s in spite of the fact we can count on extended, refracted light on either …
It’s beginning to look a lot like … (you know)
The pre-Christmas season will soon be underway here in the Klondike, actually beginning a few days before this piece can see print. It’s a season of bazaars and open houses that lead up to the actual holidays. It begins with the oldest and largest of the bazaars, the Little Blue Daycare Christmas Bazaar. This will …
John Henderson: Celebrating the Great White North
When he arrived in Yellowknife, back in 2004, with his wife, Serena, and baby daughter, Janessa, it didn’t occur to John Henderson that he might still be there 14 years later, have a thriving career as chief operating officer at the Det’on Cho Corporation and a side career in the arts as the editorial cartoonist …
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Home Routes provides a cozy evening of music
The 2018–19 season of Home Routes Concerts kicked off in September with a tour by country singer Tim Hus, accompanied by his sideman of 15 years, Spider Bishop. Hus, on vocals and guitar, is reminiscent of a younger incarnation of Stompin’ Tom Connors, with whom he did tour at one time. In a live performance, …
Where the Trump family fortune got started
“I’m a fifty-pager,” says Whitehorse writer Pat Ellis, commenting on her preference for producing short history booklets. Her latest, Financial Sourdough Starter Stories—“The Trump Family, from Whitehorse to White House,” the “Klondike Gold Rush” and “Harry Truman and the A-Bomb”—tops out at 64 pages, but the concept remains the same. “I’ve done a squatter book …
How an email exchange became a 15-year blog project
Now that the Moccasin Telegraph has run its course after 15 years of providing an opportunity for folks to share history and reconnect, we have stopped preparing more editions.
The Palace Grand Theatre is back in business
When “Arizona” Charlie Meadows built his Palace Grand Theatre, in 1899, it probably never occurred to him that some version of the place would still exist in 2018.
An Old-fashioned public reading at Jack London Square
Of the five writers who have attracted folks to come and visit buildings and gravesites in the Klondike, that are attached to their names, Jack London was the first.
A dystopian life near the Blackstone River
The Wolves of Winter is Tyrell Johnson’s first published novel. It’s set in the Yukon, but he hadn’t actually been here until he came to Whitehorse for last month’s Yukon Writers’ Festival.
Authors on Eighth celebrates Klondike literature
Each summer the Klondike Visitors Association (KVA), honours the memory of four writers who have meant a great deal to Dawson City and the Klondike: Jack London, Robert W. Service, Pierre Berton and Dick North.
Dawson is gearing up to celebrate Canada Day with both new and old traditions. Here’s the scoop!
The biggest change in the Canada Day Parade in Dawson City, this year, is where it will end.
Stream of Dreams
A team of facilitators from the Stream of Dreams program was in Dawson this week to promote environmental stewardship and facilitate a community art project.
The ODD Gallery showcases Tamika Knutson’s Skin
Tamika Knutson is a Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in citizen who began her art training at the Yukon School of Visual Arts, in Dawson City.
The Northern Review looks at literature
The Northern Review, which is published by the School of Liberal Arts at the Yukon College, describes itself as “a multidisciplinary journal exploring human experience in the Circumpolar North.
Zsuzsi Gartner: Aspiring to the darkly tragi-comic
Zsuzsi Gartner built her early career as a writer in journalism, working as a newspaper reporter, then a TV current affairs producer and then a magazine writer and editor, but has been interested in creative writing from an early age.
Putting Canada 150 between two covers
CBC/Radio-Canada got involved in the Canada 150 sesquicentennial celebrations in a big way, starting about a year earlier with an open call for submissions to be put in a 2017 yearbook.
Owen Laukkanen: “Keep writing and edit your own work ruthlessly”
Owen Laukkanen is unabashedly a writer of commercial fiction, also known as “genre” fiction, having produced a novel every year since The Professionals came out (and was nominated for four major genre awards) in 2012.
Tyrell Johnson: ‘Write the story you would want to read’
Lots of writers can point to a specific event or person that sent them in the direction of a career in writing; Tyrell Johnson isn’t one of those people.
Michael Winter: Keeping track of things in the world
Newfoundland and Labrador writer Michael Winter will be a mentor at the 2018 Yukon Young Authors’ Conference at F.H. Collins Secondary School May 3, 4 Michael Winter, one of the four mentor writers at this year’s edition of the Young Authors’ Conference, said he was first inspired to become a writer by watching his sister …
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Jamella Hagen: Part of Writing is Being Ready to Write
The local writer selected to be a mentor at this year’s Young Authors Conference is Jamella Hagen, who teaches creative writing at Yukon College.
Gearing up to explore ideas and the written word
PHOTO: Dan Davidson The Yukon Writers’ Festival takes place May 2 through 5, with events throughout the Yukon In 1990, a number of organizations joined together to meld the Young Authors’ Conference and the National Book Festival into a farther reaching Yukon Writers’ Festival to highlight the Canadian literary arts in the Yukon. The …
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It’s ice pool time
The ice pool tripod is in the river, anchored by a cable to the boxed clock on the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre, ready for when the ice moves during breakup some time in late April or early May. The tripod is on the ice between the river bank and the unofficial ice road. It may …
Dawson City International Short Film Festival is downloaded for its 18th Year
Screenings for the Dawson City International Short Film Festival began in October, with five or six people meeting twice a week to view what would eventually add up to between 400 and 500 submissions for the Easter weekend festival.
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays the Percy deWolfe race
The Percy deWolfe race is a 210 mile (338 km) run from Dawson to Eagle, Alaska, and back, and is a qualifying race for those hoping to run the Yukon Quest or the Iditarod.
Looking back at Canada’s Centennial Year
When we look back on Canada’s sesquicentennial year (and yes, I did look it up to make sure I spelled it correctly), what will we think of it?
Try this!
The annual Youth Art Enrichment program, now entering its 17th year, is an annual four-day intensive art program for Yukon youth, hosted by the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City. It has changed its dates this year and will be held from March 19 to 22 instead of its traditional November schedule. KIAC’s …
Keeping the weekend weird
Thaw-di-Gras, Dawson’s spring-or-late-winter carnival, is adding a day this year, with events beginning on Friday, March 16 and running through Sunday, March 18.
13 Ways to look at Canada
With I Am Canada – A Celebration (North Winds Press) Heather Patterson has come up with a novel way of assembling an overview of special things about our country.
Trek Over the Top Turns 25 this Year
The 25th annual Trek Over the Top snowmobile race will arrive in Dawson City on March 8 and return to its starting point in Tok, Alaska, on March 11. The event has been organized on the Dawson end by the Klondike Visitors Association (KVA) for the last seven years, and this is the second year …
We are what we used to eat
February 19 to 22 will see the latest edition of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Heritage Department’s bi-annual Myth and Medium week.
Strange things won from the midnight sun
In keeping with this column’s focus on Yukon related material, I’m returning this week to a successful thriller that is set in a version of Dawson City. It’s not quite my town in both geography and details, but Elle Wild didn’t try to pretend it was when I talked with her about it, and even …
Dawson City Music Festival aims for sustainability
The Dawson City Music Festival (DCMF) will be holding its annual general meeting on Thursday, January 18, at Yukon College. The meeting was to have been before Christmas, but analysis of the topics raised at a well-attended membership meeting in mid-October caused the board to decide to refine its thoughts a bit more before presenting …
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A tale of Arctic exploration
Yukon author Eva Holland has taken advantage of Amazon’s Kindle Singles format to produce what might have been a 45-page volume about the early history of Arctic exploration.
Getting Ready for Christmas Eve
After all the bazaars and seasonal open houses are done, and folks are just about ready to settle down at home waiting for Christmas Morning to arrive, there is one more thing that happens for quite a few folks in Dawson. The various churches will have their own late evening services on December 24, but …
Drifting Home covers 3 generations of Bertons
In the summer of 1972 Pierre Berton decided to recreate a trip he had taken with his mother, father and sister back in the 1930s and take his family rafting from Bennett Lake to Dawson City.
Advent season is Bazaar season in Dawson
The approaching Advent Season means that it will soon be what I sometimes refer to as Bazaar Season in Dawson City.
The Northern Review remembers World War I
Volume 44 of The Northern Review contains the complete list of the papers from The North and the First World War Conference that was held in Whitehorse, and in Dawson City, May 9-12 2016.
A spooky pre-Halloween evening
Dawson City’s Old Court House on Front Street will be the site for this year’s Haunted House event, a yearly offering to the community sponsored by Parks Canada. For many years the RCMP took the lead in providing this Halloween celebration, but four years ago they needed to step down. Janice Cliff, with Klondike National …
Symposium to discuss activating history
Every two years the Yukon Historical & Museums Association holds a meeting for the entire Yukon heritage community. It moves around the territory, but executive director Lianne Maitland says that one of the places they like to come back to is Dawson City. The 2017 Heritage Symposium, called Activating Our Communities, will take place on …
People who crafted the promise of Canada
Continuing this series of reviews of books that deal with the Canadian identity and, to an extent, with the idea of Canada at 150, we come to the latest book by former Berton House writer-in-residence Charlotte Gray. It’s called The Promise of Canada: 150 Years – People and Ideas That Have Shaped Our Country. It …
A Tale of the Klondike Tailings
Despite the romantic image of the grizzled miner panning by the creek side in search of gold, that phase of the Klondike’s mineral saga was relatively short. Entrepreneurial minds knew of more efficient and less-labour intensive ways of getting gold from the ground, and it wasn’t long before the arrival of the dredges in the …
SOVA at 10
When talking about the location of the Yukon School of Visual Arts (Yukon SOVA) in Dawson City, two issues are often raised: What does the location do for students? What does it do for the town? Kyla McArthur, who works at SOVA as the administrative officer and is also a town councillor, spoke of the …
Congratulations SOVA!
