Dawson City: the wildest little town in Canada's Yukon

It's midnight at The Pit and while it's still broad daylight outside, the shades have been drawn and the fairy lights illuminated to give some semblance of darkness in Dawson City's most notorious dive bar.

Just like every other evening during the brief northern summer, The Pit is going off. Speed Control, a local Yukon band, has a capacity crowd roaring as they belt out quirky AC/DC-inspired originals. There are punters dancing on tabletops, another on the bar and I cop an eyeful of bare breasts, flashed in drunken exaltation when a gold miner "rings the bell" and buys a round of shots.

On the wall behind the band is a provocative painting depicting the artist having his way with Queen Victoria (or so I'm told); on the opposite wall there's another masterpiece of a Mountie being pleasured by a lady of the night. I'm blushing – but hey, this is Dawson City, and anything goes.

When gold was discovered in 1896 at Bonanza Creek, a tributary of the Klondike River, it began an unprecedented stampede as 100,000 desperate, recession-hit dreamers set out to strike it rich in the north-western realms of Canada. Few could contemplate the hardships they would endure on that route – sub-zero temperatures, unchartered wilderness and an arduous passage that included treacherous mountain ascents and an equally harrowing river journey.

Many died on the trail, even more dropped out, with just a tenacious 30,000 making it to the goldfields – only to find that most claims had already been snapped up. However, out of this epic failure came prosperity as the disorderly frontier outpost of Dawson boomed into "The Paris of the North", with banks, churches, theatres, bordellos and, of course, saloons.

However, with every good boom comes a bust; and within a few years, a third of the population had left to seek their fortunes elsewhere. When Dawson was incorporated into a city in 1902, the population had dwindled to less than 5000, with many of the rickety wooden buildings, hastily constructed on permafrost, falling into ruination.

Declared a National Historic Site in 1972 (and now vying for World Heritage designation), Dawson's downtown today is something of a living museum, with major restoration projects breathing new life into many of the original, false-fronted buildings. Some, such as the pressed tin-clad Bank of Commerce – where the beloved Bard of the Yukon, poet Robert Service once worked – are slowly undergoing major reconstruction; others, like the Kissing Buildings, which have collapsed in on each other in a frosty embrace, are beyond repair but are maintained for posterity by Parks Canada. But it's not the buildings that make Dawson City such a fascinating destination – it's the people, the larger-than-life eccentrics coined "the colourful five per cent".