Extreme Frontiers: Racing Across Canada from Newfoundland to the Rockies (17 page)

W
e’d been on the road for well over a month now, and the constant movement and the early mornings were definitely getting to
me. We’d joked about mosquitoes, but the incessant biting was wearing us all down. We took the chance to have a couple of
days’ rest. We’ve been doing this long enough to know when to take a breather, and it did everyone the power of good. So it
was with our batteries recharged that we made our way to the Yukon.

Our next stop was Dawson City, a town famous for being the centre of the Klondike Gold Rush at the end of the nineteenth century.
Having started from Canada’s easternmost point at Cape Spear, we were now right up in the north-west corner, close to the
Alaskan border. The Klondike was the last of what are known as the great gold rushes: first it was California (1848–55), then
Victoria in Australia in 1851 and finally up here in 1896–9.

We made our way to the site of Klondike No. 4, the massive land dredger that used to operate here once the main boom was
over in the early twentieth century. It was incredibly efficient and very successful, making something like eight million
dollars in gold for the company. I can’t express how big it is – it’s a machine that looks like a building. Covering as much
ground as a football pitch, it operated a conveyor belt of iron buckets as tall as I am to scoop out the rock. In 1959, the
dam at the head of the valley burst and the flood pushed the dredger against the hillside, where it stayed until the army
were sent for to rescue it. Today it sits back in its original position, although the conveyor belt has long since stopped
and it’s now just a tourist attraction.

I was curious to find out what happened to the gold after it was dug up, and after asking around, I was introduced to a guy
called Tyson, who worked for Mid-Arctic Gold Yukon Ltd and had a sign on his door announcing that he was a gold-buyer. He
showed me a bowl of gold dust, which was amazing, and explained that individual prospectors are still working ‘claims’, specific
areas where individuals or companies are allowed to prospect. Some of these have been held by the same family for generations
and prospectors are still finding gold along the Klondike. They bring it to him and he estimates the quality. That gives him
an idea what he should be paying for it, and the company then sells that quantity of their own gold on the market. With the
money they make, they pay the miner, then replace what they’ve sold with the new gold. That way their money always remains
in gold.

Tyson is one of only two gold-buyers in Dawson City, and I got the impression there was no love lost between them. They aren’t
enemies as such, just competitors, and they get all kinds of quantities of gold brought to them – from as little as ten grams
of dust to pounds and pounds of the stuff chiselled from
hard rock. Tyson had to be careful what he said to us because of course this stuff is valuable and everything he does is confidential.
He did tell me, however, that as of 15 July, the price of gold was 1,498 Canadian dollars per ounce, which didn’t sound bad.

When he weighed the dust in the bowl and made his calculations, estimating the purity that would remain after melting and
refining, it worked out to be just under 17,000 dollars’ worth of gold. I was gobsmacked – $17,000 for that little pile! I
asked him where I could go to stake a claim.

‘Sorry, Charley,’ he said. ‘They’re all taken.’

Tyson was from Vancouver originally, though he attended the Yukon College in Whitehorse. He came to Dawson City seven years
ago, just for a visit, and one night in a bar ran into the guy who would become his boss. He was offered a job that same night
and has been a gold-buyer ever since.

The gold dust was pretty grubby-looking, with no glint or lustre to it. That’s how it is immediately after it’s been separated
from the dirt; it’s only later, when it’s cleaned up and polished, that it begins to look like gold as we understand it. Tyson
explained that even after it’s been melted, the gold is still roughly the same purity as it was when it came out of the ground.
It’s only at the refining stage that every impurity is extracted and it ends up as 24 carat, which is as close to 100 per
cent pure gold as you can get.

It sounded like quite the process: extracted from the hillside, then brought here to be melted before being shipped to the
refinery and on to whatever form it would eventually take – an ingot, or jewellery perhaps. Out the back of Tyson’s office
was a workshop where they melted the gold in a furnace. It was incredibly hot in there, with the furnace roaring away in one
corner, but I was really excited to see how the gold was melted. Tyson poured the dust into a flat, coffin-shaped tray and
then mixed it with borax and soda ash, which helped to create what he called a flux, to help shift the impurities and assist
the melting process. After that he put on a heavy-duty fire-resistant jacket, welding mask and a pair of massive fireproof
mittens. Right at the heart of the red-hot furnace was a smelting cup that he lifted out with a pair of tongs. I had to stand
back at this point; the heat was almost unbearable. The tray of dust had a flattened edge that fitted over the cup so that
Tyson could pour the mixture in. Using the tongs again, he replaced the cup in the furnace and secured the lid. Twenty minutes
later it would be ready to pour.