Any discussion of the Yukon School of Visual Arts begins with a couple of questions: What is it? Why is it in Dawson? The first question is easily answered: the Yukon SOVA is a post-secondary art school with excellent facilities and dedicated staff, offering a foundation year (first year) of a Bachelor of Fine Arts …
TIAY Picks Dawson to Showcase Sustainable Tourism
Every few years the Tourism Industry Association of the Yukon brings either its spring or fall conference to Dawson City. TIA Yukon Executive Director Blake Rogers says that it makes even more sense than usual this year. “This year is a special year, the Year of International Sustainable Tourism for Development, as declared by the …
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Celebrating the Klondike as a Special Place
The editor set us the challenge of making a pitch for our community that says it is more special than any other in the territory, with a wink and a nod in the direction of Whitehorse. The assignment is hardly fair to the capital city. Those who don’t live in the capital city of any …
Poking Fun at Some National Icons on Our Birthday
During a year when there have been a lot of serious books written about our national identity, it stands to reason that a nation that loves to watch This Hour Has 22 Minutes, The Rick Mercer Show and Still Standing would produce at least one book making fun of the whole business. J.C. Villamere, who …
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The Yukon is Great for Summer Travelling
Summer, with its long daylight hours, is a great time to travel around the Yukon. We started our travels the summer after we arrived, trading up from a VW Beetle to a Ford 150, and loading a second hand 8 ½ foot camper on the back. Over the next several years we covered all the …
Discovery Days: Yukon’s Moveable Holiday
The Yukon’s Discovery Day Holiday is kind of hard to pin down. Likely the Monday closest to the day gold was discovered on Bonanza Creek.
Celebrating the Klondike’s Literary Legends
During the week that leads to the Discovery Days weekend, the Klondike Visitors Association, Parks Canada and the Writers’ Trust of Canada celebrate the writers who have made Dawson City world famous. Part of this event, called Authors on Eighth, is a writing contest that began in June and ended in July, in time for …
Race ’til You’re Pooped!
“We’re dedicated to keeping the Yukon weird,” Robitaille likens the Great Klondike International Outhouse Race to Jim Robb’s Colourful 5%
Yukon’s Fictional Geography
Dan Carruthers’ more recent thriller, Anya Unbound (2017), introduces us to Sean Carson, a recovering widower, who stumbles across a 17-year-old Polish girl on the way to his bush cabin. He discovers she is part of a baker’s dozen of girls who have been lured to North America and are bound for the sex trade …
Finding Orchids in an Unusual Setting
Finding the entrance to Orchid Acres can be a little confusing for newcomers to West Dawson and Sunnydale. Someone will tell you it’s on the road to the Dawson City Golf Course, and that’s true, but the signs indicating that road are a little confusing. There’s a large sign with a blue arrow, indicating that …
Remembering Canada’s Centennial Year
I was in Grade 10 in 1967. For some reason my school provided high school students with tree saplings to take home and plant. Why they were willow trees instead of maple trees I have no idea. Mine has been growing ever since, and it was a monster of a thing when I drove past …
Books to Celebrate 150 years of Canada
The Story of Canada in 150 Objects Canadian Geographic & The Walrus Magazine format 130 pages plus pullouts $15 On an older note, there are other publications dealing with Canada’s sesquicentennial. One interesting item, which has been in my bathroom since I picked it up in March, is this one: a joint publication by two …
There’s Gold in Those Buckets of Dirt
Canada Day will be exceptionally busy in Dawson this year. Combining our nation’s birthday with a roster of events that normally occur on the first Saturday after that celebration will make for a packed schedule. The Klondike Visitors Association decided a few years ago that having the Yukon Gold Panning Championships in the afternoon, following …
Double-barreled day of action in Dawson City
June 10 will be a double-barreled day of action in Dawson City, as it always is during what could be called Commissioner’s Day. The two events on this day – the Commissioner’s Tea and the Ball – are always held on the Saturday closest to June 13, which was the date in 1898 when the …
North Words
“Exploring the Frontiers of Language” will be the theme of this year’s edition of the North Words Writers Symposium, which will be held in Skagway from May 31 to June 3. This is the eighth annual symposium since the event’s inception. It was originally inspired during a series of walking conversations between Daniel Henry and …
Gold Show: The Rush is On
Early in May, with the deadlines for the 2017 edition of the Dawson City International Gold Show approaching, Coralee Rudachyk was busy, but calm. As the General Manager of the Dawson City Chamber of Commerce, she has the primary responsibility of making sure everything works out according to plan. The plan is a pretty solid …
Good Advice
Jamie Bastedo is not new to the Yukon. He first came to the territory 35 years ago as a biology graduate student. “Think Never Cry Wolf,” he says. “My head full of book knowledge about northern landscapes and cultures.” The Yukon still means a lot to him and he is excited to be coming back. …
Poetry for Change
Sheri-D Wilson, who calls herself The Mama of Dada, is an award-winning spoken word poet, educator, speaker and activist, who has performed in literary, film and folk music festivals in Canada, USA, England, France, Mexico, Belgium, and South Africa. She is the author of nine collections of poetry. Her most recent – ninth poetry collection, …
Chronicling the Vanishing Alaska Highway Lodge Community
I’m very jealous of what Whitehorse based Lily Gontard and Mark Kelly have managed to pull off with their delightful book, Beyond Mile Zero: The Vanishing Alaska Highway Lodge Community (published last month, Lost Moose, 240 pages, $24.95). They’ve taken an idea that I turned into a measly two or three columns in the Whitehorse …
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Writing as a Full Time Profession
James Bernard MacKinnon, commonly bylined as J.B. MacKinnon, will be coming to the Yukon from Vancouver to be the Yukon Public Libraries’ choice as a travelling writer to visit a number of communities during the Yukon Writers’ Festival taking place May 2-7. During his Yukon visit McKinnon will do presentations and readings in the Dawson …
Using Stories to Make People Think
This is the second of a five part series by Dan Davidson about the professional authors participating in the Yukon Writers’ Festival and the Young Authors Conference during the first week of May. Whitehorse based writer and filmmaker Kelly Milner grew up in the Yukon. She cut her writing teeth doing feature articles for a local …
A Mentor for Yukon Young Writers
Born in England, but transplanted to Newfoundland when she was very young, Kathleen Winter credits libraries with kick starting her interest in writing. “We moved around a bit and in one village the only library was ‘the bookmobile,’ a van filled with books that came to town once a week – I loved that van,” …
Celebrate the Art of Filmmaking this Weekend
The cupboard behind Dan Sokolowski’s head is still covered with the multi-coloured Post-it notes he’s been using to assign the 86 short films in this year’s Dawson City International Short Film Festival to various categories for Friday, Saturday and Sunday screenings that will fill up this Easter Weekend. The films were selected by a group …
The Tripod Stands to Mark the River’s Breakup
Given the odd behavior of the Yukon River this year, it’s not at all certain just how and when spring breakup will occur, but however it happens, the ladies of the IODE have it covered. What were some very wide open leads in the river prevented the formation of the usual ice bridge across at …
Racing to Honour an Honourable Man
At 10 a.m. on Thursday, March 23, the spirit of Percy DeWolfe, Dawson’s Iron Man Mail Carrier, will head off from the starting line between the Old Post Office and the Palace Grand Theatre. Two minutes later the first of the corporeal contestants in the Memorial Mail Race named after him will let the dogs, …
The Evolution of a Home
By 2001, however, that big detached deck on the front of the house was deteriorating and we decided that a verandah running across the entire front of the house would cut down on the seasonal evening sun glare and provide what amounted to a sheltered outdoor living room in the summer. This addition we were …
Thaw di Gras appeals to Locals and Visitors
Dawson’s impishly named Thaw di Gras carnival is still thought of as a spring carnival, even though a good March weekend will still be in the minus teens and a bad one may be in the minus 20s with wind chill. Whatever the weather may bring, much of this March 17th to 19th weekend will …
The Trekkers Will Soon be Here
The Trekkers are coming again, and this year’s Trek Over the Top from Tok Alaska to Dawson City, will have a substantial increase in numbers over the last two years. Paul Robitaille, marketing and events manager with the Klondike Visitors Association (KVA), reports that the Tok Chamber of Commerce has taken over the promotion and …
Making Music and Money for Good Causes
Regardless of what else may be happening, on 1st Saturday of the month during a school year, these open mic events are a regular occurrence.
Flowing Water and the Daily Light Show
It’s been a truly odd winter here in the Klondike. On the one hand it’s been colder, and colder for longer stretches than it has been for several years. Mostly, it hasn’t been really cold, which begins below, say, minus 35, and carries on down into the minus 50s, but we’ve had a lot of …
Shedding a Little Light on a SAD Season
They consulted with Dr. Brendan Hanley, the Yukon’s Chief Medical Health Officer, and he thought it was a worthwhile experiment. The next question was where to put the devices so that they could be used by the most people and at times when people might need them the most. Libraries seemed like a good idea, …
Gathering Memories of Clinton Creek Proves Difficult
The original purpose of the Clinton Creek Oral History Project was to gather information about how the area around the former asbestos mine and company town had been used by locals prior to the establishment of the mine in the mid-1960s. The mine was about a decade getting off the ground from the time that …
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Christmas Eve Preparations in October
Organizers for the Christmas Eve Pageant Photo Shoot were on edge as October 2 dawned. Would there be a lot of snow on the Bonanza Road sites where the pictures were to be taken? Would it be too cold that day? Would there be enough sunlight to get good shots? It was, after all, a …
The Klondike Continues to Prepare for World Heritage Status
The nomination package has been prepared under the watchful eye of a local advisory committee, including representation from Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, the City of Dawson, the Yukon Government, the Klondike Placer Miners Association and citizen reps from both Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in and the Dawson community. There is also a project management team, and much of the actual …
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Dawson in a Fictional Sense
About the same time as I was reading Elle Wild’s very entertaining mystery novel, Strange Things Done, I happened to watch a discussion between best selling novelists Stephen King and Lee Child. Part of the discussion was about settings, and Child noted that he had set one of his novels in New York, a city …
The Sourtoe celebrated as a “Hidden Wonder” of the World
Just a week or so ago the newly published Atlas Obscura, subtitled, “An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders,” arrived on my desk sporting an enthusiastic recommendation from fantasy and comic book writer, Neil Gaiman. That’s not true any more, there have been at least half a dozen substitute toes since that time. One was …
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What is the Aurora Trail?
