23 Jul Dawson Gold
Today we woke up around 10:30 and Dee-Dee and Tanya took down their tent. We did a few more casts, but it was hopeless. We packed and left.
Now to you readers, whenever you think about the Yukon (unless you have been there before in the summer) you sometimes think of a tired gold prospector being eaten alive by mosquitoes watching the cold arctic ice barely melted by the cloud covered sun slowly gushing down a mountain into a half frozen solid lake. Wrong! Well, at least half wrong. There are some mountains with snow on them, new age gold prospectors here, and plenty of gold, mosquitoes, and lakes. But there is no snow and no frozen lakes and no cold!!! Believe me, I come from southern Ontario and up here it can be as hot as it is down there. And the mosquitoes only bite when there is no wind. And they are huge! That was the weather this day. It was hot and sticky with no breeze and lots of mosquitoes.
We checked the other lake that the local told us about, but it was wee bit too weedy. So we carried on.
Later, we stopped by the Klondike River to fish. Dee-Dee took out his rod, Dad took out his fly rod, and I took out mine. We started fishing for grayling, and I soon got bored and went to check out the water.
Then Tanya came over saying, “Andie, do you see the gold in the water?”
“Gold?!!” I exclaimed. We looked in the water. The river’s sand was sparkling with chips of gold! Well, that is was we thought it was, anyway. So we started picking for the beautiful small yellow rocks, and got many, many, many, bits of gold.
Meanwhile, Dad had a tug on his line. It was a good-sized grayling, about a 1.5 pounds actually. We all went back home satisfied, and there was even lots of raspberries so we could snack on them.
Near the end of the day, we reached Dawson city and our new friends left to go to the nearest campground. After packing and saying good-bye we also left to a place called “Klondike Kates” and had supper.
– Andie Trépanier
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