AFTER THE GOLD RUSH

IT’S BEEN 125 YEARS SINCE GOLD WAS DISCOVERED IN THE KLONDIKE. FOLLOWING IN THE WAKE OF THE YUKON’S STAMPEDERS, JAMES DRAVEN FINDS A LAND UNCHANGED, RETAINING TREASURES BEYOND MEASURE.

PREVIOUS PAGE: Emerald Lake in southern Yukon. The colour comes r i ht re e ti ff deposits of marl on the shallow lake bed.

THIS PAGE: Canoes on the banks of the Yukon River.

OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM THE TOP: Five Finger Rapids; The SS Keno in Dawson City; Old bottles in Dawson City.

My phone doesn’t recognise me. Startled by our approach, a grizzly bear is lumbering out of the river and into the trees, and my phone won’t unlock. With my DSLR camera stowed inside a case, a dry bag and plastic barrel inside my canoe, I’m struggling to access my smartphone’s camera.

‘Dammit,’ I mutter, and a nearby beaver takes heed, slapping its flat tail against the water’s surface as it speeds off to set about its defining task. My raison d’ tre is capturing these golden moments, but this one has passed: the bear has gone.

The problem isn’t a software glitch nor a hardware malfunction: it’s a hard-wear problem. My fingerprints have been worn smooth and crazed with a weathered patina from beating my wooden water blade against the mighty Yukon River for ten hours each day. My hands — once soft, aside from keyboard callouses — have been battered by 12 days of collecting firewood and grasping guy ropes and rigging in torrential rain, blazing sunshine and subarctic cold. My phone’s fingerprint sensor no longer registers my blistered digits.

The river runs fast and, as silt audibly fizzes against the hull of my canoe, I hiss self-admonishment under my breath. The rest of my group clatters with the sound of camera shutters.

Just then, a lone boat drifts by. With both hands upon his paddle, its shrouded inhabitant lazily stirs up the murky river, creating little eddies that seem to suck our clamour from the air. In the vacuum, we gawp at him: alone, so far from civilisation.

‘Guten tag,’ he says, his low voice loud and clear in the quietude of the wilderness, and then he glides away in silence.

The Yukon is a land untamed. Eighty per cent of it remains wild and — outside of the capital of Whitehorse, where 79 per cent of this massive Canadian territory’s 40,000 inhabitants live — the locals have got to be made of tough stuff. They always have.

On 16 August 1896, Keish (AKA Skookum Jim Mason), Káa Goox (AKA Dawson Charlie), and Shaaw Tláa (AKA Kate Carmack) of the Tagish First Nation — along with Shaaw Tláa’s American prospector husband, George Carmack — discovered gold in what is now known as Bonanza Creek, in the Klondike region near Dawson City.

The find sparked the legendary Klondike Gold Rush of 1896–1899: a stampede of more than 100,000 prospectors that would forever after define the Yukon. Inked onto the collective consciousness in sepia tone, this place was — and remains — the wild west. Gold fever lured men and women from around the world to the traditional lands of the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council and the Carcross/Tagish First Nation, though the path here was perilous.

While the wealthy boarded paddle steamers in a bid to swell their fortunes, the majority faced the hardship of hiking the mountainous Chilkoot Pass to get to the Yukon. With many of the first wave unprepared and perishing en route, Canadian authorities made it mandatory for stampeders to pack one ton of supplies for their journeys north, meaning many had to make the arduous climb — 3,759ft up and down a route known as the Golden Staircase — scores of times, with as much as they could carry on their backs.

Upon arriving at Bennett Lake, prospectors faced the task of building their own boats and rafts and paddling or sailing down the Yukon River. This was the route travelled by Jack London on his way to seek his fortune as a 21-year-old in 1897. The Klondike’s endless winters and immortal beauty reshaped him, transforming the young prospector into a writer, inspiring both The Call of the Wild and White Fang

Today there are a number of ways you can travel from Bennett Lake to Whitehorse and on to the diminutive town of Dawson. You can drive on one of the territory’s sinuous highways that weave warily between improbable inland sand dunes and everlasting emerald lakes. You can board a floatplane and fly like a swatdizzied bluebottle over indomitable, gunmetal mountains and ancient, glacier-etched valleys clad with pine and willow.

Back in 1896, there was just one way there, so in honour of the 125th anniversary of the gold rush, my companions and I rent canoes and set them down in the waters of the Yukon River to follow in the after-tow of stampeders like Jack London; to paddle 444 miles from Whitehorse to Dawson City.

