Saturday, August 25, 2018

"Max Hirschberg’s 1,200 mile bike odyssey to the Klondike Gold Rush in 1900"

The Headline is a bit confused. The odyssey began at Dawson, City Yukon Territory, the epicenter of the Klondike gold rush rather than going to the Klondike.

In last week's "Norway to Map Deep Sea Mineral Deposits" I mentioned that most of the would-be gold mining millionaires who went up the Chilkoot Trail struck out completely with their names being lost to history.
Some in desperation headed for Nome, on the Bering Sea, 800 straight-line miles away:
Although some who had come up the Dawson trail and failed ended up crossing Alaska along the Yukon river, other later arrivals took ships up from Seattle which deposited them at the beach.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Routes-to-nome.jpg
A number of friends, including my old partner, Hank West, waved good-by. The road out of Dawson was broad and well packed, the was cold and exhilarating, and the Sky was clear and calm. There were numerous dog teams headed for Forty Mile, Circle City and points farther down the Yukon. Whenever I approached a dog team, the driver would accommodatingly pull off the trail and restrain his howling, snapping dogs from nipping me. I passed many dog teams before reaching Forty Mile. At the combination bar, gambling room and roadhouse, I thawed out before a roaring wood fire in an oil-tank stove. Eight or ten whiskered men were sitting and smoking, talking about the rumor of a nearby gold strike.

The Yukon River at Dawson, was about 1,500 feet wide. When the river froze, huge cakes of ice, some standing on edge, others slanting, formed a barrier to the opposite shore. As the final freeze occurred, cakes of ice from the lowered river caused the trail to resemble a sidehill slope. There were overflows covering the ice in places, some frozen over with newly formed ice, which broke when stepped on, leaving a few inches of water over the solid ice beneath....MORE