The folk/roots duo Twin Peaks, comprised of Naomi Shore and Lindsay Pratt, opened Dawson’s Home Routes season on Sept. 26. The show in Dawson City was their second-last stop on a tour that had seen them perform in Dease Lake, Atlin, Teslin, Crag Lake, Whitehorse, Haines Junction, Faro and Mayo, with one more concert planned …
Need Some Good Advice?
Basia Bulat is returning to the Yukon. Bulat is a multi-instrumentalist – she plays guitar, autoharp, banjo, ukulele, charango, hammered dulcimer, saxophone and flute – and has a powerful voice. She comes by her musical interests naturally, having a mother who was a music teacher who taught both piano and guitar. She has said the …
The Trail of 98 Shows Another Side of Robert W. Service
Though best known for his 15 collections of verse (a term he preferred to poetry in reference to his own work) Robert Service also wrote novels. Between 1909 and 1927, he produced some genre material: adventure, mystery, science fiction and horror. The first of these was The Trail of 98: a Northland Romance, written in his …
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How Two Pierres had an Adventure in the Yukon
Steve Pitt came to the Yukon in 1982 to attend his sister’s wedding. She was marrying Dal Fry, son of Art and Margie Fry. That’s part of how Art ended up as a character in Steve’s book, The Wail of the Wendigo. The book is a young adult adventure novel that brings two kids named …
Seeds of Change Lead to Reconciliation
Seeds of Change invites locals and visitors to consider the implications of the concept of reconciliation. It’s the summer exhibit in the Gathering Room in the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre in Dawson City. It displays information about the history that has led to a need for this reflection, and it shows some of the steps …
A Colouring Book for Adults
When Kyley Henderson was in elementary school her mother, Elaine, encouraged her to draw, and one year a drawing of hers was used in the Robert Service School yearbook. Elaine, who is herself a landscape painter and sculptor, says that she always encouraged Kyley to develop her art as a kid. Kyley remembers her mother telling …
Priska Wettstein: A Love Affair with Photography
Priska Wettstein’s love affair with photography began in 2008 when husband Paul presented her with a camera.
Promoting the Klondike Experience
Not quite a year ago, Jesse Cooke was in Ottawa to receive the Parks Canada Youth Tourism Entrepreneur Award. He was being recognized for his business, Husky Bus, which he launched in the summer of 2012. Even then, as he announced at a subsequent meeting of the Dawson City Chamber of Commerce, he was already …
The History of Jews During the Gold Rush
Once upon a time there were quite a few Jews in the Klondike. They arrived with the other gold rush stampeders. There were enough of them that they established their own graveyard. But the Jewish presence in Dawson City nearly vanished after the end of World War I. Dr. Brent Slobodin researched and wrote the …
Stories for Gold
Each year the Klondike Visitors Association works with the Writers’ Trust of Canada, Parks Canada, and the Dawson Community Library to put on the Authors on Eighth Walking Tour during the week before Discovery Days. Connected to that event is the annual Authors on Eighth Writing Contest, which challenges would-be authors to emulate the work …
Saturday is Market Time in the Klondike
Saturday in Dawson’s Waterfront Park means it’s time for a couple of markets to open for business. The Farmers’ Market has been running for many years. While it began with growers selling produce, vegetables, garden plants and bushes, it has expanded in offerings to the point where the name might be better rendered as a …
The Strange Story of Mary Hanulik Garden
Dawson City blooms in the summer. It’s a process that begins in some local commercial greenhouses and explodes after the horticultural booths at the Gold Show during Victoria Day Weekend in May. It then continues unabated as part of the Farmers’ Market during the summer, and employs several landscaping and gardening firms during the same …
The Joys of Reading Aloud
Jack London’s The Call of the Wild is not a particularly long book. A mere 70 pages, perhaps a few more in a version with illustrations, it is often published between the same covers as its thematic opposite, White Fang, often along with some of the better known short stories to round out the page …
Chasing Stories in Skagway
My shakedown cruise for our trailer has come to be my annual pilgrimage to the town of Skagway to attend the North Words Writers’ Symposium, held this year from May 25-28 in the windy town. This was the seventh annual event, of which I have attended all but one since the first in 2010. The …
A Little or a Lot, Get Ready to Run
Dawson City runners have been pleased to participate in the Mayo Marathon. This year there is a Dempster to Dawson (or D2DC) Solstice Race.
Mark Zuehlke and the Remittance Men
Mark Zuehlke grew up in the Okanagan, hearing tales of Remittance Men – those eccentric British immigrants sent here in the late 19th century by their families who didn’t know what else to do with them. They were called Remittance Men because of the funds they received from their families to support them. The funds …
Celebrating Jack London’s Legacy
One of the stops along Dawson’s 8th Avenue Writers’ Block is Jack London Square, home of a part of Jack London’s Klondike cabin and the Jack London Museum, in a setting modeled after a painting by Jim Robb. This year marks the 100th anniversary of London’s passing and the Klondike Visitors Association is marking the …
Gearing up for the 30th Gold Show
There are three major changes that can be seen in the organization of the 30th edition of the Dawson City International Gold Show, which will fill up a section of 4th Avenue between May 20 and 21. The first, as noted by Dawson Chamber Manager Courtney Holmes, is that the trade show had to expand …
Music for Fun and a Good Cause
“Ten years we’ve been doing this and we never quite know what’s going to happen each time.” Nijen Holland (usually just known as Nijen) was quite right when he said this at the conclusion of the latest Coffee House/Open Mic Saturday night at the KIAC Ballroom (formerly known as the Odd Fellows Hall ballroom). Lately …
The Yukon and the First World War
In the view of Dr. Ken Coates, the North’s response to the challenge presented by World War I was to do the opposite of what people Outside might have expected. “They historically were seen as being very separate from the whole country,” he says, “kind of unique places, off in the wilderness, having problems of …
Twenty Years of Pioneer Women Celebrated at the Hospital
Twenty years ago the late Madeleine Gould’s lengthy quest (1987-1996) to join the Yukon Order of Pioneers ended with a Supreme Court of Canada decision. Over the years a number of women in Dawson had supported this quest, notably with the humorous “No YOOPIE – No WHOOPIE” floats that were a feature of many parades …
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The role of the KVA in the Klondike
When a group of Dawsonites dressed up in Gold Rush garb to meet a Canadian Pacific Airlines riverboat in 1962, they had no idea that this simple one-off publicity stunt would put down roots and that the fledgling Klondike Tourist Bureau would evolve into the Klondike Visitors Association (KVA) about 10 years later. Today, the …
Taking it to the Streets
The streets of Dawson vary in size, height, width and smoothness with the seasons. In spite of snowfall and the need to plough them, they are really at their best in the winter, when the hard-packed snow fills in all the possible places where potholes might form. In the summer, potholes are the bane of …
Nurturing Good Writing
Unlike many a published author, Saskatoon writer Sandy Bonny didn’t study to become one. It just happened. “I haven’t got an English degree,” she says, “and didn’t train or apprentice purposefully with literary mentors before my first publications, but I did always enjoy writing and continued writing recreationally long after it was required for school. …
Converting Adventure into Books and Film
Dianne Whelan is an award winning filmmaker, photographer and author who lived, until fairly recently, in Vancouver. At the time of this interview she was in New Brunswick, in the midst of a project she calls “500 Days in the Wild.” “It’s what I do for a living. I do these adventures, make films and …
Dawson and the Harrison Effect
I’ve been enjoying a couple of relatively new books about the work of the latecTed Harrison. They are Ted Harrison Collected (Douglas & McIntyre) and A Brush full of Colour (Pajama Press). The first one is a trade paperback collection of the 91 serigraph posters he created and sold. The second is a hardcover children’s …
Sharing His Knowledge of Wolves
For 20 years, Robert (Bob) Hayes was the Yukon’s wolf biologist. During those years, he studied hundreds of radio-collared wolves and conducted several long-term wolf-prey studies. He is considered a world expert on moose and caribou predation by wolves and the effects of wolf control efforts on wolves and their prey. Over time, his studies …
Germans love Jack London
Why is Robert Service so much better known here than Jack London? This question comes from Wolfgang Robert Greiner, one of five German journalists I was invited to meet for breakfast at the Aurora Inn in late February. Their primary literary interest is in Jack London, whose Yukon themed short stories were standard fare in …
It’s 40 years of mushing on the Percy DeWolfe Trail
Anna Claxton and the rest of the Percy DeWolfe Race Committee were hugely relieved to be able to announce that the “really hard working, amazing, dedicated trail crew” had managed to push a trail through a total of about five miles of jumble ice, and find ways around the various open leads in the river. …
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Year 17 sees an abundance of Yukon Films at the Festival
On Easter weekend the ballroom of the Oddfellows Hall will be filled with hundreds of short film fans celebrating the 17th edition of the Dawson City International Short Film Festival (DCISFF) and cramming in as much as they can of the 500 hours of screen time that will fill up the days. This is the …
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Announcing Yukon’s Unofficial Other March Long Weekend
With late February temperatures maxing out at +4 in Dawson, it’s hard to say just what this year’s Thaw di Gras, Spring Carnival will be looking at for weather, but the Klondike Visitors Association (KVA) has once again encouraged a wide variety of groups to get involved in outdoor and indoor events for the weekend …
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Myth and Medium Focuses on Stories and Performance
This week shaped up to be a culturally ambitious one in Dawson City. The centerpiece of the week has been the Myth and Medium conference organized by the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in’s Heritage Department and focusing on the performing arts. It’s not too late to take in some of the culture. The week’s performance workshops continue on …
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Examining the Quest to Understand the Aurora Borealis
The most recent exhibition at Dawson’s ODD Gallery is nothing if not seasonal for its subject is the northern lights, also called aurora borealis, the light display named jointly after the Roman god of the dawn, Aurora, and the Greek god of the north wind, Boreas. Nicole Liao’s installation is called Against the Day, which …
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Of Heater Plugs and Roof Clearances
It’s not that there haven’t been warm winter spells at various times in Dawson, but this winter seems to be one for the books.
