Much of the thawing of to-day is done by steam forced into the earth through steel tubes three fourths of an inch in diameter, and from ten to thirty feet long. These are called “points.” Each tube has a hard metal cap or steel head on the top, and below this an opening where the connection with the main steam pipe is made. The bottom of the tube is pointed so that it can be forced down into the ground. A man stands on a tall derrick and with a twelve-pound sledge hammer drives the pipe, inch by inch, through the earth. The steam-heated steel melts the ice as it goes down. When the point reaches bed-rock, it is left there for two or three days, oozing forth steam. To thaw out enough ground for the dredges to work on, hundreds of these steam points have to be sunk. In places the pipes are so close together that they stand out on the back of old Mother Earth like the quills on a porcupine. They soften the ground so that it is dangerous to walk over it until it has cooled. A man may think it is solid under foot, when all at once he may sink to his knees or waist in scalding hot mud. In the creeks where the Yukon Gold Company has been operating with steam points and dredges, the values amount to sixty or seventy cents’ worth of gold to the ton. The thawing costs about thirty cents for each ton. When the famous Joe Boyle, organizer of the Canadian Klondike Company, came to figure on his problem he found that the steam-point method would cost him four cents more a ton than the value of the gold he could recover. He concluded that if he could get rid of the great non-conductor of muck and moss that covered the frozen earth, the sun of a few summers would eventually thaw its way down to bed-rock. Then came the question of how to strip off the muck at a cost that would not eat up the profits. Boyle decided that the Klondike River itself could be made to do the job. He dammed it in places and turned its course this way and that. The current soon cleaned off the top layer, and when the water was drawn off it left the gravel exposed to the rays of the sun.