Yukon Ho!

July 6 – July 26: Whitehorse to Dawson and DCMF

The ride into Dawson was quick and painless -no hills anywhere. I kept waiting for a mountain to rise above us and make us climb it before dumping us into the city. Fortunately it was nothing but a slight downhill the whole lovely way.
I’m not doing a day-by-day account of our time in the city because we were there for over two weeks’ worth of long days and even longer nights, but here’s the not-so-condensed condensed version…
First off, Dawson is a bizarre city. It’s super small and the population dwindles to 800 in the winter. The streets are all dirt roads and the sidewalks are all wooden boardwalks. A lot of storefronts and buildings are freshly painted to advertise what was sold in them a hundred years ago, but sit locked and empty. Others are abandoned and sinking in on themselves due to the melting permafrost that will eventually claim all the city’s buildings. The rest hawk tourist gifts and gold.
There’s a tiny ferry (holds about eight regular sized cars or three RV’s) that crosses the Yukon River 24 hours a day from May to September. It mostly ferries RV’s on their way to the Top of the World Highway to Alaska and hippie kids who work in Dawson but live camped out at the hostel on the other side of the river.
We planned to camp out in different free places every night and then move into the private hostel cabin we’d reserved for Music Fest weekend, but we were tired of packing up gear and lugging it along with us every day so we ended up paying the weekly rate at the hostel and camping out with Matt
(*Sidenote about the hostel: it is very cool and very rustic. The cabins are sturdy, but made of rough, unfinished wood. I have a cut on my knee from where it touched the wall one night. There’s no electricity and the “kitchen” is an outdoor woodstove you stoke a fire in. The “bathroom” is a wooden room with a skylight and a lock. It has a faucet that pipes cold creek water into a huge steel drum. Beside that steel drum is another steel drum. If you want to shower, you bail water from the cold water drum into the second drum, go chop some wood, build a fire in the stove beneath the second drum, wait 30 minutes for the water to heat up, then mix hot and cold water in a small bucket and dump it on yourself. As long as you’re low-maintenance it’s pretty cool there, even if Dieter -the German former cycle tourist who owns the place- is a money-grubbing hotelier who re-sells the junk campers leave behind. Pack of oatmeal? There are two different packets, each .50 cents. Bar of soap? One, slightly used, .75 cents. Tin cup? You can have it for a dollar. What do you mean you left it here last summer? He also sells bear-proof food caches for $130, even though MEC sells the same ones for $75. Since Dieter paid $130 for his eight years ago, he’s not budging on the price this year. While he waits for someone to pay full price he rents them out. When he heard Sean and I were looking for a ride to Whitehorse he was desperate to get us on his “shuttle” for $150 each. He’s a bit of a weirdo, talks about himself a lot and has pictures of himself, 30 years ago, wearing denim short-shorts astride his bike. End sidenote*).   
Matt was originally only hanging out in Dawson a couple days (until July 12th) so he could be near a phone on his brother’s birthday. Unfortunately for his plans, by the time the 12th rolled around he’d fallen in love with three or four different girls on our side of the river. Every night for a week he said good-bye to us and every morning for a week he failed to leave.
I ended up working in the mornings for the week Matt stayed behind. On our first night we ended up in the liquor store in the lobby of the Midnight Sun Hotel to buy beer and wine with which to celebrate our triumphant entry into Dawson. While there I noticed a sign that the hotel was looking for housekeepers. No sooner had I mentioned “I saw the sign out front…” than the manager rocketed out of her office and told me to show up at 930 the next morning. Since a start time like that meant I could still drink the whole bottle of wine I’d just bought I told her I’d be there, but that I could only work for a week. She said a week was OK so just like that, I was employed.
I spent the next seven mornings cleaning the four buildings that make up the Midnight Sun -usually from 930 till noon. It was there that I got my first lesson in “Yukon Time.” The small housekeeping staff was made up of a rotating group of six people including me -head housekeeper Vera, a French woman named Chantal, an older native woman named Shelia, and two quiet, 20-something boys whose names I can’t remember because they rarely spoke…when they showed up. The schedule on the wall of the housekeeping office in no way reflected the staff that would choose to show up that day, and none of those who did show up seemed to care that we were short-staffed. Sometimes people showed up late; sometimes not at all. Even though I only worked for a week I felt like employee of the year for showing up on time every day. We started each morning with a coffee break, broke again around 1030/11am, and could usually squeeze one more in before quitting time at noon.   
