Dawson II
11 July 2018
Sometimes, you just need a couple days off.
Photos:
July 11, 2018
The last thing I did on the day I returned from Tuk was go to dinner. I had talked with some people and they suggested that the Billy Goat Cafe might be half decent. And then I talked to some others, and they said it wasn’t so great. What better opportunity for some research?
The Mighty Yukon
I stopped in and sat down, then ordered a gyro. Two guys sitting at the next table chatted me up, and asked what I was riding. When I told them, one of them smiled - he had won a bet; he had guessed that I was on a KLR. How did he know? He was also on a KLR, and we all have that look about us, I guess.
Anyway, we got to talking. They were from Belgium. One of them, Jonas, had shipped his bike over from Belgium to Vancouver, and he was on a trip all the way down to Ushuaia, the southern tip of South America. His buddy, Pieter, had flown to Vancouver and bought his KLR there to do the first leg of the trip with Jonas through Canada and Alaska. Apparently they were pretty tired of talking to each other already, so having me there was a nice change. They were headed over the Top of the World highway next to Chicken, AK and then on to Fairbanks and eventually Prudhoe Bay. We chatted while they ate their pizza and my Gyro (it was okay…), until it was time for me to turn in. We said our goodbyes, but that wasn’t the last I would see of the Belgians.
July 12, 2018
Much to nobody’s surprise, 1000km of dirt and camping on a cold, windy, point on the Artic Ocean is kind of tiring. Upon returning to Dawson, I decided to take a couple days to wash all of my everything, catch up on my notes, and eat some good food.
Socks still clean!
I started by checking out the campground I had ended up at. It was only $18 CAD, but all of the amenities were coin operated. Amusingly, they all took different coins. The carwash ran on single loonie coins, the shower operated on twonie (Yes, that is what they call them.) coins, and laundromat wanted Canadian quarters. But, it was cheap overall, and had decent wifi (for the Yukon). I also had a nice shady spot under the trees complete with picnic table and a good spot to park the bike. I started the day by retrieving the things I had stored at the Northwest Territories visitors center, and then went straight to doing laundry. During that time, I chatted with a couple who I had seen on the Dempster highway. When I had last seen them, they were pulled over with the left rear tire of their truck wrapped around its rim in a most uncomfortable fashion. They had waved me on then since they had 3 spares and all they needed to change them. Now, here they were, in front of the laundromat, jacking up their truck once again. The stock Dodge jack was giving up, apparently it was designed to lift an empty truck - not one loaded with a big camper in the bed. Click click click click is all it did as he turned the crank. He went off to walk down to NAPA to pick up a new jack and we got to talking about travelling. They were retired, from somewhere in the midwest of the US, and had been on the road for a few months. The tire they were replacing today was losing air from somewhere, so they intended to put another one on before they tackled the Top of the World highway. They also had a for sale sign in the back of the camper - since they had done all of the more rugged stuff they wanted, they were looking to move into a trailer since it had more space for the money than a pickup bed camper.
Sometime in the afternoon, Dave arrived. He too had trouble finding a campsite in town (they had offered to split a parking-spot site between me and another motorcyclist the day before - for $20), and had seen my yellow tent and orange bike from the highway. Since I seemed pretty happy here, and it had a carwash, he grabbed a site as well. This is when I finally got to see the tent had been talking about over beers in Eagle Plains. I probably shouldn’t talk about it too much since it isn’t in production (yet), but its safe to say I would love to have one and it would make camping far more comfortable than I am accustomed to. Which is saying a lot, I sleep pretty darn good in my tent. Anyway, he intends to change the world of camping, and I think he might just do it. It’s been his pet project for a while now, and he’s been camping in it for his entire trip from Arizona through Alaska and it has held up very well. After the house tour, we went and got a dinner in town. Our conversation went just about everywhere, but came back to the ride to and from Tuk pretty regularly. We had very similar ideas on the appropriate bike for such a trip - something lightweight was far more preferable than something heavy, even if the heavier bike was more comfortable. We also talked a bit about work, where I learned about of his contractor status, and about his tent situation. The food was great, and the conversation reminded me of one of the things I absolutely love about travelling alone - its so easy to meet new people and have great coversations with them. You never know who you’re going to run into out here, but you can bet they’ll be interesting.
I feel sorry for that car, being dragged all the way up and down the Dempster
Hmmmmm
After dinner, we went back to camp and Dave finally convinced me that I really needed to ride his motorcycle, even if for nothing else than research purposes. I’m generally very shy about this, because there’s always the chance of breaking something. But, when he told me “There’s no way you can break this bike,” I was pretty much out of excuses. I handed him the keys to my bike, I hopped on his, and rode off. The bike in question here is none other than the Husqvarna 701, with a 693cc single-cylinder engine, 6 speed transmission, no fairing, and a seat more akin to a 2x4 than a La-z-boy. All of this in a svelte 350 pound package with 74 hp. For comparison, a 2018 Corvette Z06 weighs 3,524 pounds and has 650 hp. That gives it a power to weight ratio of 0.18 hp/lb. The Husky on the other hand, has a power to weight ratio of 0.21 hp/lb. So, the Husky is a little bit fast, at least for a dirt bike.
