With its twin turboprops roaring, our 40–seat plane begins its descent to Dawson City Airport and clouds give way to reveal the Klondike gold fields, a pockmarked heritage landscape in the Yukon, scarred by more than 100 years of mining. At the close of the 19th century, this is where a stampede of desperate men from all walks of life raced to stake claims and toil in their pursuit of gold. Today the precious yellow mineral's soaring price has made Dawson City, a small community of 1,800 in Canada's sub-Arctic north–west, a boom town again. As it did in 1897, Dawson is luring all sorts, from the well–heeled to hoi polloi, each with a craving for adventure and emboldened by dreams of walking away a richer man. It has lured me, too. I'm out of shape and out of dough – my small-town newspaper salary having failed to erase $10,000 of debt – and a season of mining sounds like the perfect way to climb out of the red.
While today's scene bears little resemblance to the famous black–and–white photos of bedraggled men hand-digging mine shafts or panning creeks for nuggets, the backcountry crawls with a new breed of prospector and claim–staker – the former searching for the mother lode, the latter hoarding as much land as possible, often for unknown paymasters looking to cash in.
For the next four months, Schmidt Mining Corp's Quartz Creek camp, tucked in the Indian River valley about 30 miles south-east of Dawson City, is where I'll live and work. Not part of the new wave of the Yukon's current exploration boom, Schmidt Mining has forged a presence in the region for years, claiming its gold the oldfashioned way, by washing it out of the dirt.
Thankfully, I only have to fly in from Whitehorse, Yukon's capital. My antecedents risked it all, traversing mountain passes on foot and sailing down the Yukon river in makeshift boats to reach the Klondike. Most failed to make their fortune and returned home penniless, an unfortunate few perished, and those who made it helped build Dawson City, which today is still the hub for the various outfits that comb the territory each summer for what gold remains.
Dawson is now a tourist trap of restored wooden buildings and costumed interpreters selling gold–rush fever to tourists in Bermuda shorts, but the real action takes place where it always has: in the bush. The wilderness – most of it government owned Crown Land – is a mountainous region shrouded by coniferous forest, dotted by aspen and birch trees, which combine with moss and muskeg to form a near-impenetrable, mosquito-ridden jungle in the summer months. Miners and prospectors must share the space with an abundance of wildlife that includes moose, black and brown bears, wolves, coyotes, lynx, ravens, eagles and trumpeter swans.
They do say history repeats itself. Perhaps one should be selling shovels to the new gold rushers ?