It was Dawson City’s Thaw di Gras Spring Carnival this past weekend. As always, it was bitterly cold, but sunny!

I went out three nights in a row!

We kicked off our Thaw di Gras by absolutely freezing nearly to death for 35 minutes in line to get into Gerties for our town’s annual Lip Sync competition.

Our friend Alex was the Master of Ceremonies for the event!

It’s a very popular highlight of Thaw di Gras, so even though we got in that line to get in, we still sat nearly at the back, but at least we had a table!

Events like this really make my heart swell for this quirky little remote town. Watching our friends and neighbours get up on stage and dance around in costumes was so fun!

Not only was Alex the host, but he also stepped in to play a small role in one of the acts – and that act won! So he went home with a first place ribbon!

We got home just as a northern lights show was kicking off!

All weekend was full of events for kids and adults and even sled dogs. There is truly something for everyone. I visited the hat making competition at the museum in the afternoon and then we were back at Gerties for trivia on Saturday night!

And even with all those teams, some of them quite big, our humble team of three won first!

Trivia was hosted by our friend Kyle and he did not take it too easy on us all. The first half of trivia was the typical 5 questions per category, answers on paper type of trivia. But then the second half was on stage! I went up for the Entertainment category and the Science and Nature category. 4 teams had a representative on stage at a time and we wrote our answers on a whiteboard and turned them around all at the same time.

When you are on stage, you can get up to 3 questions at a time. The first, easy, for 1 point. Then you can go sit down and bank that point, or let it ride for the medium question worth 3 points. If you get that one, you can sit down with 4 points (I did once). But if you got a question wrong, you lost all the points for that round! For the last category, I let it ride for the hard question worth 5 points, but I lost it all when I didn’t know the speed of light in km/hr (it is 300,000). So I lost it all! Fortunately, Jeff and Alex did awesome and brought back 9 points each several times.

Our price was $300 in Gertie’s chips to split among us!

After Trivia, Kyle hosted karaoke!

Fortunately, we only stayed for a few songs because my courage was growing, and I may have jumped up there! Do you have a go-to karaoke song? Maybe I need one.

The northern lights were out again, but it was so windy the fireworks were postponed a day.

On Sunday afternoon, Jeff and Kyle were set to win the famous egg toss event.

Again I froze my appendages and face off. It was only supposed to be -12C or so, but the wind was like razors!

Unfortunately, their dreams of winning the egg toss gold were crushed as quickly as the egg.

We went home to thaw afterwards, and Jeff shovelled the barbeque out of hibernation and grilled up our first burgers of the new season!

Then, last night Janet and I went to KIAC to watch Elisapie’s concert! But first we waited outside KIAC’s door for 30 minutes freezing ourselves yet again (I thought you said the door was going to open at 7pm KIAC! :shakes-fist:)

Elisapie is a Canadian Inuk musician who grew up in Salluit (at the top tip of Quebec). She was celebrating the end of a tour with her band, celebrating her Inuktitut album. It is a great album, full of famous songs that she has translated and sings in Inuktitut (the language of Canada’s Inuit people). Here is that album from Spotify. I highly recommend it!

We scored front row seats to the sold-out concert, mostly because I hate having people’s heads in my photos for my blog 😀

She’s a talented singer with a beautiful voice that is gentle and also haunting at times. She told stories of her childhood and trauma and loss and how important music and dance was to her community. She incorporated some throat singing into her songs that was such a treat to hear and see in person.

Near the end, her band joined her for an incredible, unmic’d performance where she gently sang Qaisimalaurittuq (Wish You Were Here) (I think that was the humming song – correct me if I am wrong Janet or Alex!) while her musicians hummed. She had us all join in while they quietly left the stage, leaving us to hum for several minutes in the dark, until they returned for their encore. It was really magical, and unique!

She wanted us to participate throughout the show, and seemed to like it best if we were standing up, clapping, and dancing along with their performance. Sometimes that annoys me, when the performer is bossing around the audience, but it was fun to get up and dance.

We left after 10pm and the sky wasn’t even dark yet! Yet the northern lights were already visible.

The end of another Thaw di Gras weekend in Dawson City! And if it wasn’t -32C this morning, I’d believe it really was spring!