Still, as I stoop again to rinse some more gravel, I can't help but wonder about those original stampeders: how could so many have charged off on what was so clearly a fool's errand?

It's hard to imagine the impact the Klondike discovery had on the nation in July of 1897 when the steamship Portland pulled into Seattle with more than 2 tons of gold in her hold. To a country in the midst of one of the worst economic recessions in its short history, the news wasn't merely electrifying, it was nuclear. Seattle Mayor W. D. Wood resigned to join thousands of other gold-fevered argonauts cramming aboard any craft willing to take them north. They shipped out, as Robert Service wrote, "fearless, unfound, unfitted." Most headed up Alaska's Inside Passage to a mudhole called Skagway, trailhead to the goldfields.

Like the original gold seekers, contemporary Skagway visitors still arrive by water, although the vast majority step off luxury cruise ships. Huddled at the mouth of a narrow glacial valley, Skagway is hemmed in by steep, heavily forested mountains, whose sharp, snowy peaks are nearly always hidden behind prevailing marine overcast. Although the main street is now paved, weathered boardwalks still edge false-front shops and once-elegant Victorians that have somehow survived the ravages of nearly 100 harsh winters.

Steve Hites actually looks forward to the peace and quiet those winters bring. "This is the real gold rush," he says as tourists fill Skagway's streets on this five-ship summer day. A tour operator and historian by trade, Hites knows all the classic Klondike stories, especially those concerning a thief and con artist from Colorado named Soapy Smith, whose gang ran Skagway until July 1898, when Soapy stopped a bullet during a dockside gunfight. "A town like this has its modern Soapys," Hites Says as we pass old storefronts now crammed with T-shirts, overpriced jewelry, and gallery-chain art. "We've just legitimized some of the flimflam."

Stampeders who made it past Soapy faced an even more formidable obstacle - crossing Alaska's rugged Coast Mountains to get to the headwaters of the Yukon River at Lake Bennett. The choices: 33 miles over Chilkoot Pass, or the slightly shorter but even more difficult trail over White Pass.

Most took the Chilkoot, which former Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park ranger Bruce Reed calls "the longest museum in the world." Today's hikers can still find ample evidence of the tens of thousands who trudged back and forth carrying their ton of supplies, 100 pounds at a time, up the near-vertical face of the snowbound pass. One, a 20-year-old Californian named Walter Starr, made this diary entry on March 19, 1898: "Temperature ranges from 15 below to 10 above zero. So far I have traveled 270 miles to move our outfit over 35 miles of trail." He still had a long way to go.

Although hundreds now backpack the Chilkoot for pleasure each summer, thousands more board one of the old olive green parlor cars of the White Pass & Yukon Route Railroad for the three-hour round-trip excursion to the 2,888-foot summit of white Pass.

Settling into one of the refurbished bench seats in a railcar still heated by an oil-burning stove, I watch the scenery slowly open as the train climbs 20 miles from the thick stands of hemlock and Sitka spruce behind Skagway to broad patches of flower-dotted tundra near the summit at White Pass. It isn't until mile 17 that the slopes recede briefly to allow long views back past Skagway to the icy ramparts of Exit Glacier and the Chilkat Range.

There was little time for scenery in the winter of '97-'98. By May of 1898, when an article in the first issue of a new magazine called Sunset enthused over "the immense magnitude of Alaska's rich domain," more than 30,000 men and women had lugged their outfits over the passes to Lake Bennett. while the Sunset article cautioned against "reckless haste that sacrifices health and jeopardizes life," argonauts camped in the lakeside snow were finishing more than 7,000 green-timbered craft that, when the ice finally broke up, would take them 575 miles down the Yukon River to the gold diggings of the Klondike River Basin.

I drive. It's six hours behind the wheel from Whitehorse, north of Lake Bennett, to Dawson City, which is now a Canadian historic site. I arrive late to find Klondike Kate's, a restaurant dating from 1904, closed, so I head over to Diamond Tooth Gertie's for a drink and maybe a hand or two of blackjack.

The place has changed since my first quick trip through Dawson nearly 20 years ago. In fact, Canada's first legalized gambling hall, named after a dancehall queen, has been completely rebuilt. Twenty years ago, bets at the high-stakes poker table were still being made with pouches of gold dust; a fight at the bar was settled by a bouncer who broke a chair over one drunk's head and threw the other out the door. Today Gertie's caters mostly to busloads of tourists, and exudes all the charm of a downtown Reno casino.

The rest of the town doesn't appear to have changed as much. Perhaps because of its remoteness, its empty, boardwalk-lined gravel streets, and the shifting permafrost that gives most of the town's historic buildings just enough of a cant to keep you slightly off-balance, Dawson feels authentic. Heading down Princess Street in the strange, violet half-light of a sub-Arctic night, I can almost see Klondike ghosts through the swirling dust.

Even stranger than the Yukon light is the persistent fascination modern-day visitors have with gold. Hang around town long enough and a mild case of Klondike fever is inevitable.

Which is why, new pan in hand and visions of nuggets the size of candy kisses filling my head, I make for the heart of the goldfields.

Along the way I stop in at Dredge No. 4, the hulk of an eight-story behemoth that is the largest wood-hulled dredge in North America and one of the dozens that scoared the real riches from the Klondike after the first rush for gold was over. Gravel scooped in gi- ant buckets was sifted through a series of screens to separate out the gold, then it was dumped out behind in tailings that marked the progress of the dredge, which worked this riverbed until 1960. A guide mentions that the technology was crude - some gold, he says, was inevitably missed.

That's all I need to hear.

As I pan on the public Klondike Visitor Association claim, my thoughts wander back to those stampeders racing down the Yukon in the spring of 1898. By the time they reached Dawson, they were too late: the best claims in the Klondike had already been staked. They must have had an inkling of this when they unloaded their gear in Skagway, yet on they came. Why?

In The Klondike Fever, Yukoner Pierre Berton speculates that gold was merely an excuse for the wildest kind of goose chase by men and women still young enough to be gullible and foolhardy yet also optimistic and carefree. As the 19th century was drawing to a close, so was the Western frontier. This was the last possible moment in history for such an adventure. Berton writes: "The Klondike was their Everest; they sought to reach it because it was there."

It really may be that simple. The fact is that only half of those who reached Dawson ever bothered to look for gold. And only a few hundred prospectors found enough to call themselves rich. Then, as now, the real reward of the Klondike is the journey there.