Freeze Frame

Dawson City, the centre of the Klondike gold rush of 1897 and 1898, is a remote town underlain by permafrost. The first gravel road coming up from Whitehorse was not completed until 1955. Before that, for about five months out of the year the main access to the town was by boat, and when the Yukon River froze over, Dawson was isolated from the outside world. During the first half of the twentieth century, this one-time capital was a living museum of deteriorating buildings and other remnants from its boom days.

Some forty years ago, as the price of gold rose, the Klondike saw a resurgence of placer mining — the extraction of valuable minerals from streambed deposits. That activity revealed an array of artifacts that had been left behind: log cribbing from old shafts, well-worn tools, and scraps of work apparel. Even the broken tips from pickaxes have been uncovered.