Gold fever, cold, and the true adventures of Jack London in the wild

Posted by janandonly 6 days ago

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Comment by libraryofbabel 12 hours ago

It’s funny, from his books I always imagined he spent years up there in the Yukon. But it turns out he trekked in (by far the hardest experience of the Yukon Gold Rush rush was just getting there with the mandated 1 year of food and all your mining equipment), staked an unprofitable claim, talked to a lot of people in bars in Dawson City, spent an uncomfortable winter in a small cabin with some other gold-rushers eating just bread and beans and bacon, got scurvy from eating just bread and beans and bacon, and then got the hell out and went back to San Francisco.

I say this not to minimize the depth or the hardship of his experience (it sounds like a nightmare) but more in amazement at all the compressed experiences he had and the folder for stories he amassed during that one year. Certain years in life flash by (or they seem that way to me) and others are formative and seem to last forever. Clearly this was the latter for him.

Comment by austin-cheney 11 hours ago

Makes me wonder if I should write about Afghanistan.

Comment by jimnotgym 11 hours ago

You probably should. Try it and see if you like doing it.

Maybe publish a chapter online and ask feedback and encouragement (since there are fewer magazines now)?

I would be interested to hear it

Comment by teruakohatu 20 hours ago

London didn't sugar coat the life up there in his novels. The people depicted were all hard people living hard lives, or they were fools, or both.

I can't remember which book it was but the comedic/tragic depiction of an unexperienced sister and two brothers overloading a sled, unwilling to give up useless comforts, so much so that the dogs couldn't move the sled, stuck in my mind.

Comment by hackingforfun 20 hours ago

> I can't remember which book it was but the comedic/tragic depiction of an unexperienced sister and two brothers overloading a sled, unwilling to give up useless comforts, so much so that the dogs couldn't move the sled, stuck in my mind.

That's from The Call of the Wild.

Comment by NoiseBert69 11 hours ago

Journalism at its best.

Beautiful pictures and an interesting text.

Comment by 19 hours ago

Comment by sandworm101 15 hours ago

>> shoot the entire production without leaving California, and it’s hard to criticize them for not using authentic Yukon locations.

Yup. Everything on screen will be fake. No majesty. No detail. No grit. Nothing authentic. No presence. It will look like a marvel movie, a clean and sanitized version of "wilderness". I bet they will even add fake consensation so we know when a the scene is supposed to be "cold". Because the turbulance of a character's breath hitting a biting arctic wind and freezing to thier mask is so easy to model accurately in post.

Want to see a real yukon movie?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Cry_Wolf_(film)

"He also found the process difficult. "During much of the two-year shooting schedule in Canada's Yukon and in Nome, Alaska, I was the only actor present. It was the loneliest film I've ever worked on," Smith said."

THAT is what the real north is like.

Comment by winternewt 4 hours ago

No need to speculate. The article was published in 2019 and the movie is now six years old.

Comment by sandworm101 1 hour ago

And it did so well that i dont even remember seeing a trailer!

Comment by rramadass 16 hours ago

> “He was fiercely intelligent, and had a lot of confidence, but instead of trying to impress people, he looked and listened and felt.

> “Even his popular classics are enriched with multilevel meanings beneath the action-packed surface,” Labor says. “Jack was gifted with what Jung called ‘primordial vision,’ which unconsciously connects the author to universal myths and archetypes.

This right here is why Jack London is one of my favourite authors. The two-volume set published in the "Library of America" series is a must have for any aficionado. Not only does it have his novels and short stories but it also has his social writings which any American will do well to read today.

Novels and Stories : https://www.loa.org/books/99-novels-and-stories/

Novels and Social Writings : https://www.loa.org/books/100-novels-and-social-writings/

Reading his works, it is apparent that he was highly intelligent and really read and thought about everything in a very practical "here is how it is applicable to real life" manner. It is an object lesson on how mere schooling should not define you but what you make of yourself with what you study, learn and practice.

Comment by nephihaha 10 hours ago

"White Fang" and "Call of the Wild" are Jack London's best known novels, not his best novels IMHO. I prefer "Martin Eden" and "the Iron Heel", and am a bit mystified as to how his entire literary career has been boiled down to two dog books.

"Martin Eden" is about a mixed class relationship, with a wealthier woman becoming involved with a working class man. This is no "Lady Chatterley's Lover", but based partly on his parents' experience, not just his own.

Comment by trhway 20 hours ago

give it 30-50 years and we'll see repeat of these stories and photos, this time on Moon, Mars and asteroids instead of Yukon.

Comment by mannykannot 16 hours ago

Harsh as the Yukon is, it is a walk in the park compared to anything in space, where there is no realistic possibility of a rush of individual prospectors.

Several areas of the ocean floor are covered with valuable polymetallic nodules [1] which are way more accessible than anything in space, yet this has not led to the equivalent of a gold rush.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule

Comment by lukan 20 hours ago

What will be the valuable resource everyone is hunting on the asteroids, that is so valuable it covers the trip there?

Gold is way too cheap (and much easier to get on earth, even if the current mines are exhausted)

Comment by pstuart 18 hours ago

Building big ass space stations -- colonies at L4 & L5. Why haul it up from space? Perhaps rail guns on the moon might be easier...

Comment by lukan 13 hours ago

Sure, space mining for space stations make sense and I am all for it .. but where are the riches that would make people feel the gold rush?

Comment by pstuart 13 hours ago

Probably the initial hype of selling the possibility of riches, a la the dot com boom (and bust).

Comment by trhway 20 hours ago

He3? The trips will be cheap. Moon will be extended weekend trips. $10/kg to LEO. I.e. $1M for 100ton ship - compact nuclear reactor, small living quarters, 70 tons ejection mass for ionic drive - that is possible today - gets you to Mars in a few months.