At noon Sean would meet me and we’d bike to Minto Park -the site of the Dawson City Music Festival- where we volunteered with the “Bull Gang.” This started the Saturday before the festival and it was what made the whole trip so wicked. The Bull Gang was a small group of maybe eight hardcore volunteers who showed up all day every day, and maybe twelve part-time volunteers who showed up when their real jobs allowed -not that real jobs are taken too seriously. In Dawson, most people quit their jobs when Music Fest rolls around because otherwise, they wouldn’t get the time off to attend Music Fest. After Music Fest,  no one has trouble finding jobs again because all the employers are suffering from a serious employee deficit.
Anyway, our job was to plot and build the fences around the park, tent and beer garden, construct the stage, three tents, the info booth and volunteer tent, set up bleachers inside the main tent (which a crew from Whitehorse had set up the week before), build the wooden dancefloor inside the tent, set up the beer garden, port-a-potty’s, etc. We also did a massive DCMF storage shed clean-up (the first in roughly 25 years) so there was a lot of riding around the dusty streets in the back of pick-up’s and on flat beds en route to the dump. The days were long but the breaks were many and the treatment was awesome. Three guys were in charge of set-up -Jon, John, and Sandy- and they must have had a hefty budget for the volunteers because there was always a fridge full of beer, fresh meat, cheese, veggies and bread, and a cupboard overflowing with snacks. If we ran out of anything, all work halted while we had an impromptu meeting about what needed to be picked up on a grocery run and who could do it fastest. Sean and I didn’t buy a single meal the whole week before the festival, and were even given some beer to take back to the hostel with us at the end of the day.
Also, because we showed up all day and stuck around until the work was done, Sandy pulled us aside one day and told us we were going to be “button-holders.” What this meant was we got photo ID that gave us access to the festival at mainstage, all the workshops and shows at venues around town, and (this was the best part) to the hospitality lounge (a Thai-decorated concession stand/some sort of meeting space inside the long wooden building that served as some kind of clubhouse for the unused Minto Park baseball diamond) where the performers get fed and boozed. This might sound like just a pretty good bonus but it was the biggest bonus ever. DCMF is known for the hospitality it shows performers -the festival pays for all the performers’ flights to Dawson, billets them in houses around town, and feeds them about a billion delicious, themed meals over the course of the weekend. They also pump them full of beer and wine. Because we had those sweet-ass passes, we got in on all of it. There was Indian food, Ethiopian, Mexican, pastry, breakfast, gourmet pizza, and late-night sushi served by the kimono-clad mayor of Dawson (who looks a lot like Stephen King). Ahhhhhhh and the Sake-tini’s. Those were free (on top of the drinks our drink cards allowed us), served the first night of the festival to go with the Japanese theme of the midnight sushi snack. I was doubtful that I’d enjoy any sort of tini but those things tasted like water. As a result, I downed a lot of them, which led to an unsuccessful end-of-the-night attempt at hitchhiking the half km from Minto Park to the ferry…yeah…I took it relatively easy the rest of the festival, but not too easy. I mean, the drinks were free!
Anywhooooo we saw a lot of wicked music (The Done Gone String Band, Hungry Hill, Hank & Lily and Fishead Stew ranked among the faves) and we missed a lot in favour of the comfort of the hospitality lounge, but since we were easily able to re-sell the tickets we’d paid for back in March, we didn’t feel so bad about not seeing every single band. Also, we met a lot of awesome people working bull gang, and it was more fun to hang out with them in the lounge than it was to get rammed around in the tent.
Plus, we saw the best music during the day anyway -at the workshops set up in various bars and venues around town. The workshops were short little concerts given by either solo performers, a couple similar bands, or different people from a bunch of bands who had things in common. Most of the workshops we saw took place at the Palace Grand -a beautiful old building that used to be one of the gold rush hangouts where the Klondike girls would sing and dance while all the drunk, foolish miners threw hunks of gold at them
Sunday night, when the final show ended, performers and all-access pass holders (that’s us) were herded onto shuttle buses that drove up into the mountain for the after-party. The party was held on the awesome property of a local bar-owner and it was even better than the hospitality lounge. An outdoor shed was set up with lamps and lights, hammocks and couches, a huge roaring firepit blazed all night, there were cases of beer and bottles of wine everywhere, spicy, cheesy nachos kept showing up from somewhere, and some dude manned the BBQ all night and passed out sausages to all the hungry drunks.
We took the 5am shuttle back down to the ferry and were in bed by 6am when, we later heard, the last of the party-goers headed home.
So. We checked out of the hostel on Monday morning and rode our reloaded bikes over to Minto Park to help take down. Taking down was obviously more depressing than putting up, but it was also took a lot less time. Sean and I slept in the hospitality lounge Monday night, and then on Tuesday, got a ride home with the tent crew.
That’s a whole other story…