Looking Inside the Insider
Christopher Ross writes about his journalism experiences at the Dawson City Insider from 1997-1999 and what happened after.
Klondike Korner
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.
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, …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 …
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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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. On March 7, I had a lovely photo of the large piles of snow along Front Street, showing the work done by the department of highways crew, which has control …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 …
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.
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 …
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 …
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 …
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%
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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.
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 …
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 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 …
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 …
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 …
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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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
Explaining Travel Realities to People Outside
In just a few days we’ll be loading our little Toyota Yaris onto a freight truck and shipping it to Whitehorse to have a new driver’s side front door installed. It’s not that the car can’t be driven to the city in the summer. I made two trips with it during the last half of …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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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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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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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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.
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 …
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 …
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 …
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: 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 …
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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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 …
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: 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 …
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 …
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: 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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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: 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
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 …
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
Klondike Korner: Picture This
Picture this: a journey through time marked in artifacts, some past, some present. On the wormtrail of the tailings, rusted machinery; a memory of dredges and cats combined. On the gravel below a Parks Canada sign offers an explanation, while two cables offer support to a power pole. All this is framed by an empty …
When the Outhouses Get Running
Poetry à la Commode If you’re looking for good weekend sport then Dawson’s still holding the fort. Be real spiffy and bring your own biffy and then you will not get caught short. here was a time when Dawson’s Great International Outhouse Race was at least partly a serious affair. Hmmm. You may be wondering …
The New Faces of Dawson
While it’s rare to find a weekend in the Dawson summer when there’s not a major event, things do tend to slow down a bit after the Discovery Day weekend and the Yukon Riverside Arts Festival. The next big thing here is the Klondike International Outhouse Race, but that doesn’t take place until Labour Day …
Klondike Korner: Poetry Corner: Inukshuks
Though usually solitary sentinels, except in gift shops, where they line the shelves in mute plastic mimicry, these grey figures cluster in groups on stone pedestals, or stand single and alert on the crest of a lichen patched hill. Just past the border station on the Top-of-the-World, outlined against the horizon, they are not border …
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, …
When will the Ferry Be In?
Write about things that are going to happen about 10 days after you write them, the editor says. Oh, to be a Nostradamus at such times. About 10 days from now, the George Black ferry will slide down the wooden rails leading from its winter berth to the Yukon River, chasing away the ravens trying …
Klondike Korner: It’s the Bazaar Season in Dawson
As you read these words we have just exited the Bush-designated season for Daylight Saving Time. We are now 20 days away from the start of the Christian season of Advent, which begins this year on November 28. This is the official beginning of the month-long countdown to Christmas. But really, for those who have …
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The Odd Places Some People Live
Dawson City has long been known for unique answers to its housing shortage, especially in the summer, when the place is flooded with summer people (or summerdoughs) looking for work and a cheap place to live. Some of them live in run down buildings that probably don’t meet any kind of safety standard. Some have …
Klondike Korner: The Rooneys Want to Put on a Show
After a career that began when he crawled on stage at the age of 18 months and has hardly slowed at all in the 88 years since, Mickey Rooney has finally made it to the Yukon. He and his wife, Jan, along with two of Canadian theatre’s biggest names, present Let’s Put On A Show …
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All That Glitters in the Klondike
Dawson City was founded on the glitter of gold and, so, it is no surprise that the yellow metal gets mentioned a great deal here. We work it into other events that might have no natural connection to the stuff. But we’re in the Klondike, right? And just now, with the staking rush that has …
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 …
Klondike Korner: ‘Tis the Season of Bizaarness
November is always a bazaar month in Dawson. Strangely enough, the word does seem to share the same 16th century Italian root – bazarro – as “bizarre,” the word it is sometimes confused with. Perhaps this is because Middle Eastern bazaars are so noisy and frenetic that it almost seems as if people in them …
Klondike Korner: Poetry Corner
This frame once served as a sales pitch to the world. Now, stripped of its painted enticements and weathered to a natural grey, it offers a another kind of frame, a way of picturing the world, a means of focusing attention on the interplay of light and shadow, blue, white, green and brown, the image …
Bugged!