And in modern attention economy there is another extremely valuable resource to mine - attention of millions. At least initially the trips by IG/TikTok influencers (would be like Jack London posting TikToks as he goes instead of writing books later) will generate tremendous revenue paving the interplanetary ways for us, mere mortals.

>Gold is way too cheap (and much easier to get on earth, even if the current mines are exhausted)

With that logic Manilla Galeons wouldn't have happened :)

Edit: just looked up prices of iridium, rhodium - $6K-$10K/ounce. So just 10kg - $2M+ . Thus it looks like there is a lot of economic sense for asteroid mining once we get to cheaply launch into LEO 100+ ton items like nuclear powered ships.

Comment by lukan 20 hours ago

And all of this ... for gold?

(even filtering sea water for it here on earth sounds a lot cheaper)

Comment by wileydragonfly 18 hours ago

Been hearing about the miracle of He3 for decades. Neither one of us gets off this planet alive.

Comment by trhway 18 hours ago

I’ll get, at least for short time :) If nothing comes better, in 20-30 years retired I’ll build something like that Denmark amateur rocket. It is cheap even today, and the tech and blueprints will be widespread and available like say drones and homemade planes today.

Optimistically though I think by that time ticket to Moon on SpaceX cattle class will be $100K.

Comment by lukan 13 hours ago

Hey I feel your space enthusiasm and would really like to be in space at least once and preferable to the moon, but I don't see how it can be economical for mining for earth. Space mining makes sense to build things in space for further space colonisation, but I guess we will have to invent other reasons to justify it.

(For me exploring space and working towards becoming a multi planet species is justification enough)

Comment by trhway 12 hours ago

it is like for example situation with energy production 30 years ago when solar was expensive and coal was cheap. Yet the solar have been becoming more and more cheap while coal becoming more and more expensive. The same will be with a lot of mining - the cost of it on earth, including environmental costs, will be rising while space mining costs will be falling. It will take time before space mined iron would make economical sense, where is space mining things like previously mentioned iridium, etc. looks to already have economical sense, or very close to it, even today.

Comment by lukan 11 hours ago

Space iron? Earth's crust is full of it, it will never make economical sense to bring it from space. You could use the energy needed for a rocket start to melt and seperate it from allmost any rock here on earth way easier.

Some very rare elements or tritium maybe, but this is is a big maybe.

Comment by trhway 10 hours ago

One of the points of space economy is that rocket needs to leave earth only once. After that the equipment would just be mining and sending stuff back using pretty unlimited solar and nuclear energy thus the amortized cost of the mined material would be going down to pretty much 0 which in the long run may work even for iron.

Nobody these days surprised that producing stuff in China and delivering it 10000km is cheaper than producing locally. The same thing will be with mining as the cost structure - absence of environmental, regulatory and political costs in particular and much cheaper energy (solar and nuclear) - is much better in the space than on earth. Also scale - you can easily find asteroids where you can have a mining operation 10x or even 100x the largest earth operation - and scale drives cost down. The earth based operations will just lose the competition.

>You could use the energy needed for a rocket start to melt and seperate it from allmost any rock here on earth way easier.

good luck getting permit :)

Comment by notahacker 9 hours ago

If you're sending stuff back you need reentry vehicles. Even allowing for reusability, it's hard to imagine the cost of building and launching them being less than the value of iron they contain (current value around $1 per kg for the higher grades and a fraction of that for scrap) and you're going to have to deal with regulators to land them. Even if the asteroid material solves the problem of all the propellant needed as reaction mass for transit to and from the asteroid belt, the unit economics of return only make sense to bring back the highly valued elements, and only if the rare elements aren't actually ones where the terrestrial supply monopolist can ramp up production rates once they face competition.

Comment by lukan 9 hours ago

"Nobody these days surprised that producing stuff in China and delivering it 10000km is cheaper than producing locally"

Actually people do see the madness in this, hence all the "produce local" initiatives instead.

The only reason it made sense, was not caring about external costs from fossil fuels and bad worker conditions in china.

"You could use the energy needed for a rocket start to melt and seperate it from allmost any rock here on earth way easier.

good luck getting permit :)"

Not hard. What do you think recycling smelters do?

It just does not make economical sense to melt and separate any rock and purify the elements. You use the ones you know have already high amounts of iron, copper, .. and you seperate them before as much as possible as smelting is energy intense and handling molten elements is hard and therefore expensive.

And the other point, yes, if there is a automated space industry, that can produce cheap reentry vehicles, some space mining might make sense. But if we would have that tech, we might as well use it on earth. Because you cannot just point a lump of iron towards earth. That would be called a asteroid and would be a weapon of mass destruction. You need spaceships. Going down .. and then up again, unless you use throwable spaceships?

Comment by boothby 5 hours ago

The funniest aspect of this conversation is the context: an author who made his living on telling the stories of fools he met in the gold rush. Some people can't be dissuaded by reason.

Comment by gerad 18 hours ago

honestly anything outside the gravity well. it's expensive to get materials from earth to space.

Comment by d_silin 16 hours ago

Yes. Yet those will be stories worth remembering.

Comment by BenjaminBarwo 19 hours ago

Jack London’s experience is a useful analogy most people chased quick wins, underestimated operational friction like logistics, environment, capital constraints, and failed due to poor preparation. Jack didn’t extract value from mining but he converted field experience into durable intellectual capital like stories, brand, and differentiation. I think of how startups and other business endeavors rarely win by blindly copying obvious opportunities they win by capturing firsthand market pain, execution scars, and unique insights into defensible products. My personal takeaway is asset isn't always going to be the "rush" it's what you learn while surviving it.