Dawson City - Administrative Day

Day 11 - July 24th, 2024

Weather - Sunny, 30 degrees C

Advert hanging in the laundromat

With all the necessary cemetery surveying completed and Earl leaving tomorrow, today became an administrative/fun day. I had four main goals: I needed money, clean clothes and body, to charge my various electronics, and to figure out where I would be calling home for the next week. After packing up the campsite that we had come to love and getting some breakfast in town, the first order of business was to hit up the bank and take out some more cash, as I knew I would be staying at a hostel or a campsite for the next week or so. The next most pressing task was showering and laundry, so we headed to one of the local RV parks and took advantage of their (paid, of course) services. This process took WAY longer than it should have; who the heck decides to wash ten loads of laundry at an RV park!? But I digress. By the time I managed to finish my laundry, approximately one million years had passed, and it was 3 pm. As the museum closed at 5 pm, we decided it was time to be tourists.

As soon as we entered the museum, the receptionist sent us next door to the train shelter where a tour was taking place. As all museum tours are included in the entry fee, she didn't want us to miss out. What luck! Earl and I had been hoping to see the trains, but it seemed that the building was only open to the public infrequently. Luckily, we arrived just in time to get a good 15 minutes or so of the tour before the building had to be locked up again. Afterward, we returned to the main museum and took in the main floor gallery before joining in for a museum history tour. The Dawson City Museum does not yet have air conditioning, so by the time we completed this second tour, Earl was about to drop. So, I just went through the upper galleries on my own. Honestly, the Dawson City Museum was one of the most stunning and well-put-together museums I have had the pleasure of being in. The exhibits have been curated in such a way that they acknowledge all of the subsects of people who took part in the gold rush. The museum does its best not to glorify or romanticize the gold rush or make the entirety of Yukon history centred around it, but instead to tell it like it was.

After our tour of the museum, Earl was still feeling a little rough, so we decided to hang out in the library until closing. While there, I was able to finally catch up on uploading and curating the photos and surveys I had been collecting over the past few days. Under ideal circumstances, among other things, there are two things that one should do daily during fieldwork: 1. keep a daily journal of everything, no matter how minute, and 2) back up everything and any data collected at the end of the day. Unfortunately, given the nature of my work up here, I haven't been able to do the latter as faithfully as I would have liked. It's a little uncomfortable knowing that you have several days worth of information on a fragile device in your back pocket and nowhere else, so I was relieved to get it all uploaded into a secondary (and tertiary) location.

After all that, it was time for dinner. Earl and I settled on splurging at The JJJ Hotel for our last dinner together and to celebrate our work over the past week and a half. Honestly, it feels like it has been so much longer! We just sat back, relaxed, and enjoyed ourselves. After what has felt like a very light day, we have retired for the evening. Tomorrow, it's time to say goodbye to Earl and hello to solo research. I'll see you all then!

-Nikki