Bug time: The sun is flirting with the edge of the mountain and the heat is leeching out of the day. Insects, paralyzed by the August brilliance, begin to rise from their shelters, bobbing in the evening air like dust motes caught in the shaft of light from a crack in the window blinds. Encouraged …
A Day to Remember
The first time you read this might be on Remembrance Day, November 11, a day which has a lot more significance now than it did before our troops began operations in Afghanistan in late 2001. The day is a little confusing in its national application because, while it is a holiday here in the Yukon …
Klondike Korner: It’s a Recycling Depot, Not a Garbage Dump
Conservation Klondike has been trying to assist folks in this region to recycle more and throw away less for a number of years now. It has a recycling depot in the lane between 2nd and 3rd Avenues and another facility at the Quigley Dump, which it operates in cooperation with the City of Dawson. The …
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Klondike Korner: What is Dawson Time, Anyway?
About a decade ago, the Yukon’s Department of Tourism had a slogan that was supposed to entice people to extend their stay in the territory by another day or two. “Stay Another Day – On Yukon Time” was the wording of the program, and it was kind of a play on a phrase that’s common …
Klondike Korner: Dancing in the Summer Breeze
The leaves have exploded this week. Two weeks back they were small brown buds huddling against the nighttime frost, waiting for sunlight. Then the buds split and small green extrusions peeked forth, just testing the air. Tiny leaves replaced the buds. Miniature photosynthetic factories took nutrients, sunlight and water and enlarged the original blueprint day …
Where Did You Say That Was
There are lots of people in Dawson who couldn’t give you street directions to save their lives. Part of the confusion is the problem with street and house numbers that I wrote about last time, but that’s not the only reason. Simply put, building functions, locations and names keep changing over time and people tend …
Getting in Tune for Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve is an ecumenical operation in Dawson City, and St. Paul’s Anglican gets the honour of hosting the 7 pm Carol Service because it has the largest sanctuary. It is a standing room only event, and it needs all the room it can get. The choir started rehearsing right after Remembrance Day. At any …
Developing a Painless Pageant
BC Radio One has been running a survey to find out when people think it would be okay to play Christmas music, and a lot of the on-air replies seem to think that December 24 would be just fine. I suspect it’s not that people actually know the difference between Advent and Christmas, but that …
Dog Teams and River Walkers Make the Crossing
It’s that season when Dawsonites don’t quite know what to use to get around. As a case in point, I came out of the General Store the other day to find both a bicycle and a snowmobile parked beside the Old CIBC building across the street. At this point, given the lack of a bike …
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
Darkness is closing in at 4:30 and it’s finally started to get cold here on the week I’m writing this. The cold is a good thing because it enables folks stranded in West Dawson to make the trip across the Yukon River for supplies. They may not agree with the “stranded” part, but after the …
A Celebration of Northern Words
I’m sitting in my trailer in Whitehorse as I type these words, but I can almost hear Buckwheat Donahue hoowwlliingg with delight all the way from Skagway, where I spent the last several days, attending the very first North Words Writers Symposium. Buckwheat likes to begin and end every event he’s involved in with a …
Afternoon and Evening Delight on Commissioner’s Day
At the last of the Transients’ Weekly Suppers this year, one of the special speakers at the event made reference to the Commissioner’s Residence and the upcoming Tea and Ball, which take place there. At the word “commissioner”, blank looks passed over the faces of those summerdoughs who were here from Outside for the first …
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Klondike Korner: Visions of Dawson’s Past at the Museum
When you think about historic photos of the Klondike, most of what comes to mind is from the Gold Rush years or not long after. The Parks Canada theme for the area is, after all, from the Gold Rush to about 1920, with the heyday being the years when George and Martha Black held court …
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When the Fire Hall Got Hauled
Back in Column #2 of this series, I promised you a couple of moving stories about Dawson buildings. My last column should certainly have made it clear that I was thinking about actual physical relocation rather than a tug at the heart stings. When I moved to Dawson in 1985, there was a clunky complex …
When the Whistle Blows
It seems only fair to warn strangers to the fair metropolis of Dawson City that there are certain hours of the day when it would be best not to be walking on or cycling past the boardwalk next to the S.S. Keno. This is especially true if you are easily startled. The hours in question …
A Different Kind of “Break Up”
Is this what they mean by ‘break-up’?” asked the man. It was March of that particular year, so I was slightly nonplussed. He gestured at the jumble of broken hardpan snow on the road where the plough had just gone by. Great chunks of icy rubble divided the street neatly in two, and no vehicles …
Klondike Korner: Looking for the Midnight Sun
Down in Peterborough Chris Culgin (guitar, fiddle & vocals) of the band called the Avenues is wondering about the daylight situation when we connect on July 15. At nearly a month past Solstice I can’t promise him the full Midnight Sun experience when he and the rest of the band get to Dawson on June …
