On a hot July day 1897, the steamer Portland arrived at Schwabachers's dock on the Seattle waterfront to discharge a cargo of prospectors and their conspicuously heavy baggage. Within two weeks, every barge and scow capable of making the arduous trip up the rugged Canadian coastline had been pressed into service to transport the 10,000 men women and children who would head north to try their luck.

The Klondike Gold Rush was born.

Thousands of men and beasts perished on the journey. Few arrived in time to or with sufficient resources to exploit the stream beds yielding up the golden nuggets and dust. Most ended up working for somebody else, or returned home. While fortunes were made, they were won by a small fraction of the estimate 100,000+ who departed in search of fortune and fame.

In one week, the town of Dawson City grew from a village 500 to over 12,000. By the end of the summer of 1898, that number had bloomed to 30,000, and price gouging was rampant.

By the new millennium, enthusiasm began to wane, and news of a gold strike in Nome, Alaska drew new prospectors away.

That was the first wave of the Klondike Gold Rush. Between then and now, an estimated 20 million+ ounces of gold have been removed from the Lone Star Mountain, whose flanks harbour the rich creeks that spawned the fever.

What most people around the world don't realize is this: the Klondike Gold Rush is still on.

There are several small exploration companies exploring the 'benches' of the Indian River, that drains Bonanza and Eldorado creeks, and still others are seeking gold in the rugged mountains surrounding Lone Star Mountain. In the creeks that drain Lone Star Mountain, one and two-man placer gold operations are extracting thousands of ounces of gold each year from the still productive creeks.

But one company has united all of the claims on the entire watershed of Lone Star mountain, and is today applying a comprehensive scientific approach to delineating the 'lode' source of all the 'placer' gold taken over the past 100 years.

For the uninitiated, placer gold is free or loose gold that is extracted from creeks and soils, as opposed to lode or hard rock gold that is bound in rock, and part of an underground unified mineralized system with definite boundaries.

The company is Klondike Star Mineral Corporation (OTCBB: KDSM), and they control not only the largest contiguous claim group in the Yukon Territory, but all of the lode claims underlying the richest creeks where gold was removed at the height of the original gold rush.

In their third year of the extensive program, aspects of the geology controlling the occurrence of gold concentrations in the 60 square kilometer claim group are becoming increasingly apparent.

We're starting to make breakthroughs with the core drilling,' says project geologist Bill Mann. 'From what I've seen so far, there's a thick continuous zone of mineralized rock, and continuity is much better than I was originally lead to believe.'

The regional geology and Klondike Star's exploration program have attracted the attention of some prominent earth scientists. The Mineral Deposit Research Unit (MDRU) at the University of British Columbia is involved in a collaborative program of scientific research in the Klondike gold fields under the direction of professor of Dr. James K. Mortensen.

'We know that a substantial amount of lode gold is still present,' he says. 'We know that because we see gold bearing quartz vein systems developed in many parts of the Klondike . This is a style of gold mineralization that typically contains gold over a very, very substantial vertical distance - certainly thousands of meters. We've identified basically four major areas that appear to have been the sources of at least 90% of the placer gold that was recovered here. '

Klondike Star has raised over US$15 Million so far to advance the exploration of the project. Investors from as far away as Dubai and Zurich, including fund managers and royalty have flocked to the company's equity offerings.

Vice President of operations Don Flinn attributes the healthy investment climate to several factors.

'When you have a company looking for a deposit that has produced over 20 million ounces, and a gold price that is stronger than it has been in two decades, on a property with the historical significance and romantic cachet of the Klondike, you've got a lot of compelling factors there that are just too irresistible to many of the world's investors'', he says.

'Add to that the fact that we have some of the most talented geological people in the industry at work on the property, and its pretty impressive.

Company president Hans Boge sums it up succinctly.

'Klondike Star was founded for the purpose of determining the lode source for all of the placer gold removed from the Lone Star watershed, and establishing a world class mining operation.'

Bring on the gold rush.