Woodsmoke from our campfire hangs nebulous hammocks between tree trunks, and makes a primitive laser show of the shafts of midnight sun that permeate the leaf canopy. I have slept on the ground, however, on a self-made mattress of memory-foam-moss and bracken bedding, thanks to a punctured sleeping mat.

It’s been a frigid, overcast night, so when the sun burns bright come dawn, steam rises in ethereal clouds from the river as eagles soar above. Filled with silty river water the night before, a gravity filter bag dangles empty from a branch, indicating we’ll have drinking water for the day ahead. I fill my water bottles, distractedly picking little spiders, pine needles, and moss spines out of my clothes with my free hand, which is wrapped in duct-tape bandages.

On the periphery of my vision floats a shadow, hovering beyond the cumulous mist, its airbrushed edges becoming crisp as a silhouette emerges.

‘Guten morgen,’ says the impassive traveller as he coasts past our rag-tag collection of tents before the downriver fog swallows him again.

To call this a campground would be rather too ostentatious a title for a woodland patch on the banks of the Yukon River, chosen purely because the bear scat here is older, drier than in the other places we scouted. We paddled around 60 miles yesterday, and by midnight we were all too exhausted to continue searching for safe harbour. Should the bears return, we decided, this spot would provide shelter within

THE DIAPHANOUS DRAPES OF THE AURORA BOREALIS RIPPLE ACROSS THE ETHER, A DANSE SALUBRE

IN GREEN AND PINK.

dashing distance of our roped-up canoes.

In the cold and the constant daylight, slumber comes in fits and catnaps, and when finally I slept, I was soon startled awake by a strangulated, mournful cry. Just one lucky member of our group of ten spotted its source. The lynx had swum across the river, skipped across the shingle beach in front of our camp and slipped into the nearby forest. A somnambulant search party was formed and we spent the night tracking the evanescent cat, which had evaporated into the woods like foggy breath. We forgot to exhale, however, when we stumbled across a ramshackle cabin standing alone with its door ajar.

Just a few days earlier, we found the picked-clean remains of a beaver on a sandbank and, on another occasion, we discovered a symbolic spiral formed from eight disembodied caribou legs in a clearing, though no other traces of the animals could be found. For horror movie aficionados, the abandoned cabin in the woods was a trope too far, so only a handful of us investigated further.

Inside, the trapper’s cabin is a time capsule. We found furniture, a telephone and radio from the 1970s, stacks of magazines, newspaper clippings about early ’90s prom queens, and a furnace full of ashes. A calendar hanging on the wall dates the last time this place was occupied: April 1997. A pair of boots sits beside the armchair, but the man that filled them is long gone. Nature is slowly reclaiming this place.

These endless forests bristle with the decaying evidence of human intrusion. At each end of this journey, in Whitehorse and in Dawson, immaculately restored 19th-century paddle steamers sit proudly in dry dock beside the river as whitewashed symbols of human ingenuity. The SS Keno, spared from Dawson’s Sternwheeler Graveyard, and the SS Klondike II, completely rebuilt after falling foul of the treacherous river. Out in the wilds though, on Hootalinqua Island, the 360-ton hulk of the river-damaged SS Evelyn slowly disintegrates as a rotting reminder of these ephemeral endeavours.

Rusted relics, run-down 1940s pickup trucks, emaciated muscle cars and the decaying teeth of bear traps provide us with an outdoor museum when we pull our canoes ashore each evening.

Downriver, Fort Selkirk has been an important site to the Northern Tutchone people for thousands of years. The Hudson’s Bay Company established a trading post here in 1852, and the community grew quickly during the Klondike Gold Rush. Once base to the Yukon Field Force and the North-West Mounted Police, it’s considered the first capital of the Yukon. The site was abandoned in the 1950s, due to the construction of modern roads and the end of sternwheeler tra c, but today the place remains well preserved, with its Anglican church, log-cabin general store, and schoolhouse maintained by Yukon’s government and the Selkirk First Nation.

When I find that the Victorian cookhouse is still in use, and equipped with a working antique stove, I hasten to stake my claim and set up bed in the cabin. Having made the error of packing a summer-weight sleeping bag, it’s my first warm, dark night since Whitehorse.

In the neverwhere realms on the edge of sleep, I hear the deep booms of a canoe hull against pebbles, and a slow scraping sound. When, anxiously, I rise and step outside to check our vessels remain secure, I find only the lone German boatman.

‘Guten abend,’ he says, absently, as he drags his canoe ashore.