Something Different Comes to Town
Larry Graves and I spoke just after the band’s van had rolled into Sault Ste Marie on its way to Thunder Bay, a nine-hour drive from Toronto. “We’re only a fraction of the way to the Yukon,” Parks said, sounding tired over his cell phone. Before Mr. Something Something arrives to play the Dawson City …
They Keep Coming Back
The departure of yet another Berton House writer, Jeanne Randolph, brought to my mind the number of writers in residence who have come and gone – and come again over the last few years. This happens to quite a few people other than writers, and is referred to locally as the Dawson Boomerang Effect. Randolph …
Klondike Korner: Jeanne Randolph Analyzes Everything
Jeanne Randolph may have a different working title for the book project she’s writing during her residency at Berton House by the time she reads at the Whitehorse Public Library on June 29. It will be a study of pantheism, a look at our culture’s adoration of commodities, as demonstrated by the structures littered around …
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Klondike Korner: Frontiers of Literature
The only disappointing thing about the second annual North Words Writers’ Symposium was that it didn’t take place in Dawson City. It was intended that it should. Buckwheat Donahue, the founder of the event, had dreams of a moveable literary feast that would follow a circuit from Skagway to Dawson to Denali and back to …
Klondike Korner: Tourism Promotion Goes Digital
When Klondike Visitors Association (KVA) executive director Gary Parker accepted the Tourism Industry Association of Yukon’s (TIAY) Innovator of the Year award on behalf of the KVA, he couldn’t manage to restrain himself. “I think we’ve started something new and exciting. And what’s new about Dawson leading the way?” When it comes to tourism, what …
Klondike Korner: Ice Bridge Jitters
Silly question from summer visitor: “What do you do with your ice bridge in the summer?” Snappy reply from Dawsonite: “We cut it into little chunks and store it in our freezers until we need it again.” Unlike the line I used about breakup and street clearing a few issues back, I don’t know if …
Remembering the Iron Man
Percy deWolfe, known as the Iron Man Mail Carrier, faced many unpredictable moments during his 38 years (1910-1949) on the trail between Dawson and Eagle. He did it all year round, so there were different factors every season. But sticking to the so-called “spring” when the Percy DeWolfe Memorial Mail Race is run, Percy would …
Showcasing the ‘fur’ North
A few weeks before the 2011 Dawson Fur Show, coordinator Miranda Meade isn’t quite sure how many people she can expect to show up for the bi-annual event. That’s understandable. Trappers are a little hard to get hold of during trapping season and the organizing body, the Dawson District Renewable Resource Council (DDRRC), can never …
Klondike Korner: Trekking Over the Top
As I write these words there is one more day of registration for the 18th annual Trek Over the Top from Tok, Alaska, to Dawson and back. The snowmobile racing event that was begun by the Alaska Trailblazers as a lark in 1993, and solidified into serious winter tourism in 1994, has entered a new …
Klondike Korner: Movie Nights at the Museum
Once upon a time there was a movie theatre in Dawson City. The Orpheum was located just across Front Street from the Waterfront Building where Wildflower Designs (formerly The Doghouse) is now. The Orpheum was run by Fred and Palma Berger between 1966 and 1979, when it was heavily damaged by the flood that spring …
Klondike Korner: Memories of Clinton Creek
When I began teaching Social Studies 10 while living in Faro, the main text for the geography portion of the course featured a big section on the Clinton Creek Mine, which the book said had been the salvation of the nearby town of Dawson City. The former territorial capital had been in some danger of …
Klondike Korner: Just Watchin’ the River Flow
“But this ol’ river keeps on rollin’, though No matter what gets in the way and which way the wind does blow, And as long as it does I’ll just sit here And watch the river flow.” – Bob Dylan The ice in the Klondike River let go all the way and surged to the …
Klondike Korner: Reflections on a Dawson Spring
It is spring in Dawson. People are in shorts and vehicles are turning brown from the middle of the side panels to the tires. New vehicles in the Yukon should come from the showroom with a colour scheme I’d call the Yukon Blend. (After the mid-point, the colour should morph into a uniform brownish-grey that …
Klondike Korner: Getting Ready For the Ball
They’ve been sprucing up the front façade of the Palace Grand Theatre recently, sanding off the old stain and lathering on the new. The contractor needed to get the job finished quickly, as June 4 was the date set for the Robert Service School’s commencement exercises, which have taken place in the grand old building …
Cleaning up in the Klondike
Now that the snow is completely gone, it’s a little bit depressing to see how much garbage it was hiding. We had begun to notice this in a cursory sort of way once the warmer weather began transforming our dog-walking from a necessary chore to a pleasant outing. Later we took it more seriously, but …
Klondike Korner: Gold Show Turns 25
Gold Show Ready to Go” (Whitehorse Star, May 26, 1986). My headline had to be in the Star, because the Klondike Sun would not exist for another three years at that point. In the fall of 1985 Bill Bowie brought the seed of an idea back from a trip to Inuvik, where he had attended …
The Shadows Know
In the afternoon glare of October elongated shadows stretch north across the town,reaching for winter.
