The Klondike gold rush made Dawson City what would come to be called the Paris of the North. That title seem familiar? It was what Sitka was called, 100 years prior. And I guess it sure seemed the place to be. The lone miner holding his gold pan is an enduring symbol for the gold rush. But these miners who struck out for this area and who had dreams of individual riches from panning for gold spent more time digging than panning. The best deposits of gold were buried beneath the permafrost. They had to thaw the frozen ground with fires and then dig. A few got lucky. But most actually sold out to larger gold mining corporations by 1900.
That didn’t mean the gold mining stopped. Oh no. And in fact there is still gold mining that occurs near Dawson today. The 2 main economic drivers for the city are tourism and mining. Our hosts son works for the mine which is owned by Parker Schnabel, of reality TV fame (Gold Rush, look it up. Who wants to confess that they watch it?). Our friend Parker’s net work for 2026 is estimated between $8-10 million, so between the TV show and mining he is doing just fine.
OK back to mining. There are several ways of mining for gold. Historically, manual extraction was the way it was done (panning for gold). As it is a soft metal, it is relatively easy to separate from its surroundings. There is also hard rock mining, and its brother open pit mining (Fort Knox Mine in central Alaska is one). In South Africa they mine in shafts and deep tunnels.
Placer mining is a larger operation than panning for gold and once the larger companies came in that was what was done along the creeks and rivers outside Dawson. You pan or use a rocker or a sluice box to run the steam bed up and with water rinse the gold deposits out. The Dawson operations did dredging. It basically puts a floating machine in the river and runs the bed up the sluicer. The after effect is huge piles of stream bed rocks that are piled up on the other side of the dredger as it moves along. It’s largely been replaced by other less destructive methods (but not sure how less, we didn’t have time to see the current operations).
These piles can be seen as you drive the Klondike highway into Dawson. They go on for 6-7 km. Its eerie. Nature will eventually reforest these areas, but it will take a while. Like a century. They stopped dredging in the 1966 so there are now grasses, trees and actually now whole communities that are building up in these areas. It’s unnerving and distressing and also undeniably an aspect of the Dawson experience.
Here is the kicker. Evidently in 2017, Dawson City applied for a UNESCO site for a portion of these dredge piles as they are a part of the history of the area.
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