The Sourdough Saloon is a bar that celebrates its gold rush history. The bar’s double swing doors hark back a hundred years; its plush flock wallpaper and long velvet bench give a wink to the glamorous days of the late 1890s, when prospectors stampeded to the creeks of the Klondike and Dawson briefly boomed. From the red-upholstered bar stools, grizzled old gold miners and mining mechanics of the modern age blow their month’s earnings on endless jugs of Kokanee beer. They tell the same stories again and again, ring the bell to buy a round for the house, and occasionally they tip with gold. The Sourdough Saloon is most famous, however, for a drink more lurid by far than beer: its sourtoe cocktails are the drink of one’s choice garnished with a genuine, severed human toe.

The Sourtoe Cocktail Club first kicked off in 1973. A group of friends was debating how could one become an honorary sourdough (the name given by the early gold miners to those who had survived the Canadian sub-Arctic from the freezing of the Yukon River in September to its break-up in May) without having to endure the bitter months of winter. One of them, Dick Stevenson, had bought a cabin just outside Dawson. The previous occupants had been brothers who’d hauled bootleg booze over the border into Alaska during the years of prohibition. They’d travelled by dogsled and, on one journey, one of them had frozen his big toe; with no doctors available, his brother had amputated it. They’d preserved the toe in alcohol and there it stayed until Dick inherited the pickled toe along with his cabin. Maybe, Dick suggested, one could become a 'sourtoe' rather than a sourdough. Qualifiers must down a drink garnished with the preserved, frostbitten digit – and the toe must touch the drinker’s lips.

Thanks to Dawson’s summer tourist trade, today there are 24 thousand members of the Sourtoe Cocktail Club. The first toe has long since gone: one member drank ten cocktails, fell backwards off his bar stool, bumped his head and swallowed it. 

'I’ve seen two people swallow the toes,' says Matt Van Nostrand, co-owner of the Downtown Hotel. 'And two summers ago, I saw someone chew one up and spit it out. He was pretty intoxicated.' Fortunately for the Sourdough Saloon, generous amputees from far and wide have donated replacements. Van Nostrand currently has 12 in his collection – two big toes (one male, one female) and 10 little ones. The furthest-travelled toe came from Virginia. 'A woman emailed us and said that she had this toe she could send us,' Van Nostrand explains. 'I think that one was a lawnmower accident.'

Getting there: The sourtoe cocktail is served from 9 to 11 p.m. in the Sourdough Saloon of the Downtown Hotel on the corner of Second Avenue and Queen Street, Dawson City, Yukon, Canada.