We’d been told there was still plenty of gold to be had in the Klondike and it could be found pretty much anywhere. So while
we were waiting for the dust to melt, I went outside and dug up a shovelful of dirt, which I tipped into a pan and washed
in the trough outside. I felt like Charlton Heston in
The Call of the Wild
. Rinsing away the silt and dirt, I saw a tiny speck of yellow among the stones. Gold! A nugget the size of a pinhead, but
it was real gold, and all I’d done was take one shovel of dirt from the yard. I could see how easy it would be to catch ‘gold
fever’, and why even today would-be prospectors still came up here in search of their fortune. I was delighted, holding up
my tiny nugget for all to see. And then I dropped it. I dropped the bloody thing straight into the gravel at my feet. I could
not believe it. I scrabbled around on my hands and knees trying to find it. My gold, my gold … where’s my bloody gold?

Still bemoaning my loss, I went back to the shed to see how the melt was getting along. The furnace was like a knee-high dustbin
with a Polo-mint-shaped hole in the top and a vent in
the side where blue flames were spitting out. You really did not want to stand too close to it, believe me. Poking an iron
stave through the hole, Tyson gave the mixture a bit of a stir, then took a mould and poured a little oil into it to stop
the solidified gold bar from sticking. After that, he grabbed the tongs and lifted the smelting cup out of the furnace. This
was the tricky bit. I watched in wonderment as he poured molten gold, licked by flames, into the ingot mould, without spilling
a drop.

Of course he had done this hundreds of times, but I couldn’t get my head around the fact that I was watching a guy melt 17,000
dollars’ worth of gold. He admitted that the first time he poured gold like that he’d been incredibly nervous – essentially
he was pouring molten money, and spilling any would have been a disaster. Thankfully he never has. If it was me, I know my
hands would be too wobbly – I’d be bound to drop the thing and spill some prospector’s fortune all over the floor.

A little while later he handed me a solid gold bar about the size and shape of a small bar of chocolate. When we weighed it,
Tyson reckoned that it was around 83 per cent pure, which increased the value by $500.

I could see how the business was built on trust; with no regulatory body overseeing things, it was a gentleman’s agreement
between the miner, the gold-buyer and the assayer: a price, a handshake and a deal. I liked that; it smacked of how it was
in the old days. Tyson said that the method of exchange hadn’t really changed at all for over a century.

We all had gold fever now, so Tyson made a few calls, trying to hook us up with a prospector named Dave who worked a
number of claims along the river valley. It turned out Dave had been in the hospital down south because of a water-skiing
accident and wouldn’t be able to meet us until later, but his brother Dirk was waiting for us at the main claim, sitting on
a massive broken-down Caterpillar excavator. He told us that this claim had been in the family since 1974 and occupied a strip
of land in Gold Bottom Creek, which was the spot where Robert Henderson, a Nova Scotian who had come north from Colorado,
discovered the first gold on the Klondike in 1896. Dave worked the claim on his own now, though Dirk had worked with him in
the past. This was actually his first day back in eighteen years, and he’d only agreed to come up because of Dave’s accident
and the duff Caterpillar.

At this point Dave showed up, so we went to meet him and left Dirk to fix the excavator’s fan belts. Dave had a big smile
and a dry sense of humour. He explained that the area he worked was a ‘placer mine’, which meant they were bringing up gold
that was lying loose in the gravel rather than being part of the rock. He told me that there are three basic processes in
placer mining: first you remove what he called the overburden (that’s the permafrost); once that’s done, you can get on with
the sluicing process; and finally you go into what he referred to as the clean-up. The gold is found in the bedrock, beneath
the overlying mud. Dave works with the bulldozer or excavator to remove the top layers, but when he hits gravel he starts
to pan by hand, just like in the old days. Once he sees gold, he stops panning and starts sluicing the gravel instead.