The Mystery of the Four Coffins Explained
“You’re in one of the slides in this presentation,” they told me. This came as a surprise, since it is generally my lot in life to be the picture taker rather than the picture takee. But there I was, standing outside the chain link fence on Fifth Avenue, in the fall of 2010, just about …
Remembering Tent City
As we get closer to the time when Dawson sees an influx of summer workers, I thought I would take this week to reflect on the glory that was Tent City. To begin with, there has been a summer housing crunch in Dawson from at least the 1970s on. The shortage of suitable accommodation has …
Klondike Korner: Introducing the Klondike Cup
On February 10, about a week after you’ll be reading this, one of the longest rivalries in hockey legend will see another act its 106-year history. On that day the Ottawa Silver Seven (AKA the Ottawa Senators Alumni) will face off against the Dawson City Nuggets on the latter team’s home ice for the first …
The Artful Orchestration of Ferry Extraction
In Dawson we usually get 24-hours notice before the George Black ferry gets pulled for the winter. That’s time enough for one last big haul of potable water, one last really big trip to the grocery stores; time to stock up on fuel for the generator; time to lay in supplies for what can be …
Art Enrichment Time
The first Youth Art Enrichment (YAC) week in Dawson City was inspired in the early years of the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (KIAC) by the long-running Youth Authors’ Conference that takes place in Whitehorse. It’s so successful in its own write – so to speak – that now it seems it’s just the …
Klondike Korner: We Shutter to Think of Winter
I’m baaack. I hadn’t been in town a day before someone asked me if I’d given up this column. The answer is no. It’s just hard to do a coming events essay when you’re not at home to know what’s coming. Our little vacation took us to Calgary, Ireland and Toronto, extending the range of …
A Dawson Virtual Tour
I discovered Google Earth a few years ago. Our son was spending the winter in Fort Nelson and we figured out that Google Earth would allow us to zoom in on the street where he was living, actually find the hotel and move, in a jerky, foreshortened way, between there and other places that he …
Watching Ice
This is the time of year when you find people looking at the river and wondering – when? There are different “whens”, of course. I happened across some gentlemen at a table just past the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre a day or so ago. It was a beautiful afternoon and one could almost see the …
Dawson and the Ted Harrison Effect
While doing what I call my Berton House exit interview with Sara Tilley, the latest writer-in-residence, she remarked that one of the things that made her feel comfortable and at home here was the colourful palette of our buildings. It reminded her of buildings in Newfoundland. That’s quite true. I noticed the colours, particularly in …
Klondike Korner: Look Out Below!
