Dawson City, December: Klondike Osteobiographies: tombstone, whiskey + wilderness tips

Tombstone Territorial Park. That's Evan to the right, in the way of my shot.

I now have three stories recorded as audio files for my project. One is perfect, one is half-finished and one needs a bit of a tweak (my ravens are still too loud in the background). They are coming along really well and I'm pleased. I love this part of the project, because the stories are arriving fluidly at my ear through the local populace, and retelling them is extremely fun. I was given a bone story last night by a British sailor (you know what they say about how there's one in every port...) but his bone story wasn't directly tied to the Dawson landscape and so I can't really use it. I'll tell you his story here, anyway though because it's a good one:

He told me, over some shared whiskey drunk from Lulu's Norwegian skol cup, that back when he was at sea, there was a surgeon on board. Apparently this surgeon was perversely obsessed with performing surgery and proposed to this certain sailor that he allow his leg to be amputated. The surgeon promised to craft a stylish wooden leg in return, just like a sailor should have anyway. He had his trusty handheld bone saw on board, and just needed to be given a chance at slicing and stitching someone up. Thankfully, I'll tell you, this sailor still (I think) had both legs when I saw him. Cheers to that. And cheers to that again. And again. The trick for me around here is to double fist a fat glass of water with that glass or five of whiskey.

This town is one of great stories shared generously. I also learned some interesting wilderness tips from Caveman Bill last night, such as that bear should not be eaten at a certain time of year, in the spring, when they are catching all the salmon because the bear meat will taste fishy. Someone else told me that humans should never eat other meat-eaters, just grass eaters. Bill said the same for certain ducks: there are grass-eating ducks and fish-eating ducks, and you don't want the fish-eating ducks because they taste like rotten fish. You know the grass-eating ducks from the fish-eating ducks because of how low or high they sit in the water. One is more buoyant than the other, probably the fish-eating ducks because I think the grass eating ducks have to dive down. Or it's the other way around. He also said that no humans or animals will eat wolverine, because wolverines have bad wolverine juju (magic energies) and taste like shit. Lulu (an awesome filmmaker) throws a good party and thankfully there are no pictures, moving or otherwise, to prove it.

What I do want to share, however, is more pics of Tombstone Territorial Park, where I spent the whole of yesterday, in absolute awe. I gawked so much that my shoulders were sore at the end of the trip and at one point I seriously didn't know where to be looking because it was too much beauty for 360˚. The park was a vortex of blinding sunshine, blue sky and quickly changing colour everywhere: blended pastels on a stark black and white mountainous landscape. Mountains in this low-lying sunlight tend to glow ethereally in the distance. It was an entrance into another dimension, an oasis of gorgeousness and light in a dark world. The entire Dawson area and Dempster highway up to the park was a snow storm, yet somehow magically as we entered the unique mountainous ecosystem of the park, everything cleared away and another planet lay before us, beside us, behind us. Again as we left the park, the snowstorm world resumed as if we had been gone six seconds, not six hours. But back to while we were inside the vortex.

That pink thing in the far distance, right, is a mountain peak.

I saw caribou - about a dozen or so stragglers from the recent massive migration through the park. They were at quite a distance but I could still see them walking along in groups of three, and I was both delighted by this and convinced that I now understand WHY they are considered such magical creatures: their funny legs seemed to glide over the ground where they walked, in an almost cartoonish way, as if they were floating whirligigs of caribou. Dan said it's because the ground is very spongy and sinky, and that's how they walk on it.