So long, Fairbanks!After 2.5 weeks of toil and soil, it's off to Dawson City, in The Yukon, where the rest of the research team are. Actually, I have no business being there. In fact, originally the only reason I was going there was to help Britta with the drive from Fairbanks via the 'Top of the World Highway' (which is apparently as grand as it sounds). However, upon hiring a car in Fairbanks, we were informed of a bizarre Canada customs law where Canadian residents are not allowed to hire a car in the States and drive it into Canada. It seems like quite an important law it would have been useful to know beforehand... but since I already had flights booked from Dawson to Edmonton, and the way the flight schedules are, it now meant I got to spend a couple of days in Dawson.
Dawson City is an instant charmer; a gold-rush town that had rich enough country to never go bust, and much of that era is preserved in the original buildings and board-walks, the winding Yukon River, and plenty of dancin' and gamblin'! We were met at the airport by one of the 'Bonediggers' team; a group that works in association with our lab in the Yukon Beringia by collecting bones that melt out of the ice.
Mining is often seen as 'evil', but for our lab placer gold mining in Beringia is the best way to get research done. Nothing exposes new sediments quicker. And while the mining process melts thousands of years old ice, we can collect and catalogue what comes out, advancing our understanding of the past.
Immediately, I noticed how good it felt to be around people. There were 5 people in the ground floor of a guesthouse, 2 from back in Edmonton, and 3 Bonediggers. We had dinner together, and went to a local pub to see 'Dawson Idol' and shoot some pool, all things I felt like I hadn't done in forever. Funny how quickly you can be completely consumed by a new kind of life; I had gotten so used to sleeping in the tent and having Britta fiddling with the camp stove be my alarm clock; to tramping up the silt cliffs and eating lunch out of the car; and to showering all the dirt off in the evening, remembering to actually clean behind my ears and between my toes carefully.
Anyway, the next morning the Bonediggers were kind enough to let me help them catalogue one of around 15 of their bags of bones already collected. My role was modest - painting clear nail varnish over the labels on the bones to keep them in place - but it was fun for me to learn about them and how to identify certain body parts and what animal they came from. Most of them are bison, mammoth, or an extinct horse, with some special finds of fox and one scimitar cat leg bone! There was even a large, intact mammoth tusk which I unfortunately forgot to photograph, but it was beautiful, and said to be worth up to $50,000 on the black market. But all bones in The Yukon thankfully belong to the government. They were also making a time-lapse video of the process which I sneaked into (view it here, I'm the dark-haired girl that comes in about half way through). Mathias and Jana were more than happy to tell me everything, and especially interesting was what they were going to do with the bones after cataloguing. Mathias' project is to crush a part of every well-preserved bone and extract the DNA. The idea is to track the change in DNA over time, so we can say more than simply 'mammoths lived here for 50,000 years', but rather say something about how that mammoth population changed. And how do they date the bones so that they can make these DNA timelines? Why, with tephra of course! And that's why our groups are working so closely together. (You can even see a video of Britta explaining all this here. I highly recommend checking out this Bonedigger's videos every so often for updates of the project).
Another fun evening followed in Dawson at Diamond Tooth Gerties, the most famous gambling and dancing hall, and left me with a small fantasy of running away for a summer and being a 'Gold Rush Girl'. Still, I think a summer of research would be just as good, and I have a wish one day to return as a journalist and meet all those people and the great projects again.
The next day I crossed the Yukon River for a walk, and found a sternwheeler graveyard and plenty of peace and sunshine. Then, it was time to leave the North, back to the lab, and to start analysing some samples! No wonder Britta lives for the summer fieldwork...
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