The strike that started the Klondike, still worked ground today
On 16 August 1896 gold was found in a tributary of the Klondike River by a party of George Carmack, Skookum Jim Mason and Dawson Charlie, and the creek stopped being Rabbit Creek and became Bonanza. Within two years a hundred thousand people had set out for the Yukon and roughly thirty thousand of them arrived, and Dawson City went from nothing to the largest town north of Seattle and west of Winnipeg.
The Discovery Claim itself is about sixteen kilometres up Bonanza Creek Road from the Klondike Highway. It was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1998, and there is a cairn and an interpretive walk on the ground where the find was made. The valley around it is worth the drive on its own account: the whole floor is turned over into enormous ridged tailing piles left by the dredges that worked it industrially after the stampeders had gone, and Dredge No. 4 sits on the creek as a Parks Canada site.
Now the part a prospector wants. About a kilometre downstream of Discovery is CLAIM NUMBER 6, and it is open to the public. The Klondike Visitors Association holds it and anybody may pan there, free, and keep what they find. Bring your own pan, or borrow one along with a vial from the visitor centre in Dawson. That is a genuinely rare arrangement: a free public claim on the creek that started the last great gold rush.
Do not wander off it. Every other metre of Bonanza is staked and worked, and Yukon claims are actively held.
Go in summer, allow a full day for the Bonanza Creek road, and take the pan seriously. People do find colour at Claim 6. It is fine gold and it is not going to fund the trip, but it comes out of the same gravel that emptied half of North America into the Yukon.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
