Singer-songwriter Basia Bulat performs during the Dawson City Music Festival in Dawson City, Yukon. (CBC Radio 3)For many people travelling to the Dawson City Music Festival, getting there is part of the fun. The festival’s website even offers information for taking a canoe and paddling down the Yukon River (which flows north) to the historic Gold Rush town for the three-day-long party. For Luke Kozlowski, one of this year’s performers, the trip took an unexpected turn.

The drummer and singer for Victoria indie-rock band Immaculate Machine arrived in Whitehorse only to learn that his connecting flight to Dawson had been overbooked. A festival organizer suggested that Kozlowski take the five-hour drive in a truck loaded with portable toilets for the festival.

“He said, ‘I’ll give you a bottle of whisky and an outhouse truck,’” Kozlowski relates, smiling. “It’s not something you do every day, not in B.C. But it was a beautiful drive.” Like most visitors to Dawson City, Kozlowski left with a story.

A small collection of brightly coloured buildings nestled between the Yukon River and the hills that held gold over a century ago, the town feels impossibly remote. During the height of the Gold Rush, there were 40,000 people in Dawson — more than the entire population of the Yukon today. “If you live here, you’re making a commitment already,” observes another festival performer, Guelph, Ont.-based singer-songwriter James Gordon. “You’re living outside the box. There’s a lot of real characters here.”

The vast, sparsely populated region seems not only to accept informality and eccentricity but encourages it. For instance, at Bombay Peggy’s, a one-time brothel that’s been converted into an inn and saloon, the door was being run by a local resident who has a reputation around town for living in a cave. It’s no surprise, then, that Dawson is such a welcoming home and visiting place for musicians, writers and visual artists.

While this year’s edition of the music festival (July 18-20) had recognizable Canadian names like Hayden, Polaris Prize nominee Basia Bulat and the Sadies, the festival, which included several unsigned Yukon-based artists, is as much about community as it is about music. “There’s a mindfulness about the festival,” says Kozlowski. “It’s not just about getting big-name acts or charging $10 a beer. It’s about having a good time with everyone who’s there.”

In Dawson, musicians and festivalgoers mingled easily around town. At Bombay Peggy’s, members of Vancouver group Black Mountain gathered in a corner drinking the espresso martinis that had been named after the band. Sitting in the Pit, another notorious local bar, one might hear people speaking French and German before one of them switched to English to explain how a childhood love for the works of Jack London and Robert Service led him to the far North.

Festival attendee and CBC producer Caitlin Crockard takes in a rainy Dawson City. (CBC Radio 3)Although the bars close at 2 a.m., it’s never exactly dark in Dawson City in the summer — instead, the sky dims to a gauzy cerulean hue. In the morning, other performers, most of them clad in plaid, could be seen walking along the street’s muddy boardwalks to the coffee shops, as they nursed their hangovers with the rest of the townsfolk.

People of all ages partook in the hijinks. Unlike other festivals, the Dawson festival mixes indie-rock acts with roots, blues and country performers, which in turn brings in a wide mix of listeners. “The demographic it draws is quite unique,” says Gordon, who performed with his two sons at the festival. “The multigenerational thing is quite good.”

The town, which sits on land occupied by the Tr'ondek Hwech'in First Nation, now bases its economy on tourism. What makes the place special is how the local community co-exists alongside the souvenir shops and tour guides in 19th-century costume leading visitors through various heritage structures. And that presence is felt in its thriving arts scene.

“Dawson is one of the most arts-centric towns, per capita, in Canada,” says Tim Jones, who organizes the music festival, which has just marked its third decade. “What other town of 1,800 people has an accredited art school, two galleries and live music every night?” According to another Dawson resident, David Curtis, the Yukon is kind to artists, because “if you attempt something, people will support you.” Curtis is an administrator for the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture School of Visual Arts (KIACSOVA), which began offering first-year visual arts courses for 20 students from across the country in 2007.

For a few students, the severe weather conditions — including long periods of darkness and temperatures that can reach -40 C in winter — were a shock. “I’d say maybe 30 percent of the students were adversely affected,” Curtis says. Other students fed off the shifts in weather, especially in late June, when there can be up to 22 hours of daylight. “For some of them, it was high octane in the summer.”

“It’s a place where you really get in touch with your pain,” says Yukon singer-songwriter Kim Beggs, who played in Dawson last summer, but spent this July performing in front of the Queen at the Canada Day celebration at Trafalgar Square in London. “A place of such extremes brings out qualities in people that are not often brought out down in big cities.”

Vancouver writer George K. Ilsley spent last winter at Berton House, a writer’s retreat in the Dawson bungalow that was Pierre Berton’s childhood home. Ilsley, who had been working on a novel and some nonfiction, was impressed by the talent of local musicians and artists. “Even though it was the quiet season, there was always something happening,” he remembers. “There is a chicken-and-egg situation in the Yukon, in that it attracts independent spirits, people who have that ability to make their own fun. This independent spirit informs the arts scene and also is the heart of the town.”

Musician Justin Rutledge performs at the Palace Grand during the Dawson City Music Festival. (CBC Radio 3) I felt this determination to support the community and simply have a good time during the music festival. The 30th edition of the event took place under abnormally drizzly conditions. The streets, which can’t be paved because of the shifting permafrost the town sits on, were filled with grey mud. Still, the mainstage tent was filled with enthusiastic people there to see Hayden, Bell Orchestre and Tr'ondek Hwech'in Singers perform in evening sets. In the beer garden tent, people began dancing and sliding in the muck.

During the day, festivalgoers scattered to various venues across town — including the Palace Grand and the Odd Fellows Hall, two buildings from the turn of the previous century — for various “workshops,” which bring musicians together to collaborate and share songs. At St. Paul’s, an Anglican church built in 1902, musicians like James Gordon, Hayden, Justin Rutledge and Julie Doiron accompanied each other during an event called “Songs I Wish I Wrote.” While Doiron turned in a charming take on Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard by Paul Simon, it was two unheralded Yukoners, Aaron Burnie and Jonathan Ostrander, who stole the show. Burnie played Old Maid Song, an 18th-century ballad, to his own banjo accompaniment. Ostrander offered an unabashedly tender rendition of the Ian and Sylvia classic Four Strong Winds, with other musicians singing along and adding guitar solos.

“The workshops I’ve seen at folk festivals are more like songwriters’ circles, but the ones here are themed around an idea,” says Ostrander, who moved from Saskatoon to the Yukon three years ago. Ostrander chose Four Strong Winds because “it’s a song about transient culture, especially with all the seasonal work here. The song’s really been on my mind because I had a girl up here, and she actually left this morning.”

For their onstage collaboration, Immaculate Machine worked with Out of the Blue, an upstart group made up of Dawson City high-school students. Recalls Kozlowski, “Brooke [Gallupe, Immaculate Machine’s singer and guitarist] led the group in a jam session. Then he got the singer from Out of the Blue to sing about small towns and how there was nothing to do.” Forgive me for sounding like a grizzled codger, but that kid doesn’t know how good he’s got it here.

Kevin Chong is a writer based in Vancouver.