Tis the season to be careful where you walk and where you park here in Dawson. Look up. Look waaay up (with apologies to The Friendly Giant). You never know what might be about to come down. A former colleague at Yukon Education told me of a trip to Watson Lake many years ago. Parked …
Klondike Korner: How the Dogs Love to Run
The dogs at the Percy DeWolfe starting line must have started getting antsy around 9:15 am on March 24. That’s when our dog, whose mother was a grizzled grey-brown sled dog, wanted to go out on the front porch. She turned in the direction of King Street and 3rd and let loose with her contribution …
Klondike Korner: Preparing for the Double Bob Bash
I’m writing this column on Robert Service’s birthday, January 16, which is appropriate since the event I wish to describe is the Dawson Community Library’s annual Double Bob Bash – a dinner celebrating the January birthdays of the two Roberts: Service and Burns. Burns, born nine days later, predates Service by nearly 120 years, but …
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Dawson’s Got Culture
Things generally slow down at the Dänojà Zho (Hän for Long Ago House) Cultural Centre once the summer season is over and the tourists are gone, but this fall season has been something of an exception. The place is a hotbed of activity, even in December. The building is approaching its 15th year of operation …
Musical Months in Dawson
Dawson City is famous for the Dawson City Music Festival, which covers a long weekend in July. However, if that’s all we had happening here, the town could be considered musically impoverished. Not to worry, we do our best to bring in talent from elsewhere. And when we can’t do that, we play for ourselves. …
Painting the Public Face of Dawson
Our mayor, Peter Jenkins, likes to say that moving the capital city to Whitehorse did Dawson a favour. We lost the politicians but got to keep the buildings. Leaving aside the fact that this comment comes from a man who has been in politics almost continuously since the early 1980s, it is true we have …
Memories of Life in Dawson
Publishing timelines sometimes just don’t mesh with reality. Ten days ago I could have written three of these advance-notice style columns about the crowded schedule we’re having this week (November 7 to 11). However, the theme of this column, whenever possible, is to look into the future and there’s not a lot going on 10 …
Ribbons and Scissors
As the summer winds down here in Dawson, and with no special occasion on the horizon, this week seemed a good time to sum up a few of the events that have preoccupied our social calendar without making it into this column. It has been a summer of ribbons and scissors, as project after project …
Klondike’s Wandering School House
On August 29 the Klondike School House, called Tr’odek Hatr’unohtan Zho in the Han language, finally got a home. I’m talking about the Dawson campus of Yukon College, which has been bounced all over town since it started up in the early 1980s. My early awareness of Yukon College was when I lived in Faro. …
Remembering the Lost Patrol
One of the last big weekends of this Dawson City summer will be built around an RCMP Regimental Ball, to be held here on August 27. The force has held a number of special events and anniversary celebrations in Dawson in the past, but this one, organized to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Lost …
A Look at Dawson’s Dike
It will have been obvious from my last column that I was truly expecting breakup to have occurred before I got around to writing the next one. It’s April 30 this afternoon, and while there has been a lot of movement on the Yukon River over the last few days, the tripod is still standing …
Feeding Bodies, Hearts and Minds
Just had a call from the folks at the Community Gospel Hall to tell us that there were 90 people at this week’s edition of the transients/summer workers/summerdoughs’ Tuesday night dinner. That’s sharply up from the 55 to 60 that St. Paul’s Anglican played host to last week and still more than the group St. …
Making Music in the Ballroom
The last of the monthly winter coffee house and open mic nights at the Odd Fellows Hall ballroom occurred on May 5. They are a tradition that goes back five or six years now, having been started by an educational assistant at the Robert Service School who wanted a place for the student band he …
Roofalanches
You might not expect to have to worry too much about falling snow in the Klondike in April. After all, this is not Alberta, where blizzards in the middle of April are common events. Yes, it snowed on the morning of Easter Sunday here in Dawson, but it had turned to drizzle by noon when …
Be It Ever So Wintry, There’s No Place Like Home
“Gee, but it’s great to be back home” – Paul Simon Waiting for my wife’s plane to land at the airport this afternoon I was reminded of how difficult it can be to get in and out of town sometimes. It was my second trip to the airport that day due to the foggy conditions …
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Music Fills the Klondike this Fall
Get myself ready for the October edition of the monthly Coffee House/Open Mic evening in the Oddfellows Hall ballroom.
Getting Down with the Trash
There were about two dozen people at Dawson’s recycling centre over a recent weekend. They were trying to do something about the mess that the place had become. While it’s true that the City of Dawson’s bylaw officer had served the Conservation Klondike Society (CKS) with a notice saying they had to clean the place …
Klondike Korner: Rediscovering the Discovery Claim
Each year, about 8,500 people visit the Discovery Claim on Bonanza Creek, 15 kilometres from where it meets the Klondike River. That’s not bad for a historic site that really hasn’t had much in the way of quality promotion since I first saw it in 1978. At that time there were what looked to be …
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A Klondike Korner: Honouring Tr’ochëk
The former Hän fish camp, known today as Tr’ochëk, was designated as a National Historic Site on July 19, 2002, joining the long list of such sites that are already located in Dawson City. On July 23, 2011, just over nine years later, Tr’ochëk was awarded its own bronze plaque by the Historic Sites and …
Dawson’s Writers’ Block
There’s an area of town in Dawson that I like to refer to as the Writers’ Block. I do this because of an inherent weakness for puns, and because three of the writers who helped Dawson outlast the fate of most mining boomtowns are connected to the place. Without them, it’s safe to venture that …
Mass Confusion at the Percy Junior Race
There are two types of starting line for the annual Percy DeWolfe Memorial Mail Race events. The first one is a timed individual start on King Street beside the Old Post Office. The ghost of Percy DeWolfe leaves at 10 a.m. on the dot, followed by the rest at two minute intervals. When there are …
The Origins of Berton House: Part 1
“Like all famous sons, Pierre Berton sometimes gets a mixed reception in his home town, but you’d never have known it to hear the spontaneous applause that broke out from the crowd of some 200 people as the tall man in the dark blue blazer strode out onto the balcony of his boyhood home on …
Film Time
As we close in on Easter Weekend, otherwise known locally as the Dawson City International Short Film Festival (DCISFF), I have to wonder if Dawson’s obsession with amateur video doesn’t have something to do with the fact that the town has no theatre. Newcomers wouldn’t even know that there used to be one across the …
Driving Depends on Icy Conditions
It’s hard to think of an icy road as being anything but dangerous, but that’s not always the case. In Dawson City it can go both ways. For those wanting to drive from downtown to the Midnight Dome subdivisions, Mary McLeod Road is often the preferred route, especially for those who live along the stretch …
What is Thaw di Gras, Anyway?
