Mike's Alaska Motorcycle Odyssey 2011: Dawson City

July 28, 2011
Day 35
10,311 km / 6,444 miles ridden so far.

took a break from riding for a nice day in Dawson City checking out the sites.

First stop was Midnight Dome, a hill overlooking the town.


Looking out from the Dome

Dawson City and the Yukon River

Next stop, cabin of famous poet of the north, Robert Service, where a ranger read from his works, which include The Cremation of Sam McGee and The Shooting of Dan McGrew (see www.birdsnest.com/rservice.htm)

Poet Robert Service's cabin in Dawson where he spent several years writing. Despite the rustic setting, he was already pretty successful and rich at the time...had others doing his cooking and cleaning while he wrote, exercised and had a good time in town

Desk in the front room of the 2-room cabin


His Bedroom

This was really quite nice inside....I just wonder if that little stove kept it warm in winter...

I ate some of these raspberries growing on the sod roof

The typewrite he used. Not much to it.

Toured inside this huge dredge machine, size of an apartment building, built around 1900, digs up riverbed wholesale and separates out the gold. It has a flat bottom and floats.

A diagram of how it operated until 1960 or so when it was shut down.

These are some of the huge conveyor buckets that were on the front end of the machine that dug up the gold-bearing gravel from the riverbed.

Even though it was built around 1900, it was entirely electrically powered, not steam as was common for the time. The electrical power came from a hydroelectric plant that was built nearby just for the purpose of running this equipment. Amazingly, Dawson City, way out in Yukon, was one of he first electrified cities in the world.