Officials with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans made a grim catch last night in Dawson City when they found a corpse in the Klondike River.

The body is that of a 73-year-old Ontario woman.

The woman and her husband of 50 years were camping in Dawson.

They put their canoe in the river at the Dempster Highway and planned to float back to town. According to the RCMP, the man thinks they hit a snag or an overhanging tree and the boat overturned.

Both experienced canoeists were wearing life jackets, according to police, but the woman had taken hers off to adjust it just moments before they flipped.

The 73-year-old man was able to swim to shore but his wife was swept away. He searched for her, but to no avail.

"Probably looking for her was what saved him (from hypothermia) because it kept his blood flowing," Cpl. Karina Watson of the Dawson RCMP detachment said this morning.

Although the highway is no more than a few kilometres from the Klondike, the man spent about two hours trying to navigate his way through the labyrinth of tailings ponds and piles that separate the river and the road.

"You know how those tailings are - you take two steps and you have to go around another little body of water," Watson said. The loose stones and steep piles only made things more difficult, she said.

By the time police were alerted to the fact someone was in the river, it was too late.

As a search and rescue team was preparing to head out, they got a call from Department of Fisheries employees who were working next to the Dredge Pond subdivision, about five minutes from downtown .

"Fisheries was doing a fish count and fortunately the body got caught on their gates," Watson said. "Fortunately because otherwise, we would not have located her so quickly."

RCMP officers pulled the body from the water and emergency personnel tried to revive the woman but she was gone.

Police are not releasing her name until her family has been notified.

Meanwhile, a report of a body in the Yukon River near Whitehorse yesterday was a false alarm.

At least four people reported seeing a body floating down the river alongside the Millennium Trail Wednesday evening. Two tourists and two local teenagers called police to say they had spotted a corpse.

The body, however, was very much alive, and belongs to a local man who goes down the river in a wetsuit regularly.

"We've asked him to give us a call next time, just so we know," Sgt. Don Rogers said today.