Sunday, August 15 - We had decided to spend another day here, so I did laundry first thing, then we headed out. We went back downtown and walked through the art festival tents, then walked back along the river. We went into the General Store again, looking for a donut, and found a new vegetable there.
They told us it was like a broccoli/cauliflower combination and had a real buttery taste. We didn't buy any but it looked pretty good.
Then we headed out to the mud bog races, not really knowing how this would work. We had to walk in a little ways, and then find a rock to sit on. I had the best rock, it was in the shade. It got up to 82 here today, pretty hot for us who are now used to wearing raincoats all the time.
They probably had about 24 vehicles in the races, and a pretty good crowd on the hillside. Here's the line-up.
The starting official came out wearing white shirt, white pants, red tie, and orange boots. His pants were not white for very long, though.
Some of the trucks came out completely mudded over.
We only lasted about 45 minutes after it actually started. Joe's rock was too hard, Dave's was too cold. And Joe thought it was lunch time.
We had lunch at the Jack London Hotel and Grill (pricey), and then stopped in at the Palace Grand Theatre. We missed the tour but did get to walk inside and see the stage, the padded seats, and the box seats in the balcony. It was easy to imagine grand performances on stage with a full house.
Then we drove out to the dredge on Bonanza Creek. We got to tour this one, and it was quite different from the one we toured in Fairbanks in 2004. This was the largest wooden hull dredge in North America. One of the world greatest gold rushes took place in this area, and it is rich in history of gold mining. Mining in all its forms remains the number one industry in the Yukon Territory.
We had planned on trying our gold panning luck again just down from this dredge, but after our tour guide told us that most of the gold found in this area was the size of brown sugar, we decided it wasn't worth another night of back pain. We did drive down to the creek and there were some other fools out there.
On our drive back from the dredge, Joe spotted a beaver pond that he had thought he had seen driving out, and lo and behold, a beaver slid in the water just as we stopped. We watched him for a minute or two, but we didn't see him chew up any trees, so we drove on.
We ended the evening by going back for another show at the gambling hall (Collins, Marilyn, Mazie and me), but it turned out to be a repeat performance of the first show from last night, so it wasn't quite as exciting. And I lost most of my winnings from the night before. Guess we should have stayed at camp like Joe and David.
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