The (Book) Case for Real Books
There are six bookcases in my study, and two of those are arranged so that I can shelve paperbacks on both sides of them. On those shelves I still have books that I bought and first read 50 years ago and, as new books enter the house, I periodically have to decide which ones I …
Where will the ravens warm their toes?
Dawson is switching to LED (Light Emitting Diode) streetlights, swapping out the older HPS (high pressure sodium) for the newer, more eco-friendly, longer lasting lights. It’s a move that makes sense in a lot of ways. Yukon Energy and the City of Dawson figure that changing the 170 residential streetlights will save the town about …
So much for the death of the printed book
I was very pleased to read recently that the L.A. Times reported 571 million print books were sold in 2015, 17 million more than in 2014. So much for the death of paper and print books. You might think that someone who’s been writing a book review column for nearly 40 years and lives in …
Winning Awards with Husky Bus
Last month Jesse Cooke was the recipient of the Parks Canada Youth Tourism Entrepreneur Award, at a ceremony held in Ottawa on Dec. 2. Cooke arrived in the Yukon for the first time 10 years ago, studying glaciology at Kluane Lake as part of his University of Ottawa degree program. He says it was the …
Dawson Lights up for Christmas
We have reached that point in the season where we don’t get a lot of direct sunlight in Dawson City’s historic townsite. Those who live the Dome subdivisions – which I refer to as Literary Heights because all the streets are named for authors – do continue to get a short view of Ol’ Sol …
Feeding the Hungry is a Vital Community Service
The Dawson Food Bank and the Dawson Women’s Shelter are busy organizing their annual Holiday Hamper Program and Food Drive. It’s designed to assist individuals and families in the community who might need a little boost to get them through the Christmas season. Donations of non-perishable food items can be dropped off at either the …
Brightening Up Even the Darkest Nights
I’m happy to record that, except for the arrival of the Sears Wish Book at North 60 Petro Express, everything else related to Christmas here in Dawson City seems to have been content to wait until after Remembrance Day to get started. ‘Tis the season for community gatherings, and the first one to occur was …
Good Music for Good Causes
November 7 turned out to be an incredibly busy evening for anyone involved in community events in Dawson. There was the closing banquet for the Youth Art Enrichment program, which I mentioned here a few weeks ago. There was an outdoor art installation on the dyke and waterfront called The Deep Dark, involving contrasts of …
Jewels on the Water
The ice is coming down in a rush this year. While there was not a sign of the stuff in the river on the day they pulled the George Black Ferry out of the Yukon on October 29, it took just a few nights of minus teens temperatures to bring small pans of the greyish …
Marching in remembrance of things past
Mark Zuehlke was a writer-in-residence at Berton House in 2003. At the time he had just finished several books on the history of the Canadian Forces actions in Italy during World War II and had brought along copious file boxes full of material for his work on the D-Day offensive on the other side of …
Winter: We Shutter to Feel it Coming
At a recent municipal candidates’ forum it was suggested that one of the solutions to Dawson’s perennial winter housing problem would be to arrange to rent out rooms in some of the establishments that only operate in the summer. It’s true that a good many places close up shop once the summer visitors slow to …
What to Do in Dawson in the Winter
Those who think that the Klondike is just a sleepy little place in winter between the tourists and the Yukon Quest would be mistaken.
Bringing Variety to the Rural School Experience
Students in rural schools can miss out on a number of things in terms of course offerings and opportunities. There are specialty programs in the city that attract a number of rural students to spend time in Whitehorse. Our daughter, for instance, spent half of her Grade 11 year attending the Music Arts and Drama …
Trying to keep the Sun Shining
I promised to tell a little bit of the story of the Klondike Sun’s near death experience if the editors here said it was okay. They did, so here goes. It’s hard to keep small newspapers afloat these days. The Sun is in its 26th year now, and during the last year it’s begun to …
Fun fiction from the Klondike
As the crew who came here to film an episode of the Canadian television series Murdoch Mysteries a few years ago told me, Dawson is a place that’s just a perfect backdrop for storytelling. The particular episode was a lot of fun to watch them film and then see it on TV later on. It …
Bringing New Life into Old Buildings
I have written a number of columns about Dawson’s habit of recycling building for other purposes. The Old Territorial Courthouse, which has to be passed by everyone entering the town on Front Street, is a prime example of this practice. Right after the Gold Rush, the federal government was anxious to prove to the world …
Revisiting the Klondike Big Inch
Each year during the Riverside Arts Festival, the ODD Gallery sponsors a paired set of exhibitions called The Natural and the Manufactured, each dealing with some way in which people and their plans have had an impact on the environment around them. This year one of those exhibits, the one indoors at the gallery itself, …
A new park says Thanks to Klondike volunteers
Dawson City has a new park. Located between the Dawson Plaza (where the CIBC is) and the Husky Bus HQ (the former Hair We Are salon) it’s not a large space, but it’s a pleasant spot along Dawson’s second busiest commercial street, Second Avenue. It’s the latest project of the Klondike Centennials Society, which did …
When local voices made a difference
In 1976 I was a young teacher just starting out in Beaver Creek, fresh from Nova Scotia and learning about the North. Regular stories about the Berger Inquiry (or Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry) were part of my education, as was the report itself when it came out, as well as the Lysyk Inquiry (or Alaska …
Saturday at the Front Street Markets
Front Street is lined with vehicles and shoppers from late morning to midafternoon each Saturday during the summer, even on days when there’s a smoky haze or a bit of a drizzle. The biggest attraction is the traditional Farmers’ Market, which has been going on weekly for many years. The Klondike has a healthy crop …
Rambling North for the Dawson City Music Festival
The Slocan Ramblers often get asked how it happens that four lads who live in Toronto came to be interested in bluegrass music. Bass player Alastair Whitehead says there’s a fairly vibrant bluegrass scene in Toronto and even a lot of interest in really old time bluegrass. “There’s been a weekly gathering with groups at …
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Moving Day on Eighth Avenue
“Someone should make a list of all the houses that have been moved around in Dawson, showing where they used to be and where they are now.” This isn’t exactly what was said to me last Saturday, June 26, but it captures the gist of the conversation we were having as we watched yet another …
Twice A Day the Whistle Blows
It’s 5:00 and I’m sitting at the table in my summer office which, whenever possible, is our veranda. Seven blocks west and about two north the whistle mounted on the S.S. Keno lets loose with a blast that I can hear very clearly from here. It’s a tourist season feature, which Parks Canada arranges to …
The Fire Siren is Good News
On any Wednesday evening, at any time during the year, most residents in the core historic zone of Dawson City can hear the sound of a siren cutting the silence. If it’s about 7:30 p.m., people will know that there’s nothing to be concerned about. It’s the practice meeting of the Dawson City Volunteer Fire …
When your Fingers Stumble Through the Pages
On the whole, there are two positive things about this year’s edition of NorthwesTel’s Northern British Columbia and Yukon Directory. The first is that the painting on the front cover, the dramatic “Blue Break Up” by Simon James Gilpin, is reproduced in a larger size than in previous directories. The second is that because the …
When the Darkness Bleeds Daylight
June 17 – 21 2015: Dawson City Midnight Sun Camera Obscura Festival. This is the follow up to last year’s Dawson City Solstice Symposium
Off to Skagway to Explore Language
By the time you read this I’ll be “Exploring the Frontiers of Language” in Skagway, attending this year’s edition of the North Words Writers Symposium. I’ve been at most of these gatherings since the first one in 2010 and have found the trip a pleasant way to begin summer travels with our trailer. North Words …
Facebook Posse Finds Stolen Trailer
Klondikers pride ourselves on not needing to lock our doors every time we leave our houses. But sometimes we should, as events this week proved. But in this case, locking the doors wouldn’t have been enough. This notice from Jesse Cooke (school teacher and Husky Bus owner) appeared on Facebook early in the week: “Stolen …
World Heritage Planning Gets a Big Boost
The Yukon Government (YG) finally decided to sign on in a substantive way to the push for UNESCO World Heritage Status for the site designated Tr’ondëk/ Klondike. The press release hasn’t been issued yet as I write these words, but I know, because I was one of the people who posed for the group photo …
Dawson Moves Into Puddletime
Dawson has entered that phase of spring I call Puddletime. City workers have been trying to keep up by opening storm drains. The rapidly accumulating melt-water makes its way to the river, but it’s a losing battle. The darn streams freeze up again if the temperature drops significantly at night. It’s hard to think back …
The Ice Bridge Decay is a Sure Sign of Spring
In the April 8 edition of the Klondike Sun I put a little note inside the Sun graphic, in the banner. We always do this, sometimes to comment on events or the weather, and sometimes to flag a coming event. This time I wrote, “How’s the Ice Bridge Holding Up?” because, really, it seemed to be …
Gerties is now a Municipal Heritage Site
Diamond Tooth Gerties is an iconic Dawson building. It’s the cash cow that finances most of the operations of the Klondike Visitors Association. As of January 27, 2015, it’s even more than that; it’s a Municipal Heritage Site. In the somewhat stuffy language that seems to define municipal bylaws, city council determined that “The building …
Her Next Plan is Coming to a Television Near You
A television mini-series is being shot in Dawson between April 7 and 17. The two episodes of Her Next Plan are being produced by the newly formed Big Plan Pictures Ltd. Dawson filmmaker Lulu Keating (Red Snapper Films) and Max Fraser (Hootalinqua Motion Pictures), formed the new partnership to bring this short series to the …
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Dragon in the New Year, Chinese Style
Dawson City has a fondness for parades. Canada Day and Discovery Day are the annual events with the longest history, but there have been Pride Parades, parades in support of the mining industry, and parades in support of Idle No More. This year, however, Front Street and the Yukon River saw something new: a parade …
Getting Around in Dawson
I recently listened to a court debate concerning the streets connected to 2nd Avenue in the north end of town, and which turn you would have to make to get back to Front Street, depending on which direction you were travelling. There were street names involved, but using them just seemed to confuse the matter. …
Court Comes to the OTAB
The Yukon Supreme Court returned to the Old Territorial Administration Building (OTAB in local slang) late in January. It will continue to occupy space there until March, at the rate things are moving. The subject of the trial is not fodder for this column, but I’ve been spending so much time in the building lately …
The Cold Weather Doggie Blues
At 40 below, Fahrenheit and Celsius are the same; not that our dog, Shadow, cares about that. She may need to go outside to relieve herself, but her preference is to cross her legs, huddle in the back of her kennel in the kitchen and wait for warmer weather. We kennel her at night so …
