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Yukon: A circle route to unwind you

Stories by John Masters Meridian Writers' Group WHITEHORSE, Yukon-The 1,500-kilometre circle route from Whitehorse, along the Alaska Highway, through Dawson City and down the Klondike Highway back to Whitehorse, is a drive that can hold you spellboun
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Stories by John Masters

Meridian Writers' Group

WHITEHORSE, Yukon-The 1,500-kilometre circle route from Whitehorse, along the Alaska Highway, through Dawson City and down the Klondike Highway back to Whitehorse, is a drive that can hold you spellbound at any number of points and in a variety of ways.

For those who love the open road and scenery that is, by turns, sweeping and dramatic, those things alone will be enough to recommend this trip. For anyone wanting more, here's a quick sampling:

• Haines Junction, gateway to Kluane National Park. If you have the money ($1,300 for up to four people), take a 60-minute helicopter tour with Trans North. Fly over mountain peaks and down the Lowell Glacier, a St. Lawrence River of ice up to 600 metres thick.

• Silver City. Just before you come to Kluane Lake, a sign on the right indicates a turn-off for a B & B. Drive five kilometres down the dirt road and you'll come to the little-known remains of Silver City, a gold-rush town built in 1904. The roofs are still on several buildings.

• Burwash Landing. The surprisingly good little Kluane Museum has dioramas of the region's major species: moose, lynx, grizzly, caribou, red fox, wolverine. Did you know that the innocuous-looking fisher "possesses the ability to consistently penetrate the armour of the porcupine, adding this to his regular diet"?

• The highway between Burwash Landing and Beaver Creek (172 kilometres) is built on permafrost and even though it's been worked on repeatedly, frost heaves mean that much of the drive is like being at sea in a good chop.

• Beaver Creek. Canada's westernmost community is home to the Westmark Hotel, where Holland America puts up its busloads of tour groups. From May through September they're entertained at a dinner show that includes fake Mounties and French lumberjacks. You're welcome to join them.

• Chicken, Alaska. At Tetlin Junction you turn off the Alaska Highway onto the packed-dirt Taylor Highway and head north. Chicken, with a "downtown" consisting of a saloon, café, liquor store and gift shop, is operated by modern-day pioneer Sue Wiren, who bought it all in 1989.

• Dawson City. Crossing back into Canada and driving along the Top of the World Highway you come to the Yukon River and Dawson City, home of the Klondike Gold Rush. There's enough history here to keep those interested busy for a week. For everyone else there are good shops and restaurants, shows at the Palace Grand Theatre and gambling at Diamond Tooth Gertie's.

• The Silver Trail. It's gold the Yukon is known for, but if you take the turn-off at Stewart Crossing you can travel 110 kilometres to the almost ghost town of Keno (pop. 20), built on silver.

• Whitehorse. Welcome back to civilization. Get caught up on your reading at the excellent Mac's Fireweed Books, have a cappuccino at a dozen different places or a meal at any of several good restaurants, one of the best being Giorgio's Cuccina. If you want more history, visit the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre, which goes right back to the ice age.

PHOTO CAPTION

The once-a-year Sin in the City tour starts in front of the SS Keno sternwheeler on the Dawson City waterfront. Parks Canada staff don period costumes and let down their hair to lead it.

John Masters/Meridian Writers' Group photo

Dawson's once-a-year 'Sin in the City' tour

DAWSON CITY, Yukon-Here in the home of the Klondike Gold Rush there's plenty of history, and from June to mid-September Parks Canada, which maintains much of the town as a historic site, offers a half-dozen informative tours daily, covering everything from the SS Keno , the last sternwheeler to ply the Yukon River, to the Palace Grand Theatre, originally built in 1899, not long after Dawson's population had peaked at 40,000.

But there's one tour that only happens once a year, on the second or third Sunday in August. It's called "Sin in the City" and it's something a little different.

It's still informative, but it's also a chance for the usually earnest Parks Canada staff to let down their hair. Ten members dress up in a variety of historical roles, writing their own dialogue and camping it up a fair bit. Only 65 tickets (at $7.30 each) are sold.

The tour starts at 3 p.m. at the SS Keno on the waterfront. A woman with a parasol, dressed in fashionable end-of-the-19th-century clothes (in this case, Parks Canada heritage interpreter Justine Leblanc) sketches the scene: the discovery of gold here in 1896, the influx of tens of thousands of people eager to get rich, the rapid growth of the town and what life here was like, back then.

"Sin" isn't the entire focus of the 90-minute tour, but it does occupy a good portion of it, starting at Paradise Alley. This lane, between Front Street and Second Avenue, was the red-light district.

You need some imagination to see what it would have been like in the gold-rush days, but you're helped in this by the arrival of three appropriately semi-dressed working girls who introduce themselves as Generous Jill, Anaconda Anna and Grabby Gabby.

We learn that the North West Mounted Police, whose presence kept Dawson from ever becoming much of a Wild West town, knew better than to try to stamp out the trade. Instead, they regulated it: the women were required to have a medical certificate of health, and they could only work after 4 p.m. The punishment for infractions was scrubbing laundry.

Sure enough, a little later in the tour, at Ruby's Place on Second Avenue, we meet Luscious Jenny, who's being instructed in how to properly wash clothes by one of the town's more upstanding women.

Ruby's Place, it turns out, wasn't really the boarding house Ruby claimed, and those weren't really eight nieces staying with her. Remarkably, the local authorities turned a blind eye until the 1960s.

At other stops we meet Belinda Mulroney, the richest woman in the Yukon and definitely not to be trifled with, and two of the many travelling salesmen who came to Dawson to "mine the miners" with a variety of questionable products.

We end in the dark-wood foyer of the Palace Grand Theatre, where the bartender lines up shots for all. (They're actually iced tea.) Mlle. Leblanc concludes our tour with a gold-rush toast: "Welcome to Dawson. May your wives and girlfriends never meet."

ACCESS

For more information on Dawson National Historica Site visit the Parks Canada website at www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/yt/dawson/index_e.asp .

For information on travel in Yukon visit Tourism Yukon's website at www.travelyukon.com .

For information on travel in Alaska visit the Alaska Travel Industry Association website at www.travelalaska.com .