My first thought upon rolling away from our camping spot was “Oh wow. Am I on a mountain bike?” Between the seating position, the narrowness of the bike and the fact that I could see the front tire; it felt like more of a mountain bike than a motorcycle. It was light and easy to manuever around. That impression lasted until I turned onto the highway, opened the throttle about half, and spent the first 3 gears holding on tight, and trying to keep the front wheel only a little off the ground. After that and I realized I was maybe pushing the speed limit just a little (it was almost 10:30 pm after all - with plenty of light!), so I tried the brakes. I grabbed the usual amount of brake lever, which on a KLR, is quite a bit, and found myself holding on for dear life as it expediently slowed us down for a nice easy turn. It definitely brakes as well as it goes, if not better. I found a good spot to turn around, went back to camp, and pulled in to find Dave standing next to my bike. He hadn’t been able to get it started. I guess my quick warning about the kill switch being quirky hadn’t been communicated like I thought it had, so I flipped the switch for him and it started right up asu usual. Then he told me, “I listened to you ride that last time, and you shifted pretty low RPM. Shift higher - it will reward you.” So, on the next little test drive, this time with Dave behind me, I found out exactly what he meant. Apparently the engine is not like mine, running out of steam somewhere around 5000 RPM. Thats where it just gets going. Again, I had to watch the speed limit, but it sure didn’t take long to get there. I giggled the whole ride home, and fell asleep that night with a grin on my face. Someday, maybe - if they improve the seat.
July 13, 2018
The next day, I got up and had breakfast with Dave. As per usual, Dave was looking for a good omelette. He let me ride the Husky again, this time into town. It was a very tame ride, as it should be at 10am, but still an eye opener. Its amazing the difference a hundred pounds and a 30 year difference in techonology makes; everything is easier. I wasn’t on it long enough to evaluate the seat, but Dave assures me that it is plenty uncomfortable.
After breakfast Dave headed off to meet up with some friends who were passing through town, and I went to the Dawson City Museum. The main draw for me was the shed full of steam locomotives they had sitting next door, but I soon found out that you can only see them on a tour, and those tours only operate on days that I wasn’t going to be there. Instead, I looked through the windows and practiced the art of getting a photo through a dirty window.
The rest of the museum was pretty neat though. As the name implies, it details the history of the town from its founding through the present day. The main driver through the years was and continues to be gold mining. Back in the day, there had been a gold rush, although very few people had managed to profit from it, but it shaped the basis of the town. In fact, the downtown area of Dawson City is styled to look like it did back then, complete with dirt roads. In modern times, gold mining is still happening, although not on the scale it once was. As you drive down the Klondike Highway into town, the former scale is clear - both sides of the road are heaped with mine tailings from dredges. Mile after mile of it. Nowadays the operations are smaller and not quite so near town.
While I was there, they were also giving a demonstration of some of the gold mining techniques used. One of them was the rocker box, which is used to separate the minerals by density, leaving the dense gold in the box and flushing the rest of the minerals out. They can then melt down the gold, scrape off the impurities, and sell it.
After the museum, I went up to the Dome. This is a hill overlooking the town and the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers. Its a fantastic view up there and is the best place to go on June 21 for the summer solstice, where you can watch the sun set behind a mountain, and then rise again a little later from the same spot.
My next stop downtown to look for some stickers for my collection, and ran into none other than the Belgians and the KLR riders I had ridden with a couple of days prior. They were all headed toward the Top of the World highway, except Pieter was having issues with the rear shock on his KLR. It was feeling rather saggy with all of the stuff he had, and he wasn’t sure what to do about it since he wasn’t real familiar with the bike yet. We all looked at it, and concluded that it was probably shot, but we weren’t sure. He decided to delay his ride to Alaska by a day and make a run down to the dealer in Whitehorse to get them to check it out. If it was really gone, they were the closest ones who could do something about it.
Either way, once they headed out, I went back to camp and made a nice dinner of noodles. There was still plenty of daylight left and I was not tired, so I hopped on the bike and rode up to Dredge No 4. It is a gold mining dredge that is slowly being restored as a museum. They offer tours of it during the day, but I didn’t really want to go inside so it was just fine to go stand in the parking lot and check it out from the outside. Its huge - 8 stories tall, 140 feet long. The idea behind a dredge is that its a boat. It sits in a pond above a gold deposit. At one end there is a drag line; a chain of cast iron buckets that dig into the dirt and pull it one bucket at a time into the dredge. Inside the dredge is all of th usual gold separating equipment, which cleans the gold out of the dirt and stores it, then spits the tailings out the back of the dredge. Its extremely efficient and simple and makes light work of the usual heavy lifting involved in gold mining. This one could dig the equivalent of a dump truck every minute, and over its 46 year life extracted 8 metric tons of gold. Thats worth about $347,815,749.6 as of this post. Back in the day, dredges like these operated all over the klondike.
Upon returning to camp, I found that Dave was going to head home the next day. He had a good friend in Arizona who might be headed into some medical troubles, so he wanted to start moving that direction. I on the other hand, was headed to Alaska the next morning - over the Top of the World Highway.