St. Paul’s Tries To Get Warmer
November and most of December were mild in the Klondike this winter. Wondrously, it only took two-and-a-half days to warm up St. Paul’s Anglican Church enough to have a comfortable ecumenical Christmas Eve pageant. The building is primarily heated by a large, hungry wood stove. After the chill is off, and the temperature is up to …
Here Comes the Sun
At the request of some Facebook friends I spent about a week in late December taking a series of pictures showing the retreating daylight hours. Some of them were people who used to live here — friends and former students. They wanted to remember what it was like. Other requests were from people as far …
Music for the community
I’ve been the opening act at the last two monthly coffee houses. We meet on the first Saturday of every month in the Odd Fellows Hall ballroom. We’ve been doing these evenings for the better part of a decade. I know because I was still teaching during the first couple of years, and this month …
How The Double Bob Bash Came To Be
Despite claims of memoirists galore, who say they walked the Chilkoot Pass with Robert Service, the man now known as the bard of the Yukon arrived in Whitehorse via the White Pass and Yukon Route train in 1904. The shine was well off the Gold Rush at this time. Born in Preston, Lancashire, England, Service …
When the cat came back
Clancy the Cat didn’t show a lot of interest when I dropped in to the Humane Society Dawson (HSD) shelter to visit him a couple of weeks ago. The big orange tabby looked up at me sleepily and curled his tail back around his feet before closing his eyes contentedly. Clancy is a little out …
Turning Her Life Into Stories
As a former English teacher, long time library patron, book reviewer, informal Berton House liaison, and editor of The Klondike Sun, it often falls to me to make the introductions when an author comes to do a public reading at the Dawson Community Library.
Change is Always Challenging
My son came home from work a few weeks ago with a sad look of his face. When we asked what tragedy had befallen him he replied, “They’ve torn down my playground.” Well, it was true; the Robert Service School got some new playground equipment this fall. Why this fall instead of during the summer …
A Tale of Two Boxes
I had to do my first major snow clearance of the season on Hallowe’en. It wasn’t bad — took about half an hour. The snow was still fluffy, so it was easy to move. But, as I headed to pick up some last minute goodies for the coming horde, I saw the town’s pick-up plough …
Listening to the Music
I’ve been listening to a lot of cassette tapes lately. You remember those things; they appeared between vinyl records (making a comeback) and CDs (fading away as the world goes digital). Our collection of taped music isn’t as obvious as our shelves of vinyl, which got admiring glances from adults accompanying their kids trick-or-treating. “ …
Christmas Eve Preparations Before Halloween?
Our house got turned upside down last Saturday. All the furniture in the living room was shifted , and a big table for sorting costumes was set up against one wall. The occasion was not an advance planning session for Halloween; rather, we were looking beyond that to Christmas Eve. As much as I dislike …
Where Have All The Colours Gone?
On the day I am writing this, Whitehorse and Haines Junction are inches deep in their first winter snow and Dawson, while chilly and damp, is not. Mind you, we’re getting ready for it. The big living room window got its winter plastic coating this evening, and several of the online weather widgets are predicting …
Keeping Busy On The Berton House Beat
Last evening our current writer-in-residence, Anik See, presented two of her essays to 15 people at the Dawson Community Library. See focuses particularly on landscape and people’s reactions to it, as well as an interest in the narratives people tell each other, and themselves, about their lives; both themes were featured in the pieces she …
Let’s Run It Up The Flagpole And See Whom Salutes
The facetious title of this article, which dates back to the 1950s and 1960s, is a metaphor for trying out an idea to see who likes it. Most people seem to like flags, and they serve all sorts of purposes. We don’t wave them in the Yukon as much as I noticed our American neighbours …
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The Glory Days of Outhouse Races Past
The Klondike Outhouse Race was inspired by chatter in a bar. “the barnstorming biffies charge through Dawson like a dose of castor oil.”
Things that Go Bang in the Night
We had fireworks just the other night. No one I’ve spoken with seems to know exactly who set them off down by the river. There weren’t very many of them, but there were enough to drive our dog into her customary panic. As usual, she heard them before we did; my wife realized there was …
Not Content with Watching the River Flow
Some people are just not content to watch the river flow.They have to get in it and, as Ratty said to Mole in The Wind in the Willows, “mess about in boats.”It can be contagious. Our current Berton House writer-in-residence is Anik See. See is a freelance writer, radio producer, and translator from the Netherlands, …
An Odd Taste in Lawn Decorations
The Klondike is known for permafrost-distorted buildings. The twisted shapes of older structures inspired the artistic career of Jim Robb — as a young artist he visited Dawson and was gob smacked by what he saw. He turned his amazement into a style and has worked with it ever since, to the delight of us all.There …
Reflections on Rural Yukon Education
Robert Service School (RSS) celebrated its 25th year in its present building last May. There were no special celebrations, and I suspect that not too many people were aware of the anniversary. It was probably my time on the building committee that made me sensitive to the date. There were still a few staff members …
Dawson’s Public Gardens Are A Treat
Dawson has a long history of dressing up with flowers and plants. When Martha Louise Black was the chatelaine at the Commissioner’s Residence on Front Street, one of her innovations was to plant both food crops and floral adornments. The current summertime look of the residence is intended to reflect the period of the Black …
Along the Boardwalks in Dawson City
Ask tourists what they like about Dawson City and you get a variety of responses. They like the old buildings and the sense of history they convey. They like that the town doesn’t seem to be frozen in history — that there is a day-to-day life here. They like the boardwalks. Our downtown core, from …
Tracking down grandmother by land and water
Nadia White, great-granddaughter of Elmer (Stroller) and Alice Josephine (Josie) Keys White is on a quest to find out all she can about the life of her great- grandmother. Klondike newsman Stroller White is a fairly well known historical figure, having worked at the Skagway News during Soapy Smith’s heyday. He moved on to Dawson …
Why does Dawson Need a Dike?
The Yukon Gold Panning Championships were held on the well-used greensward between Front Street and the dike. The greensward wouldn’t be here if the dike wasn’t built. The dike was a controversial pile of rock and dirt when it was erected in 1987. Many conceded it was necessary, and long overdue. But no one said …
Grand Times at the Palace
The second full revival season has been launched at the Palace Grand theatre. Marveling at the theatre is past due; It’s time to celebrate that the theatre is hosting more than daytime Parks Canada programming. There’s nothing wrong with showing off our treasure, or staging the Greatest Klondiker in the afternoons, but the Palace Grand …
Front Street’s Elegant Showcase
The Commissioner’s Residence sits on Front Street, just past St. Paul’s Anglican Church, in Dawson City. It is one of six buildings in town designed by Thomas Fuller II, who eventually followed in his father’s footsteps to become the Chief Dominion Architect of Canada. Five of these buildings — the Old Post Office, the Court …
Winnowing Word in the Windy City
In windy Skagway, the boat people make their way from the cruise ships into town several times a day, clogging the streets and shops. I meet them or walk among them on the seven-minute stroll from my trailer to the Arctic Brotherhood Hall, where I have been attending my fourth edition of the annual North …
The KVA promotes the Klondike to the world
The Klondike Visitors’ Association (originally the Klondike Travel Bureau) pre-dates the formation of the Yukon’s Department of Tourism (originally the Yukon Tourist Bureau) by over a decade. It’s been doing its darndest to keep the Klondike on the top of traveler’s minds ever since. Over the past winter, the KVA organized the annual Trek Over …
The George Black Ferry Links the Two Dawsons
The George Black Ferry splashed into the Yukon River shortly after 2:00 p.m. on May 15, bringing to life the summer time link between the two Dawsons. There’s the main town on the east side of the river and then the satellite communities of Sunnydale and West Dawson on the west side. For a few …
The tripod met an unusual fate this year
I was in Calgary in the middle of a snowstorm when the ice went out in the Yukon River this year. Two days earlier, it was beautiful. I was strolling in the Calgary Zoo getting slightly sunburned around my receding hairline, because the only hat I had with me was my winter-weight Tilley. I had …
Talking Points about “Klondike” for our summer visitors
There’s all sorts of misinformation about the Klondike Gold Rush out there. One of the most obvious is that a lot of Americans, other than the ones who live in the big state next door to us, still think the Klondike is in Alaska. Granted that the vast majority of the stampeders came from the …
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Dawson’s reverse speed bumps slow people down
There are lots of places where people tend to drive a little too fast. Some of these places have had various ingenious traffic control systems put in place to slow people down. Roundabouts are a popular solution in a lot of regions, however unpopular they may be in Whitehorse. Speed bumps are another solution often …
Now Comes the Season of the Tripod
Sometime between now and May 29 (the absolute latest date in the records that have been kept since 1896), the ice in the Yukon River in front of Dawson will lift and fall, break up and begin to float off downstream. There may be loud noises and bergs popping into the air, with larger floes …
Dawson City Runs on Volunteers
I’ve been attending a number of annual general meetings lately, and the experience has simply served to reinforce something that I already knew: without the work of many dedicated volunteers, very little would get done here in Dawson. I know this from my own work on our local paper, the Klondike Sun, which will enter its …
Cross-Cultural Advances in Klondike Education
On March 31, the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in (TH) held a feast to remember the mixed-heritage children who came to Dawson City to live at St. Paul’s Hostel and attend Dawson Public School — the only public school in the territory they were allowed to attend between 1920 and 1952. While the stories from the hostel don’t …
Dawson’s Streets Get Ready for Spring
Dawson‘s streets will be wider and lower by the time you read this column. There will be the odd large puddle around town, especially at the corners where grates for the storm drains are located, but it won’t be anything like it might have been if not for the slight inconvenience we’re experiencing as I …
The Percy de Wolfe Race is Ready To Go
If the buzz around this year’s Percy de Wolfe Memorial Mail Race is any indication, this years’s event may be one to watch. Just how many teams will run is never known until the night before, at the mushers’ meeting, but society president Anna Claxton says she has heard interest is high. Last year 14 …
The Hollywood Treatment
In Dawson we are of two minds regarding the Discovery Channel’s Klondike mini-series — that six hour reimagining of history, geography and culture that aired this winter. We celebrate six hours of free advertising that will probably draw some visitors to our town, and we lament that it had so little to do with anything …
What Does Klondike Mean to the World?
