The Sourtoe Cocktail and Dawson City's Mummified Toe
The rules are simple: 'You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow, but your lips must touch the toe.' In Dawson City, Yukon - the gold rush town that refuses to die - the Sourtoe Cocktail Club has been initiating members since 1973. The ritual involves a shot of whiskey with a genuine mummified human toe floating in it. Your lips must touch the toe. Swallowing the toe is discouraged but carries only a $2,500 fine. Over 100,000 people have earned their Sourtoe Certificate. The club is currently on its tenth toe - nine were swallowed, lost, or stolen over the decades. Finding replacement toes has become surprisingly easy; people donate their amputated digits from around the world. Dawson City treasures its toes.
The First Toe
The original toe belonged to a rum-runner named Louie Liken, who froze his foot while running booze across the Yukon-Alaska border during Prohibition. The frostbitten toe was amputated and preserved in alcohol - possibly as a souvenir, possibly by accident. Decades later, Captain Dick Stevenson found the toe in an abandoned cabin and had an idea. In 1973, at the Eldorado Hotel bar, he invented the Sourtoe Cocktail: a drink where a mummified human toe floated in the glass. The tradition caught on immediately. Dawson City is the kind of place where drinking whiskey with a dead man's toe seems perfectly reasonable.
The Lost Toes
Toe number one lasted until 1980, when a miner accidentally swallowed it while attempting to set a consumption speed record. Replacement toes were donated by locals - a logger who lost his to a lawn mower, a woman with an amputated toe from diabetes. Toe number seven was swallowed deliberately by a man who paid the $500 fine (since raised to $2,500). Number eight was stolen in 2017 by a man who walked into the bar, ordered the cocktail, took the toe, and ran - he was caught, fined, and the toe was recovered. The current toe is number ten, kept in a case of salt between ceremonies, guarded like the relic it is.
The Ceremony
Becoming a Sourtoe member requires visiting the Downtown Hotel in Dawson City during evening hours when the Toe Captain is on duty. You order your shot - any whiskey will do - and the Captain brings out the toe. It's shriveled, dark, unmistakably human. The toe goes into your glass. You drink. Your lips touch the toe. The Captain verifies. You receive your certificate, signed and dated, proving you did something stupid and wonderful in a bar at the edge of the world. Thousands complete the ceremony each summer, joining a club that exists nowhere else, bound by a tradition that makes sense only in the Yukon.
The Town
Dawson City exists because gold was found in the Klondike in 1896. Thirty thousand people flooded into this remote valley; at its peak, Dawson was the largest Canadian city west of Winnipeg. The gold played out; the population dropped to hundreds. But Dawson never quite died. It preserved its gold rush architecture, became a National Historic Site, and reinvented itself as a tourist destination celebrating its bizarre history. The Sourtoe Cocktail fits perfectly - it's weird, morbid, uniquely northern, and impossible to experience anywhere else. Dawson specializes in being impossible to experience anywhere else.
Visiting Dawson City
Dawson City is located where the Klondike River meets the Yukon River in Canada's Yukon Territory. Access is via the Klondike Highway from Whitehorse (530 km) or the Top of the World Highway from Alaska (summer only). The Sourtoe Cocktail is served at the Downtown Hotel, typically 9 PM - 11 PM daily in summer; check hours in off-season. The town offers gold rush history at every turn: the Palace Grand Theatre, the Jack London cabin, the Klondike dredge. Casino gaming occurs in the same building as the Sourtoe ceremony - Diamond Tooth Gerties, Canada's oldest casino. Whitehorse has the nearest airport with jet service. Summer brings midnight sun; winter brings northern lights. Bring your sense of adventure and your tolerance for preserved human tissue.
From the Air
Located at 64.06°N, 139.43°W at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers. From altitude, Dawson City appears as a small grid of streets at the river junction - the town that gold built, surrounded by scarred hills where dredges processed the creeks. The Klondike Valley extends to the south; the Yukon River continues to Alaska. The terrain is subarctic - boreal forest, permafrost, and mining scars visible everywhere. Whitehorse is 530 kilometers south. The Top of the World Highway extends west toward Alaska. This is as remote as it gets in North America - a town of 1,300 that once held 30,000, kept alive by tourists who come to see where the gold was, drink where the miners drank, and touch a mummified toe with their lips.