His father was the one who started mining this area, beginning with six claims. Dave has expanded that to more than seventy
now. He’s had to expand because when his father had it the ground was ‘virgin’, but now they’re much further off the
‘pay streak’, as they say. It’s a lot more difficult to find gold these days, but the high price helps.

We’d seen lots of miners in Dawson already, and Dave confirmed that there was another gold rush going on – plenty of people
arriving with the fever. But it wasn’t for placer mining – they were here to mine hard rock. I was amazed to hear that even
after a hundred years of mining up here they were still looking for the mother lode. Hard-rock mining is a much heavier business
– operators need lots of chemicals and crushing machines – whereas placer mining is fundamentally the washing of dirt. Dave
told us that for almost forty years now his family have been taking dirt out of the ground, washing it and putting it back.

It’s an expensive business – Dave was constantly fixing or updating machinery, and he told me that every ounce of gold he took
from the ground was sold to keep the business operating. I’d heard that some miners kept gold back and watched how the prices
were going, but Dave didn’t buy into that. His view was that unless you had another source of income, every bit you found
went straight to buyers like Tyson in order to keep operating. He showed me how he screened the gold after sluicing the gravel
and then panning. There were three different sieves, one on top of the other so the gold would filter through. After this
we came to what he described as the only fun part of the whole operation.

He was talking about the Gold Wheel – a strange-looking contraption with an inverted circular pan that spins at an angle on
a wheel with water pouring over it. They’re commercially available now, but the one Dave was using had actually been built
by his father. The wheel is the final process; it separates the gold from the last residue of dirt, dust and stones. Dave
poured
a cup of gold on to the wheel, and the water washing over it removed the final bits of debris. What was left was just like
what I had seen earlier in Tyson’s office.

During the gold rush of 1896–9, five thousand people had occupied this valley. A whole town had sprung up, and yet today only
one family and one wooden building remain. Inside that building the walls are decked with old photos showing how the area
looked at the turn of the twentieth century: shops, hotels, a post office, even a hospital. Having seen how a placer mine
worked, and learned something about the history of the area, there was one more thing we had to do in Dawson City: hit up
the Dawson Hotel for a sour-toe cocktail.

Yes, you read that right: sour-toe cocktail. The story goes back to just before the Second World War, when a prospector named
Captain Dick bought a cabin in the hills not far from here. The fellow he bought it from had built it and lived there with
his brother. When the brother passed away, all that remained of him was a big toe he’d lost to frostbite some years before,
and which had been pickled in alcohol. When Captain Dick bought the cabin, it came complete with the pickled toe. After showing
it off in various bars, he came up with the idea of dropping it into his cocktail and kissing the toe as he drank. Captain
Dick is long gone, of course, but the tradition has continued, and if you go to the Dawson Hotel, you’ll find the current
custodian of the toe, Ed. As we ordered our drinks, he unpacked an ugly brown curly thing from a piece of tissue paper. At
first glance it could have been a small turd, but actually it was a shrivelled human toe. Ed told me the original toe got
swallowed by mistake a long time ago, and I asked him
where the replacement had come from. ‘There’ve been a few, actually,’ he told me. ‘People donate them, though we only take
one at a time,’ he added. ‘If you ever have a toe amputated, we’d love to have it.’ With that, he dunked the toe in my drink
and I kissed it as tradition demanded.

The following morning we were up early to jump on a plane from Dawson to Silver City. The plane was a Beaver, built in 1958,
with a single rotary engine. I could see all the pistons gathered around the cylindrical head beyond the propeller. It was
that kind of principle that gave birth to the BMW Boxer motorbike engine, and the Boxer is a cracking bike. We were flying
south from a tiny airstrip carved out of the hills. The pilot, Matt, ran a little company called Tintina Air and had twelve
years’ experience of flying in this area, which was good to know, as there were a lot of tall mountains to negotiate. The
Yukon’s highest peak is Mount Logan, which at just under 20,000 feet is second only to Alaska’s Mount McKinley in the whole
of North America. I joined Matt upfront for the flight, which would take an hour and forty-five minutes. The plan was to make
our way out on to the glacier, where, if the weather held, I’d be taught the rescue training I mentioned earlier.