From the very beginning there’s been some confusion connected with the word “Klondike.” It started with new arrivals — the gold rush stampeders — who where unable to wrap their tongues around “Tr’ondëk,” the Hän word for the “area,” which translates as something like “hammerstone water.” While the English word has become synonymous with gold, …
Dawson Gets Ready for Spring with Thaw di Gras
Thaw Di Gras, Dawson’s annual spring carnival weekend, kicks off on March 14. The mostly family oriented weekend event is a lot of fun for locals – and draws in visitors, too. It includes a lip sync event for youth and another for adults, cat and dog shows, snowshoe baseball, road hockey, a dog sled …
The Trek Will Be Coming Soon
The 21st running of the Trek Over the Top snowmobile run from Tok, Alaska, to Dawson City and back will take place from March 6 to 9. It’s a 200-mile (382 km) trip each way, over the spectacular scenery provided by the Top of the World Highway. Trekkers will ride out of Tok on Thursday, …
Myth and Medium are Coming Again
The bi-annual Myth and Medium symposium runs from February 24 to 28 this year, the week after the territorial Heritage Day holiday. Heritage Day originally inspired the idea of Myth and Medium about a decade ago. The first symposium tied in nicely with both a display of the Cameron Collection, brought here by Ken Lister …
Getting into the Skins of Things
Rebekah Miller is fascinated with zippers, with how they both conceal and reveal, how they open and close. She’s also fascinated with coverings – whether they are external facades of buildings or the skins of animals. Therefore, Skins is a very natural title for her exhibit at the ODD Gallery in Dawson City until February …
Barnacle Bob Headlines at the Odd Fellows Hall
Barnacle Bob Hilliard is ubiquitous on the Dawson City music scene. Since arriving in the early 1990s he’s been a fixture in the bars around town, starting at the Westminster, and also playing in the bars of the Eldorado and Downtown Hotels. Dawson has two annual parades, Canada Day and Discovery Days, and Bob can …
The Dawson City Music Festival Focuses on Quality over Quantity
2014: Frostbite and the Kluane Bluegrass, are taking the year off, Dawson City Music Festival (DCMF) soldiers on.
Radio With Heart
Volunteer radio has a long history in Dawson City, with the current organization – CFYT-FM (106.9) – reaching back to 1984. At that time, the Dawson City Community Radio Society (DCCRS) picked up the mantle left by the Royal Canadian Signals corps, which broadcast CFYT (Canadian Forces Yukon Territory) out of a hotel room in …
A Season in the Mist
Freeze-up on the Yukon River is not proceeding according to custom this year. Despite the lack of ice at the regular crossing down by the ferry landing in Dawson City, people did begin to cross the river south of the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike about two and a half weeks after the George …
Staging the Nativity in the Museum
Christmas Eve is a busy night in Dawson City, with all four of the churches holding their own late evening services in honour of the coming holy day. However, they get together for the Christmas Pageant service, which is held in St. Paul’s Anglican Church, because it can hold the largest number of people. There …
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like… You Know
The Dawson pre-Christmas season launched on Nov. 10 as the gym in the Robert Service School filled up for the Dawson Daycare’s Bazaar. This was the lead event in a series that will take place until first weekend in December. At least two others have now been announced, and sometimes another one creeps into the …
Dawson Hosts a Medley of Concerts to Check Out
As winter approaches and the Yukon River finally begins to fill up with ice, it’s pretty clear that there’s a lot of music on tap for Dawsonites over the next few months. We normally have the pleasure of the Home Routes musicians on what they call the Yukon Trail circuit. So far we’ve been blessed …
What is the Tr’ondëk-Klondike Project?
In two previous columns I have given some background behind Dawson City’s interest in UNESCO’s World Heritage Status designation. The Klondike region was placed on the national short list for this status in 2004, and I have outlined some of the earlier attempts to realize this goal. The latest project is called Tr’ondënk-Klondike: Future World …
Gearing up for 48 Hours of Filming Madness
The date may have changed this year, but the timing is the same. Contestants in the Yukon 48 Challenge still have just 48 hours to devise, film and edit a short film for presentation. While usually held in January, this edition of the contest will take place Nov. 15 to 17 in both Dawson and …
A Subversive Singer-Songwriter Comes to the Yukon
While Martha Wainwright began her current tour a year ago to promote her latest CD, Come Home to Mama, she says the North American portion of the tour has evolved into something a little more wide-ranging. “At this point we’ve moved from promoting the latest album to doing songs from the previous two or three …
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The Legacy of Dick North will Endure
The late Dick North used to quip that with a surname like his it was no mystery that he worked as a journalist in the Yukon. North was inexorably drawn here, telling me the first time I interviewed him in 1986 that Jack London’s stories fascinated him as a child. In 1954, after serving …
Proposing World Heritage Status for the Klondike
The headline on the front page of the July 24, 1997 edition of the Klondike Sun proclaimed, “Berton Proposes Dawson for World Heritage Site Status.” The Berton was Pierre Berton, of course, Dawson City’s most famous living son at the time and author of some 60 books. It wasn’t the first time anyone suggested the …
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The Sourtoe Cocktail: A Popular Gag
The Sourtoe Cocktail gets a mixed reception in the world abroad. Thousands of people have touched their lips to Captain Dick Stevenson’s inventive libation and have swallowed the notion that it is part of Dawson’s quaint charm. A few have gone further and swallowed the toe itself, and that’s exactly what happened recently. The news …
Created from Shattered Glass
From May to September you can find Riley Brennan all around Dawson, digging in the dirt as she skillfully helps to make the town a place that the Cities in Bloom tour usually compliments. Her gardening business keeps her creative side happy all summer long. Come winter she settles down in her home on the …
Delving into the History of Bear Creek
Bear Creek Compound is owned by Parks Canada now, but it was once the thriving centre of operations for the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation (YCGC), and it’s safe to say that Dawson would not have survived as long as it has if YCGC had not been mining he creeks up until 1966. One of the …
A Terd of Hurtles
There was a time when the Great Klondike International Outhouse race featured 12 to 17 teams and was quite a bit more of an extreme sport than it is now. It had a course that began in front of the museum, ran north on Fifth Avenue, up the hill on Church to Eighth Avenue, over …
Dredges Kept the Klondike Alive
Despite iconic images of a solitary miner with a pan or a group of men drifting into a hillside, the dredges of the corporate-mining-era are the main reason that Dawson outlasted the usual boom-and-bust cycle common to gold rush towns.
