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To reach Bonanza Creek , follow the Klondike Hwy - the continuation of Front Street - for 4km to the junction with Bonanza Creek Road. The road threads through scenes of apocalyptic piles of boulders and river gravel for some 12km until it comes to a simple cairn marking Discovery Claim , the spot staked by George Carmack after pulling out a nugget the size of his thumb, or so the story goes. Every 150m along the creek in front of you - the width of a claim - was to yield some 3000kg of gold, or about $25 million worth at 1900 prices. Exact amounts of gold taken out are difficult to establish because it was in miners' interests to undervalue their takings to the authorities, but most estimates suggest that around $600-million worth left the creeks between 1897 and 1904. Given a claim's huge value they were often subdivided and sold as "fractions": one miner pulled out over 100kg of gold in eight hours from a fraction - almost $1 million worth. At Discovery Claim the road forks again, one spur running east up Eldorado Creek , if anything richer than Bonanza; the other following Upper Bonanza Road to the summit of King Solomon's Dome , where you can look down over smaller scarred rivulets like Hunker and Dominion creeks, before returning in a loop to the Klondike Hwy via Hunker Road. As time went by and the easily reached gold was exploited, miners increasingly consolidated claims, or sold out to large companies who installed dredges capable of clawing out the bedrock and gravel. Numerous examples of these industrial dinosaurs litter the creeks, but the largest and most famous is the 1912 No. 4 Dredge at Claim 17 BD ("Below Discovery") off Bonanza Creek Road, an extraordinary piece of industrial archeology that from the start of operations in 1913 until 1966 dug up as much as 25kg of gold a day. Modern mines are lucky to produce a quarter of that amount in a week. Without a car you'll have to rent a bike or join up with one of the various gold-field tours (from $36 for a 3hr 30min tour) run by Gold City Tours, on Front Street (tel 993-5175), either to see the dredges and creeks or to pan for gold yourself, at a price. Only three small fractions on Claim 6 can currently be panned free of charge - but enquire at the reception centre for latest locations: for $5 you can pan with a guarantee of finding gold (because it's been put there) on Claim 33.
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