Dawson City

Dawson City is a town of about 1,600 people where the Klondike River runs into the Yukon, in the heart of Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in territory. In 1898 it was briefly one of the largest cities in the west, the stampede's end point; today it is a living museum of boardwalk streets, false-front stores and tilted gold-rush buildings, now also part of the Tr'ondëk-Klondike UNESCO World Heritage Site. Yukon's capital until 1952, it still feels like the end of the road, because it nearly is. The streets are still dirt, the sidewalks wooden boardwalks, and permafrost tilts the old buildings at gentle angles.

The Dawson City Museum in the old territorial administration building is the place to start. Diamond Tooth Gerties, Canada's oldest gambling hall, still deals cards with cancan shows in summer. The Palace Grand Theatre, the Robert Service and Jack London cabins, and the sternwheeler Keno carry the story further. Outside town, Dredge No. 4, the largest wooden-hulled bucket dredge in North America, sits in the Klondike valley, and the Midnight Dome lookout above town is the place to watch the sun barely set in June. The Commissioner's Residence, a grand 1916 house on Front Street, shows how the territorial elite lived once the rush settled. Trails and tours cross the Klondike to Tr'ochëk, the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in fishing camp that predates the town and is now a heritage site. On Bonanza Creek, where gold was found in 1896, you can still pan a working claim and walk the tailings of the valley that fed the stampeders.

For a tiny town Dawson eats and drinks well in season: a handful of restaurants and cafes, hotel dining rooms, and bars including the Downtown Hotel, home of the Sourtoe Cocktail, a whisky shot garnished with a real mummified toe. Evenings in summer are long, light and sociable, with live music at the gambling hall and the pubs full of locals, miners and travellers. The town carries more services than its size suggests in season: a grocery, bakeries and outfitters for the Dempster Highway, because everyone north of here is a long way from the next one.

Stay in the gold-rush hotels and inns on Front Street and the avenues, in B&Bs in the residential blocks, or at the campgrounds and RV parks in and just outside town. There is no local transit; the whole town is walkable, and the free George Black Ferry crosses the Yukon to the Top of the World Highway and the campground on the far bank. Air North flies scheduled services to Dawson City Airport, and Husky Bus runs to Whitehorse in season.

The season is May to September, with June's midnight sun and the July music festival at the top of the calendar; Discovery Days in August close the summer. By October most visitor businesses shut and winter is dark, cold and very quiet. Two days covers the town and the dredge; three lets you add Tombstone Territorial Park up the Dempster Highway.

Dawson City is the northern end of the Klondike Highway from Whitehorse, and the Top of the World Highway crosses the ferry west into Alaska toward Chicken and the Alaska Highway. It is the anchor of any Klondike loop and the jumping-off point for the Dempster Highway to the Arctic. Tombstone Territorial Park, an hour up that highway, is the reward: jagged granite peaks above tundra that turns gold and crimson in late August.