Klondike Korner: Klondyke Korner: Discover a New Interpretive Walk
Saturday, August 17, is coming right up. That’s Discovery Day, the day that Skookum Jim (Keish), Dawson Charlie (Káa Goox) and George Carmack stumbled across the gold discovery on Rabbit Creek – immediately renamed Bonanza Creek – that would trigger the most famous gold rush in the world. Carmack rushed off to Fortymile, the site …
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Authors on Eighth
Taking a stroll along the Writers’ Block — from the corner of 8th Avenue and Hanson Street to the corner of 8th and Firth — you find yourself sandwiched between Berton House and Robert Service’s Cabin at the top end. Moving south and then west, you close the block at Jack London Square, with the …
Exploring Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Culture
The striking Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre was controversial when it was first being built in Dawson City — it’s not exactly a gold rush themed building. But it was Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in themed, and it’s now thoroughly embedded in the Dawson waterfront scene. With its stadium seating theatre, Hammerstone Gallery, Gathering Room and gift shop, the …
Klondike Korner: Life Returns to the Palace Grand Theatre
When “Arizona” Charlie Meadows built his Palace Grand Theatre in 1899 in Dawson City, it probably never occurred to him that some version of the place would still exist in 2013. The current building is not exactly the original, though it does contain some of the original wood. The original was torn down, numbered, and …
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Klondike Korner: Parks Open Some Dawson Doors for the Summer
On an increasingly slender budget Parks Canada attempts to preserve quite a bit of real estate in Dawson City. A lot of it is still intact due to the efforts of local business owner Fred Caley. The recent acquisition of the CIBC building by the City of Dawson was the end of a decades-long struggle …
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Coping with the Summer’s Heat
The most common question from visitors is the one I was asked by a lady from Alabama this afternoon. I was on my way home from an interview at Berton House and thought I might give them a hand – they had happened along Robert Service’s Cabin while the Parks’ guide wasn’t there. I was …
Sunshine Paradox
BY DAN DAVIDSON Luminous ice-fogged sunshine haze sits upon the earth; mocks our avenues and days with signs of nature’s mirth. Sunshine should bring warmer weather so we have been told; this light’s touch is a frosty feather tickling us with the cold. We bundle up in parkas thick as down the streets we lurch, …
The Klondike Echoes Down through the Literary Years
The Klondike has been the inspiration for a great deal of fiction since the Gold Rush, beginning with Jack London, who came with the Stampeders and left with a mother-lode of inspiration that would make him the wealthiest name-brand author of his generation. A decade later, the same inspiration seized a quasi-hobo and reluctant bank …
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Old Films Provide New Attractions in Dawson
Back when Dawson City was at the end of the road, some of the consumer goods that arrived here stayed here because it wasn’t worth anyone’s time and money to haul them away. Such was the case with a treasure trove of 500 nitrate-based reels of silent movies, newsreels, shorts and primitive cartoons that were …
Klondike Korner: Lovely Artworks Carry Disturbing Message
One of the many projects under the umbrella of the Dawson City Arts Society is the ODD Galley, which is housed on a corner of the ground floor of the Odd Fellows Hall. The gallery mounts works by local, regional and international artists — leaning somewhat towards the avant-garde. The latest exhibit is by Veronica …
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Celebrating the Yukon’s Birthday
The event that led to the formation of the Yukon occurred on August 16, 1896: it was the discovery of gold on what was then called Rabbit Creek. However, it took the government of the Dominion of Canada a bit of time to realize that it needed to stake its own claim to this slice …
Whitehorse’s Annie Avery and Dawson City’s George McConkey joined forces for an evening at the pub
Bombay Peggy’s was crowded with a revolving group of about 50 people on the evening of May 11, when Whitehorse’s Annie Avery and Dawson City’s George McConkey joined forces for an evening at the pub. Avery and McConkey get together for an evening whenever she has a gig at Dawson’s Robert Service School, and they …
Klondike Korner: Visiting Artist Finds Inspiration in Faces and Stories
Vancouver visual artist Michael Markowsky would someday like to make a landscape painting while standing on the surface of the moon. On Earth, Markowsky has drawn landscapes while travelling across the country by train and while riding inside, or strapped to the top of, other moving vehicles. Typically these projects have a video component and …
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Come to the Klondike
On hillsides around us the trees are all blooming; While yards are responding to home owner’s grooming; And out on the highway the RV’s are looming. It’s all coming clear in the light! The days are so long you can hardly the remember The darkness that plagued us so much in December. The evening’s twilight …
Young Performers Are Stepping up to the Microphone
This year’s monthly open mic/coffee house gatherings in the Odd Fellows Hall ballroom in Dawson City have featured an increasing number of young performers, who are filling up the set list during the first hour of the evening. Some of them are taking individual lessons in guitar, recorder or ukulele. Others are part of programs …
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Klondike Korner: Waiting for the Ice to Flow
The ice bridge across the Yukon River in Dawson was closed by April 11 last year and it looked “iffy” for a week before that. As I write this column on April 21, I have just been watching the ice racing cars cruising around their slick track on the river. Several vehicles and a couple …
Supporting the Economy Through the Arts
Supporting the Economy Through the Arts You could expect a 10-years lifespan from mining projects, and Hakonson is well aware that placer miners have been roaming the creeks since 1898 and show no signs of stopping, but the short life of Viceroy’s Brewery Creek Mine and the short lived Clinton Creek asbestos mine tend to …
Bi-‘Sicles Built for Two
BY DAN DAVIDSON Two months trapped in the cold, ironically chained to this post, snow-ploughed up to the axles, rimed with forty-below hoar frost, two cycles lean front to back as if they could support each other against the weather. Ridden through summer’s dust and mud they ended here, stopped here, transfixed by this impromtu …
Klondike Korner: How Dawson Does All that it Does
Chatting with Dawson International Short Film Festival producer Dan Sokolowski at the end of a busy weekend, he made the point that there were approximately 80 volunteers involved in putting the festival on and that they contributed something like 800 hours of their time between last year’s festival and this one. That’s typical of all …
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Snow Clearances Create Roadblocks and Opportunities
Don’t you think they could do all this later in the day when people weren’t using the streets? This was the substance of a short discussion I had last week as I piloted my little town-car though the maze of streetus interruptus caused by snow clearing activities. I don’t actually think they could, but I …
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Klondike Korner: Livesey’s General Store
BY DAN DAVIDSON The highway passes it by now, elevated, two metres above where the entrance used to be. The pumps are long gone, leaving holes like extracted teeth in the muddy soil. “Private property” mocks the sign, surrounded by invading trees reclaiming the landscape as demolition by neglect destroys the builder’s dreams. The roof …
Klondike Korner: Wave Forms
The snow comes off the roofs in waves this year, each layer distinct in its reaction to the waves of cold, warmth, ice fog and clear skies that have teased us this winter, each layer finding its unique coefficient of friction, allowing it to slip over …. …. and under the layers around it, suspended …
Enjoying Frankenweenie, Together
Movie season has ended at the Dawson City Museum for another year. The last show was Lincoln, which played to reasonably sized audiences in late March. The Museum began its movie night program a few years ago, beginning with classic films in the audio-visual room. But the arrival of Turner Classic Movies on the city’s …
Reflections on the Changing Season
BY DAN DAVIDSON We’ve been dodging round these puddles now for just about a week, and it’s hard to find the streets these days for sure. It’s not a lot we’re asking, it’s not a lot we seek: just a route back home to get our craft to shore. But when your craft has wheels …
Klondike Korner: We Struck Gold with the KVA
Before there was ever a Yukon Department of Tourism and Culture (including whatever earlier names it may have had) there was the Klondike Visitors Association (KVA). Tourists came to Dawson as early as the Gold Rush, the most famous being Mary Hitchcock and Edith Van Buren, who arrived with an entourage and all the comforts …
Klondike Korner: What’s So Important About the Old CIBC Building?
The recent purchase of the Old CIBC Building on Front Street by The City of Dawson has raised interest across the nation. The price tag of $170,000 was a bit startling, but it’s the resolution to a problem that has been festering since 1989 when the bank moved out and sold it to a private …
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Klondike Korner: Snow-Carving Contest
March 15 will see the beginning of our annual “spring” carnival, an event we call Thaw Di Gras. One of the traditional events during this celebration is a snow-carving contest. Some years it’s too cold for people to put in the time necessary to make a snow sculpture. Some years there isn’t enough snow. That won’t …
Dawson Looks After Those in Need
Food banks often start with the churches, which are acting out their faith’s instructions to look after the poor. In Dawson, the Transients’ Dinners that take place during the month of May are run by all the churches working together, using the available space and kitchen at St. Mary’s Catholic Church to make sure that …
Klondike Korner: Handling the Quest is a Fine Tuned Operation
No matter how many words I log here to the contrary, it seems impossible to shake the impression that Dawson City goes to sleep when the tourists leave and, like bears in winter hibernation, only stirs when something happens to disturb its slumber. If you lived here you’d realize that the schedule can get pretty …
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Klondike Korner: Let it Snow, Let it Snow
There’s been something like a metre (or more) since Christmas and it’s been coming in big deposits that run over a period of two days.
Klondike Korner: Making Music Instruction Fun
The half hour went by quickly and the children at the Tr’inke Zho Daycare were still involved with the lesson when Tiss Clark, their Orff music teacher, called the week’s session to a halt. During that 30 minutes the kids marched in, chanting, formed a circle and went through a series of exercises that didn’t …
The Double Bob is a Dawson Tradition
John Tyrrell, a former Dawsonite now living in Cyprus, where he is Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Nicosia, writes to say that the anglophiles in his city are organizing a Burns Night for Jan. 25 and that they are following the Dawson tradition of calling it a “Double Bob.” This is a reference to …
Klondike Korner: Going the Indie Route with New Book
In my other writing life I produce a weekly column called Bookends. As a result I see a lot of books, an increasing number of which are self-published. The results so far have been rather uneven. There have been some that really needed an editorial hand, others where the copy-editing was enough to make you …
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Building the Klondike Music Puzzle
Peter Menzies likes to think of all the music going on in Dawson City these days as pieces of a puzzle. Menzies acts as emcee for most of the open mic/coffee house events at the Odd Fellows Hall and also for the various Home Routes house concerts that take place during the year. And nary …
Driving North in July
In this haze the Yukon skyline, normally full of distince edges, has become a Tony Onley canvas, vistas folding into each other, fading with the distance into smoke-smudged indistinct waves.
Klondike Korner: Whirlwind
BY DAN DAVIDSON The whirlwind materialized from nowhere, as if from another dimension. A small eddy of dust in the dirt parking lot swiftly gathering speed and substance until it had the form of a small tornado. Call it a dust devil, but it seemed to be more than that, sucking up the dry dirt …
The Icing on the Season
BY DAN DAVIDSON There are signs of seasons changing that we all can recognize: falling leaves and boarded windows, filled with plywood cut to size.??Hotels close and shops cut hours and the RV parks shut down, and the last canoing Germans take their tours around the town.??But the icing on the season’s when the snow …
Where Will the Ravens All Gather?