Thaw di Gras (sometimes misspelled Thaw di Graw, especially in Manitoba) is the peculiar name Dawson City gives its spring carnival. The event will be held from March 15 to 18. The name is, of course, a reference to the Mardi Gras, which actually took place on February 21, the Tuesday before the Christian religious …
The Trek Celebrates Year 19
It’s the 19th year for Trek Over the Top, and the second year the Klondike Visitors Association (KVA) has the Yukon side of the operation under its umbrella. The first run of this year’s Trek fortnight will begin in Tok, Alaska on March 1, with a return planned on March 4. The second Trek will …
Myth and Medium Returns to Dawson
The Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in (TH) Heritage department is reviving its Myth and Medium program during the week of February 21 to 23. The program ran for two years, in 2003 and 2004. Then, as organizers Jackie Olsen, Jodi Beaumont and Sue Parsons recalled when we sat down to chat about it last week, it simply got …
Sunshine and Shadow in the Winter
Our dog, Shadow, is outside this afternoon and has been for about half an hour. The sun has reached the point where it actually shines directly on 7th Avenue for an hour or so, and she wants to take in as much of it as she can. In the darkest part of the winter she …
A Fortnight in the Freezer
Today was one of those overcast days when the sun didn’t break through and all we got was indirect lighting. When this happens I can’t help but feel cheated. The sun has been back for a couple of weeks now, and while it isn’t quite hitting the streets (except for a bit on Front Street) …
Klondike Korner: Preparing for the Quest
The 2012 running of the Yukon Quest will launch in Fairbanks on Saturday, February 4. There’s a countdown clock on the Quest website (http://yukonquest.com) indicating the number of days, hours and minutes until the race begins. Sometime within the three to five days after that (depending on the race conditions), the first of the 24 …
From Winter Sports to Poetry
I’m inclined to blame the Germans. It seems that every year for the last half dozen or so out of the 12 years that the Fulda Extreme Winter Sports Event has taken place, the arrival of the red-suited FuldaFolk and their logo-emblazoned SUVs has coincided with the a precipitous drop in temperature, draping a curtain …
Lots of Snow in the Klondike
welcome to a new year of news and musing from the Klondike, where the most descriptive word for the several weeks seems to be “snow”. It’s ironic since I’ve only lately written a piece for another publication explaining that great amounts of snow at one time are rare here. It seems to have been snowing …
The Origins of Berton House: Pt. 2
When I left off with this history of the Berton House, Pierre Berton had bought back his childhood home for $50,000 in 1989 and donated it to the Yukon Arts Council. The council collaborated with the Klondike Visitors Association (KVA) to set up the Berton House writer-in-residence committee to make decisions about how to handle …
A Vision Becomes a Reality at the Gathering Place
“We had a vision in the fall, last year, of building an outdoor classroom at Robert Service School,” Hän Language teacher Melissa Hawkins explained to the assembly of several hundred students, teachers, parents, and community members on a sunny Thursday, September 6. Everyone was gathered around the antler-crowned arbour-style entrance to ?enähjin Tr’ëdëk, or the …
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Saving a Language and a Culture
Doris Roberts hates to fly, but when it came time to go to Tanacross, Alaska, to retrieve the songs and stories that Chief Isaac had taken there for safe-keeping many decades earlier, she knew she had to do it. Roberts had lost much of her Hän language while at residential school from 1946 to 1949, …
Miners Have a Bone to Pick with Pre-History
There’s a lot more than gold in them thar hills and creeks in the Klondike. Aside from all kinds of other minerals that just don’t seem to occur in large enough quantities to be of commercial, there are bones that have helped to tell the tale of the region’s pre-history. Miners have been finding bones …
All Dolled Up
Sewing Our Traditions: Dolls of Canada’s North will be on display at Dawson’s Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre until September 21, held over from the centre’s regular summer season so that it can be part of a school-related program. Students at the Robert Service School (RSS) have already had one shot at doll making and the …
Picking the Greatest Klondiker
It has, unfortunately, been a number of years since a really top-notch piece of stagecraft graced the boards at the Palace Grand Theatre on a regular basis. Since the demise of the Gaslight Follies Parks Canada has been trying to find ways to bring people into this exciting old building and has sponsored a number …