After 12 days of paddling — enduring the back-breaking, two-day crossing of the current-free Lake Laberge, and tackling the perilous whitewater channels created by four basalt columns that rise from the river at the notorious Five-Finger Rapids I find myself braving the amputated digit of a mysterious four-toed stranger.

‘You can drink it fast,’ says the whitebearded man sitting before me as he uses a pair of kitchen tongs to lift a blackened, twisted digit from a silver serving platter. ‘You can drink it slow,’ he adds, flourishing the amputated extremity from the brim of his naval cap to an inch before my eyes. ‘But your lips must touch this gnarly toe,’ he concludes as he puts a finger to his mouth, like a fish-finger magnate sharing a saucy secret. With that, he drops a dehydrated human toe into a glass of whisky liqueur.

I go for the first option. I lift the tumbler, shake the toe free from the where it is wedged at the bottom of the glass, and knock the shot of Yukon Jack back in one, feeling the disembodied toe slosh against my mouth as I do so. I don’t usually drink; I’m far too sober for this.

‘That’s how it’s done,’ cheers the Sourtoe Captain, in reference to my friend Andy’s failed attempt to ‘drink it slow,’ which resulted in an agonisingly protracted interaction between him and the severed little piggy. He offers me a fist bump as he presents me with my Sourtoe Certificate, which confers upon me membership to a very exclusive club.

The Sourtoe Cocktail Club, based in the Downtown Hotel, is emblematic of Dawson City, and has been inducting locals and visitors to its very singular society since 1973. The tale of its inception loosely relates to the discovery of a frostbitten rum-runner’s toe from the 1920s, preserved in a jar of rum in an abandoned cabin, although your lips won’t touch that historic digit. Over 25 amputated toes have since been donated to the club for this arbitrary ceremony, and the continued existence of the club gives you some idea of the reputation Dawson maintains.

With a population of just 1,500, Dawson is the Yukon’s second-largest town. Carefully preserved in some areas, and artfully dilapidated in others, Dawson City functions as an offbeat community and a living museum of the Klondike Gold Rush, although miners continue to work claims to this day.

On our last night in town, we sit through the first two performances of the nightly cancan show at Diamond Tooth Gerties Gambling Hall. When my companions head to another bar for a nightcap, I decide instead to imbibe a final draught of the Yukon River.

Autumn has snuck up like a case of jaundice, the leaves turning yellow overnight. Darkness falls like a guillotine, and soon winter will cut off roads and sever essential lifelines. I stand on a curve on the banks of the Yukon and watch its thunderous flow past town soon it will freeze. Even the river bends to the will of this land.

In the silence I hear a crunching approach. The lone German canoeist strolls into view. We exchange smiles and nods of recognition, then both look to the heavens in hushed reverence. The diaphanous drapes of the aurora borealis ripple across the ether, a danse salubre in green and pink.

Bearded, tanned, ruddy around the cheeks, and shrouded in a scarf and hood — despite having turned on facial recognition mode, my phone still doesn’t unlock when I present it with my grizzled features. I shrug and look to the sky, unwilling to spoil this moment by scrabbling to document it.

I’m not surprised my phone doesn’t recognise me; I no longer recognise myself.

Need To Know Getting There

Flights to Whitehorse are usually via Vancouver. Direct flights connect awson ity with hitehorse.

Best Time To Go

If you’re coming for hiking, biking, horseriding, camping and canoeing, visit in summer when temperatures are mild and the midnight sun allows for long, long days. ome in winter for skiing, snow shoeing and dog sledding.

CURRENCY anadian dollar

TIME ZONE GMT -7

FOOD

Sourdough is integral to the story of the gold rush, and the ailwork ounge in Whitehorse makes pancakes and beignets with a starter that originated during the stampede. The Greek food at awson’s runken Goat Taverna is surprisingly good.

Where To Stay

Raven Inn (Whitehorse); Midnight un awson ity .

How To Do It

My anada rips mycanadatrips.co.uk offers a ten-night Klondike Gold Rush Self Drive tour, including a Mc rae to chuwatka canoe tour. anoe rail canoetrail. co.uk) runs a guided expedition along the Yukon from hitehorse to awson. isit travelyukon.com.

MUST-PACK ITEM

ou won’t want to be without your binoculars, should moose, bears, lynxes or eagles make an appearance. f the orthern ights come out to play (September to mid-April), a tripod for your camera or smartphone will be worth its weight in gold.

Why Go

here may well be gold in them-thar hills, but the real riches of the Yukon are its golden silences, precious wildlife, and diamond in the rough locals, all encased in a stunning setting.