August 11, 2013. Yukon territory. 1960s.

I worked in the Yukon Territory, in my student days, as a geologist's assistant with a mining company looking for molybdenum and copper. Worked there two summers, out in the bush, in various places along the Yukon River and elsewhere, in tents in the forests, doing magnetometer surveys up and down mountainsides, collecting soil and rock samples along creeks, mapping magnetic anomalies, flying in helicopters from camp to camp, etc etc.. I spent very little time in towns. I was briefly in Whitehorse and Dawson and other places. My team got lost along some mountain ridge, trying to find our way to a road back to the mine where we were headquartered (I'm the hero of that story......I'll tell you about it sometime). Long , long time before GPS. We used paper maps, geological surveys, compasses almost useless thanks to the deflections of the magnetic field, and so on. A great adventure, really. In my day, Dawson was small, decaying, with one or two small hotels, neither of which would be out of place in the Tenderloin today. There were some tourists and trekkers, but not many. I remember a tiny cinema (a quonset hut, perhaps?). Mostly I recall ruined buildings, empty lots, a population too poor to live anywhere else, gravel roads, and so on. Generally, the ambience was one of a ruined past, and hopeless present.