Gallery Hopping as a Discovery Event
It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the emphasis now given to the arts during the Discovery Days celebrations here have revived a week that was once in danger of dying out altogether. The combination of literary, historic, sports, and arts related activities have created a five-day visitor attraction filled …
Taking a Walk Along Writers’ Block
Dawson survives as it does because it had prominent champions among the wordsmiths of the 20th century. Without the stories of Jack London, the poetry of Robert Service and the non-fiction of Pierre Berton, I doubt if any amount of gold could actually have bought the town the brand recognition that came from their typewriters. …
The Storyteller’s Story
“I was born under a tree (on September 6, 1920), way up the MacMillan River, at Russell Creek,” J.J. Van Bibber told the Klondike Sun back in 2009. “Whenever a baby was ready to be born, mom (Eliza) just holed up for a week, and then put us on her back, and just keep going.” …
Celebrating Print and Publishing at the Daily News
The Dawson Daily News building shut down as an operating business in 1954, a casualty of Dawson losing its Yukon capital status to Whitehorse. The newspaper was one of the earliest of many in the town, and the only one to survive the early boomtown days. It moved into its offices in 1910. These days …
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How Scrooge Made his Fortune
Around this time of year I usually devote a few columns to some of the literary lions that have helped to make Dawson City famous since 1898. This year I’m going to diverge a bit and write about another bit of fiction. It is, perhaps, not known to the general public that the fortune of …
An Art Invasion is Coming to Dawson
Welcome to another peek at my corner of the Klondike. Apparently this little column is getting a bit of notice, since my absence last issue has already had a couple of people asking me if I’d stopped writing it. I guess that’s the benefit of writing for a free paper that sits out there for …
ArtsFest Aims to Carve Itself a New Emphasis
In its 10th year, the Yukon Riverside Arts Festival, has made a few changes intended to give people more to do, as opposed to just looking and buying. The festival, organized by the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (a division of the Dawson City Arts Society), runs from Aug. 12 to 15, just before …
Dawson Blooms in the Summer
I managed to mow our lawn before the rain began to sprinkle this morning and was pleased to find that several of the dog damaged areas that I reseeded earlier in the summer no longer stand out as patches of bare earth. Indeed, the new grass there is greener and thicker than some of the …
The Berton House Boomerang Effect
I was enjoying an hour’s quiet reading on our front deck last week when a familiar French-Canadian voice hailed me from the street. I wasn’t entirely surprised to see Mylène Gilbert-Dumas coming through my front gate. She is a Facebook friend and my minimal high school French does allow me to pick through some of …
Michael Mason’s Single Line
It’s a slow Sunday afternoon and Michael Mason is a little discouraged at the low turnout for his one-man art show at the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Community Hall. It probably doesn’t help that there’s work being done on the roof of the building and the entrance looks a bit like a construction zone. Mason muses that …
Dawson Museum Celebrates 50 Years
At the turn of the 19th century the federal government was anxious to establish that the Yukon was a valued part of the nation. Even though Dawson City had already begun to decline in size from its heyday as “the Paris of the North”, Thomas W. Fuller, who eventually worked on the Parliament Buildings in …
A Klondike Korner: When Dawson Celebrated Independence Day
As the calendar moves inexorably towards Canada Day, with all the busyness of the holiday combined with the Yukon Goldpanning Championships, which fill up much of the afternoon, I find myself thinking back to how close we came to celebrating a different national holiday instead. In my last column, I mentioned how Luella Day (or …
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The “True” Tale of Diamond Lil
There are, as Robert Service noted, strange things done ‘neath the Midnight Sun. There have also been some strange things written, not the least of which would be some of the poet’s own verses and a few of the saltier tales of Jack London. The story told by “Diamond Lil” in her memoir, The Tragedy …
See the Dredge, While You Can
If you want to get a really good look at Dredge #4 on the Bonanza Road, this summer is the time to do it. This will be your last opportunity to get a full tour of the structure, climb all seven floors, walk from one end to the other of a building that is two-thirds …
