Lady Luck

A couple of weeks ago, a good friend from geology visited Canada after spending much of the past year exploring for uranium in Africa. Mike and Lindsey came up to Yukon for a week of northern fun, which included going to Dawson City to have an end-of-season celebration with drinking and gambling at Diamond Tooth Gertie's. Dawson City is unlike any other town in the world -- at the peak of the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898, Dawson was the largest city in western Canada at 40,000. Today it is just over 1000 people, and local bylaws stipulate that all buildings (new and old) must be built to look like frontier buildings from the first half of the 20th century. All of the streets are dirt and all of the sidewalks are boardwalks.

Jenny and I stayed at the Downtown Hotel. This is what all of the hallways looked like. I don't know who the women in the paintings are, but I'm going to assume that one of them is Lady Luck. The lowermost painting is of the outside of the Downtown (I forgot to get a picture).

The Downtown Hotel is also home to the Sourtoe Cocktail -- put the toe in a shot of booze, drink it and have the toe touch your lips in order to become a part of this elite club. This is in fact a real human toe that has been dehydrated. Jenny and I didn't do the shot this time around, but became Sourtoers last summer when we did a week long canoe trip on the Yukon River to get to Dawson City for the summer music festival.

Our Dawson trip was made even nicer by the fact that it was financed by Lady Luck. The morning of our canoe trip on the Takhini River, Jenny and I walked outside our front door and found four $50 bills blowing across the ground. We found $200 on the ground! This became our Dawson money. There is no need to go into details about where it went, but needless to say an evening of drinking and gambling in a frontier town can easily lay waste to Lady Luck.