Day 26: Pay Dirt!

After a wonderful sleep in our tent, we awoke around 9am to full sun beaming through the tent. I didn't have the best sleep, but Melinda wanted to make it down to the breakfast before 10:30 because the menu is limited after that. We went down to the local cafe called the RiverWest Bistro. They served a griddle breakfast sandwich, which included egg, bacon, and cheese smushed between two Belgian waffles and served with real maple syrup, so we were pretty excited needless to say. After ordering our food Melinda got a cappuccino with a shot of vanilla and I got my double Americano short. The girl who took our order wasn't the friendliest, however, everyone else there was extremely nice. We got our food and drinks and everything was amazing, most likely going again tomorrow for breakfast hahaha You could tell the chef actually cared about the quality and presentation of their food! 

After breakfast we cruised the downtown strip in search of souvienirs and hidden treasures. Dawson City was in the heart of the Klondike Gold Rush and it still looks that way. All the buildings still have original, colourful store fronts, with old abandoned buildings and churchs from early 1900's. There are 3 storey hotels and bars on every corner, with names like the Sourdough Saloon, The Drunk Goat Tavern and The Downtown Hotel. It truly felt like a different time period exploring around Dawson. We got the usuals (t-shirts, shotglasses and an ornament) and spent some time deciding on our plans for the next couple days. Since the forecast is seemingly growing with more and more rain each day, we decided tonight is the night to pull an all nighter in hopes of seeing tjr Northern Lights. Then we can sleep tomorrow when its supposed to rain, and then do a pub crawl through downtown until we reach the legendary toe shot. The motto for it is "drink it fast or drink it slow, but your lips must touch the toe", so I'm thinking Melinda is going to have to be a little more tipsy than me in order for that to happen 😂

After spending the afternoon downtown we decided to head towards Claim 33 where we would pan for gold. Fun fact, 33 is my lucky number and I'm supersticous so I was feeling pretty good about getting a good sized gold nugget... That didn't happen. Now I know the Yukon roads are supposed to be bad, but the side road going towards the old post is definitely a rough one. I'm pretty sure old Ruthy (my '02 Honda accord), woulda had a couple more broken parts on her if it weren't for Mr.McNeice giving us his beauty pickup truck, so thank-you again. Once we made it there, we looked at all the antique mining equipment, paid for our pans and began our tutorial. Its quite an interesting process because gold is 19x heavier than water. It's a basic cycle of getting some water in the pan, shaking the sediment to layer it, and dipping the pan to slowly release the lighter sediment with the water.  So once you've shaken all your sediments out, you're left with any gold in the crease of your pan. They stock the pans for the tutorial so once we were all excited and placed our gold into a vial I asked how much would this gold be worth? Without skipping a beat she replied "I'd like to think around $15.75" ... which was the cost of tutorial and to rent a pan and shovel. I'd have to agree because we had a lot of fun doing it. After that we headed down to claim 6 with our pans and shovel to dredge the river in hopes of finding some nuggets. This is deemed a "Free Planning Site" and had been mined for about 120 years. After an hour of getting through about 3 shovel fulls worth of dirt, we were left with 3 tiny stones which were fools gold, but we were proud, and we kept em anyways. After panning, we headed back into town to grab some snacks to stake out the Northern Lights tonight. We then headed back to camp, passed out from 7pm-9pm, made some dinner and treked up The Mountain Dome. This summit is apparently the best place to see them in Dawson so we have our fingers crossed. We have about a 50% chance of seeing them tonight but with all this cloud cover I'm not quite sure. Well it's about 2am and I'm just finishing this up, so fingers crossed for a light show tonight and good morning everyone!!