Gold, not just a colour!... romantic and exotic - rings and necklaces, treasure troves and pirates, plates and figurines and hoarded coins. They all started in the same way, millions and millions of years ago when the Earth was being born and this noble metal, 19 times heavier than water was being deposited all over the planet.

Gold has always been precious to those who had it, and those who didn't (but wanted it) and the desire to acquire it, hold it and wear it lives in most of us to a greater or lesser degree. In ancient times and modern times, people have gone to extraodinary lengths to get their hands on it. Mined deep under the earth's surface, crushed and extracted from quartz rock, panned for in rivers and streams from South Africa to South America, North to South and everywhere in between, men and women have hankered for it, written about it, killed for it and died for it through the ages.

In comparatively recent times, the lust for gold had drawn people to endure great hardships just to find a bit of their own; even in the onetime goldfields of little old New Zealand, gold is immortalised in tourism and local culture, the crude cabins and tools displayed for historical edification. Probably nowhere on the planet was the drive for gold more pronounced than the Klondike in Canada.



From a handy jumping off point in Seattle, Washington, and San Francisco, California thousands upon thousands of people from all across the United States took ship, to Skagway and Dyea to climb the 3,739 foot high Chilkoot Pass, carrying the one ton of goods per person required to be allowed to cross into Canada, one load at a time on their backs, or on sleds dragged 3/4 of a mile up a 45° stretch of mountainside.





Others travelled, for months, 3,000 miles by sea to St Michael, another almost 1,400 miles up the Yukon River that was mostly frozen from October to July to cross Alaska and reach Dawson and the Klondike where major gold deposits had been discovered in 1896. They endured temperatures of 50 degrees below zero, insatiable mosquitoes, starvation and death as they steamed, sailed, climbed, walked, crawled and died on their way to making their own personal fortune at the top of the world in places named Eldorado and Bonanza Creek. Any vessel even remotely seaworthy was pressed into service to carry tremendous waiting lists of passengers prepared to pay a fortune just to reach the goldfields.



All for some flakes of a shiny metal called Gold.

Alaska is also home to Nome which had no permanent settlement until 1898 when gold was discovered on Anvil Creek, and then discovered in the beach sands. Thousands of people flooded into the area to seek their fortune and by 1900 a tent city housing 10,000 people stretched for 30 miles along the bleak coast.

Today, some 3,500 people live in Nome and the gold is all gone, but this wild and inhospitable but infinitely historically interesting piece of the planet, located just below the arctic circle is one of the places I would have liked to have visited.

But only from a plane or a train, thanks :-)

You can see more images of Alaska n her heyday here.