Small House, Big Yard - John O'Neal

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we were in the RV Park we saw the oddest thing. It was a German tour bus. The people sat in the front during the day. When they parked for the night they all slept in coffin sized spaces in the back of the bus. They also towed a trailer that served as a kitchen. I went over and talked to them about it, very interesting. I use the term “for the night” loosely because we were having 23 hours of light while we were here.

      It’s difficult to describe the surrounding environment because it’s like no place else we’ve ever been. The whole area has been mined continuously since 1898 and the land has been savaged by succeeding generations of people using ever more destructive equipment. And as the equipment either wore out or became obsolete it was abandoned where it sat. To keep this edition of the newsletter a reasonable size, I’ll describe the gold mining process later.

      We were in Dawson City on June 21st, the longest day of the year. So we trundled up to the top of the Dome, a very large hill overlooking the town, along with everybody else in town to watch the sun dip down to just below the horizon and then reappear minutes later. It was a big party. When we left at 1:30 a.m. there were still people arriving with a case of beer under each arm. It is one of the two big social events of the year in Dawson City. The other big event is the day that the ice breaks up in the Yukon River. The locals have a pool every year where they bet on the day and hour the river will break up. (This year it was May 5th.)

      We spent a week in Dawson City and were sorry to leave. Even with all the smoke in the air, it is a great place.

      http://travelyukon.com/about-yukon/yukon-communities/dawson-city

      But we can’t leave the Yukon just yet. We need to talk about gold mining.

      In 1896 some miners were fishing in a creek a few miles from a native fishing village when they saw gold in the water. They started turning over rocks and found slabs of gold the size of cheese slices. They told their friends, who told their friends. Pretty soon gold was found on other nearby creeks and tributaries.

      But the world didn’t know what was happening in the Yukon until 1897 when the steamship Excelsior landed in San Francisco. On board was more than half a million dollars worth of Klondike gold. News of the great discovery travelled over the wires like wildfire. When the steamer Portland landed in Seattle three days later, a crowd of 5,000 greeted the 68 miners on board. Over a million dollars worth of gold was carried down the gangplank in a battered assortment of suitcases and rope-tied bags. The Klondike Gold Rush was on. The small fishing village nearby the original discovery mushroomed into the second largest city in the Yukon. The miners renamed it Dawson City.

      Gold is still being mined in the Yukon gold fields by 140 mining companies from May to September. April is spent getting the equipment ready, and October is spent preparing the equipment for winter. The claims are highly structured and regulated. You can’t just go out and start digging. We were surprised to learn that the territory is still today one of the world's leading producers of gold.

      The same original creeks and tributaries are being mined by each generation of miners who continue to find gold because of improved technology from generation to generation. The gold in the Yukon is placer gold. That means that it is gold that is sitting in dirt and rocks rather than being part of another rock, like in a vein. The method of separating placer gold from the surrounding dirt is to shake it with running water in a sluice box. That has never changed.

      A hundred years ago when gold was plentiful they used pans and hand-powered shaker boxes to sluice. Then came picks and shovels to dig for the gold below the surface. In the 1920’s huge dredges were built in places like Ohio and shipped to the Yukon. These floating house-sized machines tore the land apart by creating a pond for itself to float in and then moving forward as it chewed up more land, sluiced it, and spit the left over material out the back. As you drive around you can still see miles and miles of rocks piled up where the dredges had worked. You can even tour one of the dredges that has become a tourist attraction. Today they use heavy machinery to dig with, and trucks to bring the dirt to the sluicing machines. They sluice tons of material down to get about a footlocker size box of paydirt. They then take the sluiced paydirt, which contains the gold, and sluice it some more on a succession of smaller machines to ultimately completely separate the gold. It’s quite a process.

      Charlie, one of the guys we're traveling with, has a friend who used to be a miner in Dawson City and still lives nearby. He took us to two mines of friends of his for a look see. Both were within easy driving distance of Dawson City. One was an 8 man operation. (The owner, 5 equipment operator/drivers and 2 mechanics to keep all the vehicles and machinery running.) Working a 12 hour day, the 5 equipment operators produce a footlocker sized box of sluiced material. At the end of the day the owner takes the footlocker to a separate location on the claim and locks it up for the night. The next morning he sluices the material by himself. It takes him about 5 hours a day and yields an average of 60 ounces a day.

      We also saw a much smaller, although identical, one man operation. He does all the work himself and recovers about 8 ounces a day. We were very lucky to get tours of these mining operations because mine owners are VERY suspicious of strangers and don’t allow them on their claims.

      Driving around, we saw lots of other mining operations but didn’t approach any.

      We went 4,500 miles this month. That’s a TON of miles, WAY more than we were expecting to go, or should have gone. We thought it would be at least a two month trip but our guides decided they needed to get back to San Diego to attend a wedding. So we pretty much raced around. We spent $525 on RV parks. Spent $1,520 on gas at an average price, in Canada, of $2.70 a gallon. The price of gas in Alaska was in the $2.19 a gallon range. We found food to be way more expensive as we got further into the wilderness.

      You certainly don't need an RV to travel the Alaska Highway, although lots of people do drive them. We even saw quite a number of rental RVs. But a car would work just fine. Every 30 miles or so along the highway you can find gas stations, motels, and restaurants. There are also lots of places to tent camp along the way. People short on time just fly up there and rent a car. Any way you get there, it's a great place to visit.

      The weather this month has been pretty close to perfect. No rain at all. That's good because rain is a pain in the ass for RVers. Had a few days of temps around 90 degrees, but it got back to the normal 70's after that. Did not see very much wild life along the Alaska Highway or up in Alaska. We saw an occasional bear or sheep once in a while, but not often. Maybe the fact that we drive in the heat of the day has something to do with that.

      We never did get used to the amount of daylight. Our body clocks were always confused about when to eat and/or sleep.

      Both Alaska and the Yukon are great tourist places. And there are thousands of college age kids, from all over the world, working up there during the tourist season. They tell me the work is fun and the pay is great. Every kid we talked to said they were having an adventure.

      Every place we went in Alaska we met wonderful people. The hospitality of folks in this part of the world is amazing. Certainly noteworthy. For example, when I played golf with a threesome in Anchorage, one of the players gave me his business card and said to call him if I needed anything while I was in town. That was kind of typical of the people who live up here. Another noteworthy thing about this part of the world is the mosquitoes. Every place we have been in the world there is something that all the locals talk about, maybe it's traffic, or the weather, or the cost of living, or whatever. Here... it's mosquitoes. They are the number one topic of conversation. The numbers are astounding. They swarm like bees. And this year they out in force early because of the early heat.

      An odd thing, at least to me, in both the Yukon and Alaska is the TV satellite dishes that people have attached to their houses. Instead of pointing up at the sky like they do in California, they all point directly at the horizon, or slightly below it.

      We were pretty much out of touch this month. We saw no American TV, radio, or newspapers. Canada had their national elections yesterday so all the Canadian news this month has revolved around that. We sure learned a lot about Canadian politics this month. Today we are back in Dawson Creek, British Columbia. Mile

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