The sourtoe cocktail club is a strange Dawson city tradition of sorts. You can be inducted in the Sourdough bar in the Downtown Hotel (where we stayed) between 9 and 11 each night by an entertaining fellow known as the captain. The original captain has now retired and moved to Whitehorse. You can buy his rather odd memoirs/biography throughout the Yukon. From what I gather, the original captain got to bragging about his navigation skill shortly after his arrival in Dawson. The locals got a bit tired of his boasting and decided to play a bit of a prank by getting him to drink a cocktail with a preserved human toe in it by telling him that all true captains of the area had to perform this task (the toe was provided by a fellow who’d cut it off to prevent gangrene from spreading and had kept it as a reminder to himself). Apparently this caught on and now there are something upwards of 38,000 inductees (my membership number is 38249). I may be butchering the tale a bit, but here are the photos of our induction (toe must touch your lips for the drink to count).
The new Captain is a highly entertaining fellow. During the day he actually takes folks on backcountry hiking tours.
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