Dawson City, Pt 2: Gambling and Golf

We decided to stay 2 nights in Dawson—a truly bizarre town in the northern Yukon that I’ll describe in detail below—to allow ourselves ample time for sightseeing and (let’s face it) gambling. After the first night (which Isabelle described), we woke up at our campsite on the other side of the river, eager to take the ferry into town and explore the Yukon’s #1 tourist attraction.

So, the town: Dawson City was a gold mining mecca around the turn of the century and has since been preserved really only as a museum town. The buildings remain, the roads are unpaved, and a few people even walk around in period costume. Tourism is the town’s only industry, and thus it really only comes alive in summer, when apparently (and quite shockingly) Canada’s young and hip move up for the season. No joke—there are so many hipsters in Dawson that it resembles at times an old-fashioned version of Williamsburg.

The main attraction? Diamond Tooth Gertie’s Casino and Saloon. There are three shows a night at Gertie’s (cancan and whatnot—apparently the midnight show is a little more risqué, but we only stayed for the first two), as well as slots, poker, roulette, what have you. Isabelle and Sophia were REALLY excited to gamble; I was also excited but a little more reserved. We had budgeted $5/apiece from group funds—I stuck with the minimum, while the others each spent about $20 extra of their own money. Slot machines are particularly exciting—free money machines!! I made $5 on my first try, but little else afterwards—and of course, ended up gambling away all of my winnings.

After playing the slots for a while, we ambled over to roulette (which Isabelle calls Russian roulette no matter how many times you correct her), and met a group of new friends. Five guys from Saskatchewan were in town on vacation, and they provided us with the ultimate gambling experience: we got to pick their numbers and bets, but they supplied the funds. We didn’t get the winnings, of course, but it was exciting nonetheless. An hour or so after we started talking to our new friends, they asked if we wanted to get in on their golf game. There is a golf course outside of town (the Top of the World golf course) that has an annual Midnight Sun tournament—and we happened to be in town the night of the tournament. They were registered to participate, but their team required a female member to be eligible. Of course we agreed—who would refuse a midnight golfing adventure?!—and we left the casino around 11:30 in their rented RV.

Of course, at this point we had all knocked back a couple of brews (except the driver, of course), so the RV drive across the ferry was even more terrifying than the Blue Avenger’s voyage the day before. On the way to the game, we were worried that we would underperform and screw up their tournament chances. We needn’t have worried. Collectively, our golf game was (I’ll put it mildly) atrocious. In addition, it was FREEZING outside, we had no cart, and most of us were in flip-flops. At one point a girl in a golf cart drove by (selling beer, naturally), and one of our new friends, Jori offered to buy her socks. Somehow Isabelle and I ended up sharing them—we each wore one sock (with a flip flop) on one foot and half of a pair of stolen shoes on the other. This meant that the poor owner of the shoes, Jeffrey, was walking around the course barefoot. Although it was bright as day even at midnight, the cold eventually led us to ditch around the 3rd hole. The RV had dropped us off and returned to town, so we had no way to get home. Luckily, Jori convinced the owner of the golf course, an old man named Charlie, to drive us back in his pick-up truck, yet another adventure. Isabelle sat in front with him, and he told her all about his life in Nova Scotia, while Sophia and I held on for dear life in the back of the truck.

It was pretty tremendous.