I worked my first shift last night at the Bonanza Gold restaurant. They got slammed. The cook had never seen such a busy night, so of course I was thrown into the fire (or the deep fryer) head first.

It’s been awhile since I’ve worked in a kitchen, and this cuisine is utterly foreign to me, as is the equipment, so I’m not sure if I was actually any help at all, but Gail said all her customers were happy and raving. They were all grateful I happened to be there. We served pork chops to four hungry miners. That’s their names, “four hungry miners.” They apparently come in every day, three times a day. I’ve never seen such big appetites. Each plate had two pork chops smothered in apple sauce, four baked potatoes, carrots, beets, and a cob of corn.

The cook is taking a day off today and I am filling in for him, which I find absolutely hilarious because I have no idea what I’m going to feed these four hungry miners. Lentil spaghetti? Bean burritos? Nasi goreng with tofu? Ha!

Dawson is the last stop on the road for the vegetable truck and it shows. If I’d been delivered green peppers and tomatoes this hideously battle-scarred in Banff, I’d have sent them back over the mountain pass to wherever they were stored in a warehouse for a month previous, and served rice. One really nice thing about this place, though, is that everyone is on “Yukon time,” and expectations are nothing like people’s expectations in the city. If I leave my city judgements where they belong, it’s really very refreshing.

Dawson City is one of those legendary places where staying put does not necessarily mean not travelling. In the late 1800’s, at the height of the stampede, the population boomed to 30,000. "The Paris of the North,” it was called. The year-round population may have shrunk back to around 1200 people and about 2400 dogs, but in the summer, the whole world continues to come to Dawson City.

I met an incredible man yesterday at the Riverwest Bistro where they make a fantastic soy latte. Andreas Kieling. He was having breakfast with his wife and two sons and asked about Henk when I pulled up. In a pleasant German accent, he told me he has a 1942 Harley Davidson at home in Germany that he smuggled out of Cuba in parts over a period of two years twenty years ago. He enjoys tinkering with old air-cooled engines, he said, and seemed to like Henk. He makes wildlife documentaries, living half his year in Alaska filming, and winters in Germany editing and putting stories together for National Geographic and the Discovery Channel.

The tone of his voice, coupled with the light in his eyes when he spoke of Alaska made me want to go. It sounds hauntingly beautiful. “Most people see Alaska in a few days,” he said. “I feel like I could spend two or three lifetimes and still not see it properly.” His business card is a 3 x 5 inch color photo of himself with a film camera on the Aleutian Coast in Alaska, perched about ten feet from two gorgeous grizzlies digging in the sand for clams – a photo taken by his 10-year-old son, Erik. The two of them spent three and a half months on a sailboat on the Alaskan coast filming grizzlies for a documentary called “The Bear Man,” which he said had won awards and been translated in dozens of languages.

When I asked him how he manages to get so close to the bears, he said, “I let the bears decide how close they want to get to me.” He’s known this one sow in the photo for eight years, and she lets him within feet of her cubs. A wonderful example of what adventures might await given the patience and courage to penetrate deeply...