The Agnew Family aboard the "Dog House"

We drove up Midnight Dome mountain this morning. There was a haze over the town but the view was still very nice. A lot of broken beer bottles, several large bags of garbage and a couple of cars on the side of the road were the only evidence of the solstice celebration. Next we headed to Dredge Number 4 for a tour. It’s about 10km outside of Dawson City. The dredge ceased operations in 1959. A dam failed, the creek flooded and the dredge sunk into the mud. As the company who owned the dredge felt that the gold had been removed from the valley they decided to cease operations. At some point the dredge was given to Parks Canada and in the 1990's they decided to restore the dredge and make a park out of it. The dredge required little work to repair the interior, the big job was removing it from the mud. If your are ever in Dawson City it’s worth going out there for a tour. Down the road from the dredge is a claim where tourists are allowed to pan for gold for free. The active claims are on the side of the hills. Their back to the original ways of extracting the gold except they have much better machinery to do it with. A backhoe instead of a pick and shovel and a large sluice box operated by a generator instead of a pan. We watched some neighbours from the RV park panning and I think it’s too much work. The highlight of the day was going to Diamond Tooth Gerties Gambling Hall. It’s a charity casino that has a floor show. What a lot of fun! We sat at a table right up front (only one we could get) and at one point one of the Cancan dancers came up to Ed and said “Take a picture of this” and tossed her skirt over his head.



Looking down on Dawson from the top of the "Dome"



The "dredge number 4", a national historic site, this machine, built in the early 1900's changed the way gold mining was done, is simply processed everthing in the valley, extracting 98% of the gold down to the bedrock. It was in operation until 1959, the left in the mud. The Canadian Army's engineering group raised it in 1992, and place it on safe ground.


Some of huge drive trains and electric motors of the dredge.



Want to try gold panning? The town has a claim you can work for a few days.


And that how you do it.



A modern mining operation, material is dug from the banks and sent into the seperator.



The landscape in the valley is filled with these rock piles, a result of the dedge in operation.



Having seen Sam McGee's house in Whitehorse, here is Robert Service's house.



In the evening we when to Diamond Toothed Gerties





Margaret gets personal attention from the host.