In the Klondike's rip-roaring hub, the finest inn is a brothel and the favourite cocktail contains a severed toe. Add gambling, showgirls and a snowmobile falling from the sky and you're in for a helluva time. By Katharine Sandiford

The sound-system plays a track of howling wind and crunching snow. A hunched figure wearing a parka and winter boots shuffles across the stage and steps into a mock-up cabin. Old-time party music comes on. Parka comes off. A beautiful, buxom woman steps out and continues undressing herself, layer after layer, in a drawn-out North of Sixty strip-tease.

The restored Oddfellows Hall is packed wall-to-wall with hundreds of people. Audience members shift in their seats and review the program, not sure what they’re seeing. They’re here for the acclaimed 10th annual Dawson City Film Festival, not to watch live strippers. Yet their attention holds. Under all those layers, our heroine is wearing barely anything: a sequinned brassiere; a tiny, lacy, snowflake “bottom-piece”; a garter belt, cuban stockings and stilettos. Then there’s a crash as a topless man in a bear mask enters the cabin. It’s rich slapstick: Our saucy lady is pursued and mauled by her predator in a series of explicit physical-comedy routines. By the end, the audience is reeling with delight.

When you’re in Dawson City, expect the unexpected. Whether you come for the film festival, music festival, gold rush history, First Nations culture, can-can dancers, casino, snowmobiling parties or arts scene, it doesn’t matter – it’s never going to play out like you planned. The only thing you can count on is that you’re going to have an exceptionally, outrageously, dangerously good time. Dawsonites work tirelessly, around-the-clock, so that visitors – and they themselves – can stay perpetually entertained.

**

I land in Dawson with multiple deadlines, a broken heart and two days to squeeze the juice out of the Klondike’s “Capital of Fun.” I check into my room at Bombay Peggy’s, a restored goldrush-era whorehouse, hoping to mope around the sumptuous room for a few hours, to line up interviews from the antique desk, read self-help books on the goose down bedding and have a sob in the claw-foot tub. Instead, my phone rings. Word of my project is out, and Dawson’s good-time ambassadors are competing to see who can nab me first. I sigh, slap on a muddy layer of mascara and slip downstairs to the bar in my socks.

Dawson is run by a tightly-knit mix of high-energy eccentrics, and, like a commune, college dormitory or some other social experiment, there are prescribed rules that everybody gaily observes. They include: putting in countless hours of volunteerism, maintaining a we-can-do-anything attitude, and displaying open-minded, even loving, acceptance of your neighbours. My first evidence of all this is found down in the bar.

“A round of Chastity Belts for the ladies,” Lulu Keating shouts to the server. The redheaded Keating is a lauded filmmaker who just received funding for her next project: an experimental animation of her sexual experiences in the ’70s and ’80s. When she finds out I write for Up Here, she provides a suggestion. “You should run a centrefold – no wait, a semi-nude scratch-n’-sniff centrefold – of the winning Yukon Quest musher.” She laughs with every micro-muscle in her face – the ones other women her age might paralyse with Botox. When I ask why she moved to Dawson City nine years ago from Nova Scotia, she says, “This place is so open to anyone and everything. There’s a spirit that takes you over.”

More than 100 years ago, gold-seekers founded modern-day Dawson City when, in their frenzy for nuggets, they settled an ancient Tr’ondek Hwech’in village site. Since then, the creeks and rivers have been turned over so many times all that’s left are the snaking gravel mounds excreted out the rear of massive dredges. In the ’70s, Parks Canada came into what was then a dilapidated ghost town, poured millions into the restoration of key historic buildings and infrastructure, designated Dawson and the goldfields a National Historic Site, and watched it become a wildly popular tourist destination. Artists and entrepreneurs, lured by the quirky end-of-road freedom of the place, arrived and restored other old buildings into hotels, shops, galleries, art schools and homes. Where a century ago the town counted 40,000 residents, now roughly the same number come each year as tourists, attracted by the same spirit that brought Keating here – adventure, acceptance, indulgence.

Black-and-white photographs of prostitutes hang in Bombay Peggy’s wallpapered bathroom. “That one there,” Rachel Wiegers says to me in her sultry, smoke-damaged voice. “She speaks to me.” On-record, Wiegers does marketing for the Klondike Visitor’s Association. Off-record, she’s the living, breathing reincarnation of the Dawson City good-time girl. She’s gorgeous and voluptuous, has Bettie Page-style hair, is sweet, confident, flirtatious, independent. She’s also the first woman to do burlesque here since Klondike women performed saucy routines at the Palace Grand – when an exposed ankle could send the men into hysterics. Wiegers has to work much harder. “Thighs, hips, waist, tits,” she says, complete with gestures. In her tickle trunk: Fifty pairs of shoes (many whose heels snapped off in the boardwalks), 25 pairs of stockings, a box of vintage lingerie, 10 pairs of pasties, four sets of false eyelashes, three feather fans and a well-used riding crop.

Back at our table, the martinis arrive. Wiegers introduces me to “the hardest-working volunteer in town.” Kyla MacCarthy, the pub’s manager, donates months without pay each year to the Percy DeWolfe sled dog race, the Dawson City Arts Society, the community radio station, and, especially, the Dawson City Music Festival. In a town of 2,000, at least a fifth give time to the festival, making it what many consider the North’s finest outdoor party. “Volunteering gives you a reason to stick around,” MacCarthy says. “You put your name on something and contribute to a really cool idea and group of people.”