Where will the ravens all gather now that the tree tops are gone? Where will they hatch their nefarious schemes and plot from midnight to dawn???Where will they watch for the dog food bowls that are left to feed pooches outside? How will they plan their strategic assaults, distracting the dogs as they’re tied???Where will …
The Snowplough Went By at Noon Today
??BY DAN DAVIDSON The snowplough went by at noon today; I think it’ll go by again. The reason I think this is plain to the eye: you can’t even see where it’s been.??It started to snow in the morning on Friday, big, fluffy, white flakes wafting down. The lawn disappeared, then our boardwalk filled in …
Crescent Moon in December
Mid-morning … and there’s a fairy tale moon in the sky; a sliver of silver fit for cows to jump over, curved enough to hold a young boy with a fishing pole, a backdrop for ET perched in the carrier basket of a bicycle, pale and shining against the rosette glow of a mid-December morning.
Klondike Korner: Laying Down Tracks in Dawson City
One of the things Nathan Tinkham likes about working in Dawson City is the way things just seem to fall into place. When he arrived in town to set up for the Dawson City Recording Initiative, he wasn’t sure where he was going to stay and where he would be able to set up his …
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Flooding Our Way to a River Crossing
While “flooding” and “Dawson City” are two phrases you might not want to hear together, at this time of year it’s actually a good thing. It means the river has solidly frozen and there’s an ice bridge under construction. You will recall they pulled the George Black Ferry out of the water on October 22. …
Klondike Korner: Making the Town an Art Gallery
Dawson City itself becomes the art gallery for the year-end exhibition of work by the students at the KIAC School of Visual Arts (SOVA). KIAC stands for Klondike Institute of Art and Culture. It is the program arm of the 10-year-old Dawson City Arts Society (DCAS) and is one of the three partners, with Yukon …
Klondike Korner: Giving Directions in Dawson Can Be Confusing
Giving directions in Dawson can be a very confusing exercise, both for those of us who live here and those who are visiting. The legal surveys of the lots in the town tend to produce some weird results when translated into street numbers. My own house sits on what are supposed to be two residential …
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Klondike Korner: On Losing a Good Neighbour
I lost a good neighbour a few weeks ago. I’m writing this just a week after the death of Madeleine Gould, but it will be almost two more weeks before you read it. By then perhaps I’ll be used to looking out of my kitchen window at breakfast and seeing only one computer monitor glowing …
Coyote
There’s a coyote on the airstrip at Braeburn today, trotting north on the cleared runway with his nose in the air and his tail like a windsock. A bit of a fraud, that, for there is no wind save that of his making and he will have to rev his engine mightily to get airborne …
Klondike Korner: Making the Town an Art Gallery
Dawson City itself becomes the art gallery for the year-end exhibition of work by the students at the KIAC School of Visual Arts (SOVA). KIAC stands for Klondike Institute of Art and Culture. It is the program arm of the 10-year-old Dawson City Arts Society (DCAS) and is one of the three partners, with Yukon …
The Community That Sings Together
The community that sings together … My personal songbook is getting bigger every month. That’s thanks to the energy of a departed Dawsonite educator, named Nijen Holland (or just, Nijen, as everybody called him), who thought up the idea of having monthly coffee houses at various locations around town and encouraging local musicians to contribute …
Signs, Signs, Everywhere Signs
Next week (March 25 to 27), we’re going to have the second instalment of last year’s popular Doors Open Dawson event, in which locals and visitors get to walk through a selection of Parks buildings, institutions, businesses and private homes that are not usually open to the public. Last year’s event was such a hit …
Yonder, a Flash of Red
The fox emerges tentatively from under the Waterfront Building, making a quick, furtive survey of his surroundings, and padding to the top of the dyke. He perches there a moment, nervously alert to any possibility, and then skitters down the frosted slope and commits himself to the expanse of open ice on the river. From …
Boardwalk Users Take the High Road
Dawson’s council got to talking about bylaws and boardwalks the other day and one councillor made the comment that there didn’t seem to be any point in keeping our boardwalks clear in the winter because it appeared that nobody used them anyway. Now, this column isn’t the place for me to engage in political badinage, …
Klondike Korner: What’s this about a bridge?
In spite of numerous attempts by the Chamber of Commerce and promises from the current Yukon government, the only bridge Dawson City has across the Yukon River is the one that forms in the winter … that super highway we call the Ice Bridge. In a normal winter season, the Yukon River begins to freeze …
Klondike Korner: Ill Met by Twilight
Frustration is a winter drive in the twilight when a 16 wheel mobile snowstorm slows everything to a crawl and you peep to spy the solid core of the blizzard which you can glimpse only on long winding corners when it’s not right in front of you in spite of it bearing enough lights to …
About the Rising of the Sun
The Klondike Sun, to which Berton was referring in his guest editorial in that first issue, has made it through its 21st year. Last issue, I dropped several hints that the origins of our little paper would be my subject this week. The paper was launched under the supervision of the Klondike Sun Newspaper Society …
Klondike Korner: What about the “Nutty Club”?
It won’t be immediately obvious to anyone not involved in either history or journalism that this column’s title is a homage to a 35-year tradition that spanned the years 1954 to 1989. Ye editor wanted me to call this column “Dan’s Dawson”, a suggestion from which I recoiled in horror. Johnny Caribou, a sometime scribe …
Canine Communication and the P-Mail Network
Dogs really need to get out and check their messages on a daily basis, in the same way that we humans need to go to the post office or check our e-mail on a regular basis. I realized this some years ago while walking our old dog, Joule, but at 12 years of age she …
Film Festival Goers will be Reeling On Easter Weekend
On the day we met to discuss the 11th Dawson City International Short Film Festival, producer Dan Sokolowski was just finishing getting the 40-page program into final shape to go to the printers. He looked a little tired, but I was on deadline and showed him no mercy. “What’s new this year?” I snapped, clicking …
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The Marvelous Tale of Musher McHugh
There are strange things done on the Percy run when the mushers hit the trail. There are tales that are told of the ice and cold that make novice mushers quail. But the strangest story we’ve heard of late is the tale of Matthew McHugh, how he stopped on the jog, just to check his …
That Little Old Log Cabin on the Hill
There are strange things found on the Internet when you’re surfing just for fun. There’s misinformation galore and yet, there’s no way to get it undone. I won’t even apologize to Robert Service because I’m here to defend his honour. Case in point: www.planetware.com. If its reporting on other topics is as sloppy as that …
Klondike Korner: Poetry Corner: Framework
Today, we are advertising cloudy blue skies, gravel and shrubs. Yesterday, we were someone’s dream of success, prosperity on a billboard. Some called us progress; some, eyesore, then. Now, we frame the landscape and invite random speculation, art seeking commerce with economy. After 32 years teaching in rural Yukon schools, Dan Davidson retired from that …
When Plaque is a Good Thing
Plaque is the subject of this week’s visit to A Klondike Korner. I’ve visited this subject before, but another one of our buildings is due to be plaqued on June 5, so it seems time to bring it up to date. Buildings, places or people that are plaqued by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board …
Golden Words Helped the Klondike Survive
For all that Dawson City is celebrated in lore and in history for the Klondike Gold Rush, I venture to say that the place would not have defied the fate of most mining boom towns for as long as it has without the assistance of the printed word. This week, I’m just going to skim …
Klondike Korner: Poetry Corner
(June 1) Rumble of thunder in the sky Perhaps some rain will fall by and by Perhaps there will be lightning And that thought is somewhat frightening As the forests round about are tinder dry. (June 14) Hammer of rain above the ceiling. We listen as the heavens begin peeling By the time the flash …
Klondike Korner: When Life Influences Art and Vice-Versa
There are times when life influences art, and times when art influences life. At the Jack London Interpretive Museum in Dawson you can experience both in one package. There are three buildings on the site: the big one is the interpretive centre, and it contains the Jack London memorabilia collection that Dick North spent a …
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“Accessible” is the Word for this Year’s DCMF
Producer/artistic director Tim Jones is feeling satisfied with this year’s Dawson City Music Festival. 2010
Dawson Buttons Up for the Coming Winter
So the Outhouse Race is over and the last ball tournament of the season has played its final innings. Later today the Goldrush Campground, whose owners kindly allow me to drain the holding and fresh water tanks on my trailer, will close down for the season, and Pat and Diana Brooks will begin to button …
Klondike Korner: Pierre Berton’s Dawson Legacy
Pierre Berton was, for many years, Dawson’s best-known export and Canada’s best-known media face, better known even than Don Cherry. Having majored in the university newspaper at UBC, Berton went on to become a star reporter in Vancouver, an editor at Maclean’s magazine in Toronto, a daily columnist for the Toronto Star, a daily radio …
Decaying Memories
Iremember the steamboats, the old man said. I remember them coming in spring. I remember the paddlewheels churning the water and bringing us many good things. I remember us kids rushing down to the docks. each wanting so hard to be first to see what was unloaded, rolled off the decks, hearts pounding as if …
When Our Signs Come Down
The land has its own agenda. Plants find purchase in the disturbed earth and overcome humanity’s intrusions. We are a hiccup in the breath of the planet, a slight flutter in the heartbeat of creation. Our vision frames the world we want to see, instead letting us see what there is. When our signs come …
Winter Snow Dropped Early this Year
My experience in Dawson says we first snow before Thanksgiving. But there are exceptions. One memorable year we had snow early in September
Dawson Poised for a Dramatic Comeback
Caili Steel is full of good news when we meet at Klondike Kate’s for coffee and a chat during that restaurant’s opening afternoon. “I just found out today that I got funding from the ArtsFund.” Steel has been busily organizing this year’s version of Dawson’s spring drama festival and has been working pretty much without …
The Gold Show Blooms this Weekend
It’s Monday afternoon and Evelyn Pollock answers the telephone at the office of the Dawson City Chamber of Commerce. This catches me off stride as I had been expecting to be asked to leave a voice mail message. I know that Evelyn only works mornings at the Chamber office. Not this week, she tells me, …