Come Toss a Caber
Having spent a bit of time in Scotland, I can attest that the scenery in the Highlands bears more than a passing resemblance to the Yukon, albeit in miniature. That being so, the idea of holding Highland Games in the Klondike is less odd than it might seem. In fact, according to the members of …
Dawson Dresses Up
Breakup is usually followed by a week of damp chilliness as the cool air moving off the exposed river hits the town, but this year we got six to eight inches of snow as well during the first week of May. I can’t recall this happening before during my time here. With the river breakup …
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like “You Know What”
Here in the Klondike we are currently forging through Advent and into the Christmas season. The month of the Christmas bazaars – otherwise known as November – is behind us. That shopping season is bookended by the two large events: the Daycare Bazaar in the Robert Service School gymnasium and the Last Minute Bazaar, a …
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A Gift from the Odd Fellows
Last night I attended the delightful Dawson City showing of the David Mamet play, Boston Marriage. Two days earlier the KIAC Christmas Art and Craft Extravaganza filled a room with handicrafts and artwork. On the same date there was a Karaoke Night with visiting artist-in-residence Curtis Grahauer. Two nights before that Grahauer offered a showing …
The Ice Bridge Begins
I finally managed to spot the place where they are crossing the Yukon River yesterday (November 19). I’ve been hearing stories of people making the trek since about two weeks after they pulled the ferry out, but the ice build-up has been so erratic this year that I hardly knew what to believe. It looked …
Another Housing Crunch
First, and most obviously, it is now attached to its sister institution, the new campus for Yukon College (or Tr’odek Hatr’unohtan Zho), as noted here two issues ago. Then there are new staff members, with Sam Cheuk coming on board to take the English instructor’s post and Nicole Rayburn filling in for a semester on …
Remarkable Dedication in the Dead Centre of Town
Hardly anyone knows more about Dawson’s cemeteries than Ed and Star Jones. These days the Joneses live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They don’t commute to Dawson in the summer as often as they used to but then, as Ed says, they used to be able to make the trip for $600 and you can’t …
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Boardwalks and Visitors
It figures. Leave town for a week and they change things. In this case, it’s the boardwalks they’re changing, and I can’t complain about that at all. Every few years it needs to be done. The boards rot away; the ground moves beneath them; and a year after they were last replaced what was straight …
Dawson Goes to the Dogs
In early February the sun begins to kiss the streets in Dawson City. It’s been lurking along the tops of the hills for some time, and those who live on higher ground in West Dawson or in the Dome subdivisions have continued to get a bit of direct sunlight even when there was nothing but …
The Joys of a Good House Concert
Here in Dawson we’re into the second year of working with the Home Routes organization to stage a series of House Concerts. These help to tide us over between music festivals by bringing festival quality acts into town. They’re called house concerts because, with a few rare exceptions, they take place in peoples’ homes and …
How Others See Us PDF
It’s always interesting to learn how other people see us. Three creative spirits passed our way a couple of weeks ago and left us with some thoughts connected to our sense of place. Iain Baxter& said he thought the drive to Dawson was like living in a Monet painting. I would have picked one of …
Tr’ondek Hwich’in Celebrate at Moosehide
The 10th Moosehide Gathering will take place at Moosehide (where else?) from July 29 to Aug. 1. Moosehide is located five kilometres downstream from Dawson City, and was the home of the Hän people for some 50 years. The village was established at the beginning of the 20th century when the Hän people were displaced …
Klondike Korner: Wake-up Call
BY DAN DAVIDSON Who visits the neighbours at five a.m., exciting the watchers in the lane? They pass the word from house to house, so quickly as to be almost simultaneous, yet slowly enough to be a round, fading now in the morning twilight, dissolving into my dog-eared dreams. After 32 years teaching in rural …
The Best Remembrance
There is service at the battlefront, a Calling to be sure, though not for God and Glory, that old lie from days of yore. Those who served and did their best, they have no fear of shame; it is those who failed to stem the tide of war who own the blame. We others, though …