**

A man who looks like the third brother of Bob and Doug McKenzie joins our table. Wings of sandy brown hair flap from under his Yukon Brewing cap; his oversized football jacket matches his goofy, affable grin. He’s Dan Sokolowski, a filmmaker and the executive director of the Dawson City Film Festival, and he has some really convincing theories about what makes this town fun. “There’s the Stockholm syndrome of Dawson – when someone gets kidnapped and ends up falling in love with their captors,” he tells me, slurping his pint of ale. “Also, I think in larger centres you have to plan. Here, you can walk everywhere. There’s an air of spontaneity, and that often means things are going to be fun.” Although visitors are impressed with the town’s jam-packed activities schedule, Sokolowski claims they don’t realize the whole community makes it happen. “If someone says ‘Let’s do something,’ everyone rallies.”

That’s what happened last March when Tim Grenon suggested they drop a snowmobile from a helicopter hovering 500 feet above the Yukon River. Hundreds lined up along the dike to watch the machine smash to pieces within a huge circle marked off on the river ice. Spectators had paid five dollars to drive a stake into the snow; the stake closest to the largest piece of sled won half the $2,000 that had been raised. The Dawson City Sled Dawgs, of which Grenon is president, took the other half. With a snowmobile in the driveway of every other house, the club’s a busy one. “All of us have a passion for sledding,” he says. “It’s a great way to get out and enjoy where we live. You can go for miles and come home to a party at the end of the day.”

The biggest snowmobile event in Dawson is the Trek Over the Top, which draws some 400 Alaskan snowmobilers for three spring weekends of full-throttle revelry. It’s during this event that the
can-can dancers at Diamond Tooth Gerties casino do their first stiff-legged performances of the year. I meet with the producer and 10-year veteran of the show, Helen Watts, over a mid-morning orange juice at the Eldorado. She shows me how to can-can, and reluctantly I comply. “Step on your left foot, kick your right leg, step on your right foot, kick your left leg. Shake you bum slow, shake your bum fast. Faster, faster, faster!” It’s the same stunt her troupe pulls on unsuspecting male audience members, only I don’t get a kiss on the cheek and a garter at the end. “Most people can’t believe the calibre of show here,” she says, mascara-caked eyes blinking. “They say it’s better than shows on Broadway.” It’s true: over the cacophony of slot machines and roulette wheels, the dancing, singing and live jazz captures even the drunkest blackjack-addict’s attention.

**

I’m dining solo at the Downtown Hotel, dripping a few tears into my already salty pizza, scrawling in my journal dark, desperate thoughts. To lift my mood, I wander into the lounge to suck on a petrified toe – that's right, I'm ready to join Dawson's legendary Sour Toe Cocktail club. In the seventies, someone found a 50-year-old toe pickled in rum in an abandoned cabin, and started, as an entrepreneurial gag, to charge people to “join the club” by kissing the toe as you knock back a stiff one. It started off slow – a quirky, repulsive gag – but word-of-toe advertising has made it an international phenomenon. They've kept a registry: 90,000 club members, 100 inductees some nights. “It's a ridiculous thing, but it puts Dawson on the map,” says “Captain” Dick Van Nostrand, a rugged, silver-goateed man who's been chief of the ritual for the last 17 years. He lets me hold the toe. It's cold, yellow, shrivelled, the nail brown and ridged. “We've had people throw up,” he tells me, “And we've had little old grannies in tennis shoes giggling their faces off.” This one is the sixth toe; others have been eaten or stolen. (Captain Dick would like me to tell you they need someone to donated a back-up, in case number six goes AWOL.)

Most tourists come to Dawson for the goldrush history, funnelled here on pre-packaged bus tours. “They’re always so surprised just at how rich, varied and interesting the history is,” says Fred Osson, a 30-year-old heritage interpreter with Parks Canada. We’re at the Pit, Dawson’s infamous drinking hole, for a Pilsner or two, and so he can tell me about his job. Tours of the Robert Service Cabin are his favourite because, for fans of the poet, it’s a mystical experience – like visiting the grave of Jim Morrison or Oscar Wilde.

When he’s not in period costume, Osson’s often at the Pit, playing saxophone with the house band, discussing volunteer projects or just tying one on. He loves the bar’s “trashy chic,” and the horrible smell that off-gasses from the carpet: 100 years of beer and barf and blood. He laughs and slams his hand on the table when I ask if people in town party too hard, drink too much, if they’re unhealthy. “It can seem really out of proportion as a visitor coming in. We just want to celebrate because you're here,” he says, gulping his beverage. “Although I’m not going to lie to you, it’s like that when you’re not here too.”

**

The next morning, an hour before my flight home, I’m nervously fondling an intricate, antique, hand-beaded moosehide satchel. Glenda Bolt, manager and curator of the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre, just gave me a scolding for leaving their story last. It’s true, the centre facilitates so many cool projects – like beading classes, birchbark canoe workshops, bannock-and-tea parties, and jigging contests. The goldrush story, the raucous party-town story, she says, was just the blink of an eye for the people and the land that’s always been here. The centre bustles with visitors, First Nations and non-First Nations alike. “If there’s any opportunity to laugh and make fun, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in citizens will take it,” she says. “And beading, working with willow and sinew, slows everything down. You can really talk to people. Your real self comes out.” And I realize that is the essence of Dawson – moving fast or moving slow, you talk to people, and your real self comes out.