Canada: Nice poetry, shame about the environment

A moose grazes on water lilies. Photo / Supplied

The Weekend Herald updates Gareth Morgan's motorcycle trip across America's heartland. This week it's a case of panning for gold and panning the dredging.

As we push on toward our own "north pole" on this trip - Deadhorse on the Arctic Ocean at 70.2 degrees north - we've been advised not to camp north of Fairbanks. The bears, they say, are particularly predatory, so best to take more substantial shelter than our Fairydowns.

So we're grabbing the last chance to camp for a few days at Moon Lake, just south of that fair city. The mozzies are man-eaters and the midnight sun, I can confirm, does crazy things to people. Midnight water-skiing is not an activity I have ever seen before, neither is hearing a float plane land outside our flysheet at 2am. It truly is a different world that the folks of the Northern Lights enjoy.

Apparently they all go mad during the eight months that snow lies on the ground here, and many head south for the winter to save themselves. And the window for summer sanity is ever so slim, with the last frost of the year on June 8, and the first on August 15. We're witnessing some strange behaviour as they try to cram a full summer's worth of outdoor activity into a few weeks.

Today we've come over the "Top of the World" highway from Dawson City, where the streets aren't paved, but the boardwalks save you from soaking your threads and the ladies their finery in street puddles, and behind the swing doors of the saloon at the Downtown Hotel, human relics of a bygone era still prop up the bar - or so it seems.

The 1890s Klondike gold rush is the source of many a tale, poem or film. But this "city" (permanent population these days, just 1700) continues to live its heritage - mushers, panners and bards still attracted by its frontier mood. Only yesterday, a prospector was hauled out of the Yukon, drowning in pursuit of "easy" lucre.

Who doesn't remember the imagery in James Michener's Alaska, of the gold hopefuls climbing that cruel Chilkoot Pass to get on to a boat going down the Yukon at Whitehorse so they could join the mania at Dawson?

The "Top of the World" road is named not because of its altitude - it averages only about 1130 metres according to my GPS - but because it runs along a ridge from which, on a clear day, you can see for miles and miles and miles.

And so it was for us. Lucky enough to get one of the two days per summer week up here when it's neither raining nor cloudy, we could look across into Alaska as we rode towards her.

Star historic attraction at Dawson is arguably Gold Dredge No 4, which is the size of a football field and eight storeys high. It is one of 35 dredges that were constructed in the area and still lies in Bonanza Creek at Claim 17, where it flayed away until its river ran dry.

We've decided these monsters were the perfect polluting machines. The trees on the surrounding hills had to be cleared to fuel their boilers. The noise they made as the river bed was ripped up, then spewed into the gross mounds of tailings that still blot the landscape would be hard to beat. The engines weren't greased because the gold particles would adhere to any grease in the slurry water instead of sinking to where they could be trapped. As a result No 4, which worked some 20km from Dawson, could be heard on Main St.

Once the ready source of carbon emissions was exhausted the dredge engines were converted to electric, so dams were built to supply the power, and complete the environmental devastation. Oh, and anything that moved was shot for the pot - so several species are no longer here.

The Bonanza stream, where our team tried its hand panning at the famous Discovery claim which precipitated the Rush, we found similar to the Arrow River in New Zealand.

I wonder what the moose population was in those days. It's been a magical day for me seeing one with its head immersed in a lake getting a face-full of the water lily they crave.

And now - north to Alaska.

The cremation of Sam McGee

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

- Robert Service, bard, Dawson City, 1907

* Latest travel blogs and photos from the Backblocks America road trip are on World By Bike.