My Trails

Dredge #4

I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want them to worry, but Minnie did not want to start well after I left Whitehorse. Two times when I stopped at roadside historical areas, Minnie cranked for several seconds before starting. The last hundred miles to Mayo were made without turning the engine off.

All last week I worried that Minnie would not start this morning. I resisted the urge to start the engine before I left in case it was the last time it would start. I knew the closest place to get mechanical work done would be in Dawson. This morning when I had everything packed and ready to go, I turned the key and heard the beautiful sound of a running engine.

I took pictures of signs to read later while Minnie idled.

I left the engine running as I filled with gas outside Mayo and never shut it off till I reached Dawson three hours later. The first RV shop said they were booked up for two weeks but she gave me the name of another mechanic outside town. He ran several diagnosis programs on his code reader and couldn’t find anything wrong. No matter how many times we stopped and started Minnie’s engine, it fired up instantly. He thinks I may have gotten some bad gas in Whitehorse or the gas cap was not put on tight enough. I hope it gets me into Alaska with no more trouble.

Sardines!

Things are expensive here in Dawson City. I checked into a RV park called the Gold Rush Campground RV Park. It is like a parking lot with rigs packed in like sardines, and they want a lot of gold from my pocket just to park here. At least it is close to town and all the tourist things required of everyone that visits.

Nugget passed around on dredge tour.

After I parked and unloaded Honda, I decided to drive up Bonanza Creek and check out the historic dredge parked there. The dredge is called Dredge #4 and man is it big. I could write down how many hundreds of thousands of tons it weighs and how many millions of gold it pulled out of the river valley but it’s too much to comprehend. Let’s just say it’s a massive structure and a story all its own. The tour was fun but I got repremanded for asking something about a dredge I had seen on Discovery Channel Gold Rush.

He said. ” That’s not reality! That’s just made up TV!”

After the tour I intended to drive on up to the original Historical Discovery Site, but I was on Honda and the sky was looking like rain. I will have two more days to check out the rest of town. The next move should put me back in the USA.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 19th, 2017 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Alaska Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.