Alaska Vacation

July 9 - 5th day

Pass to the Yukon

Skagway, Alaska was our northern-most port, 59.5 degrees north and the sun was up at 4am and stayed up until 11:30 pm. Skagway (or Skaguay, as I saw it on one store-front) is a small town of about 800 residents. On the day we were there, four cruise ships docked and spilled about 7,500 tourists into the town. The nearest cruise ship in the photo above is our ship. The last cruise ship arrives on September 27, and after that, many of the 800 residents leave for the winter. The town is at the bottom of a canyon which rises to a 3,000ft pass into Canada and the Yukon, and the winds howl out of the interior most of the winter. The Indians wouldn't live in Skagway; too cold and windy, they say - only white men would live there.

The town was founded in the 1890s when gold was discovered in the Yukon. It was a typical gold rush town. There were three churches in town; a catholic church painted red, and two protestant churches painted green and white at the order of the town council, so that the men who were drinking on Saturday night could find their church on Sunday by its color. There's actually a natural wood-colored LDS meetinghouse there now also, and the tour driver pointed at a store and indicated to us that we could buy our "LDS things" there.

We chose to take a tour up to the pass - a bus ride up and back on the train. The track up over the pass was built in 1900. A railroad builder from London was asked to survey the area to determine whether a railway could be built and the decision was no - impossible in that kind of country. An Irish railroad man was called in and he said that if he were supplied with enough whiskey, he could build the railway, and he did with only three fatalities when a boulder rolled down the mountain and crushed three workers.

At the top of the pass, the trees were only about 3 or 4 feet tall. The guide explained that some of them were over 100 years old, but they were stunted by the -60 degree winter temperatures and wind in the winter. The movie "Never Cry Wolf" was filmed in this location. Remember, the pass is only 2,800 feet above sea-level.

There are still remnants of the narrow gold-miner's trail that led up the canyon to the pass. Canada is just beyond the top of the pass and the Canadians wouldn't let anyone in unless they had a year's supply of food and goods which amounted to about a ton. That meant that they had to traverse the trail many times to get their supplies over the pass. One could buy a horse in Skagway and load him up with 400 pounds of goods, but the horses wern't very good, and about 80% of them gave out about half way up the trail and were shot and thrown off the trail.

On the north side of the pass are some lakes and a train station that is in Canada. One could ride another 40 miles to Whitehorse in the Yukon territory, above the 60-degree latitude line, but we didn't have time to do much more than go through Canadian customs and hop on the train back to Skagway. The train ride back down was really fascinating. I've been on few trails with the boy scouts that dropped off like the track-bed did, almost straight to the bottom of the canyon.

As the train starts down off the pass, the inverted-V trestle bridge appears, now unused, but it is a symbol of the railway. The canyon beyond that point quickly gets a lot deeper and soon we're riding on a narrow track-bed high up on the mountain.

The tracks follow a side canyon (left photo) where the train stops to pick up hikers who have been helecoptered up to the foot of a glacier and who have hiked back down to the train stop. That sounded like a neat trip to me, but since the asking price was $500, I chose to pass it up in favor of the train excursion.

Carma is in the picture to the left on the train - note the coal stove, and the saw in the "break in case of of emergency" compartment up above. To the right is the roudy bus passengers on the way up to the top of the pass. All of them except two bewildered Japanese passengers which they switched to another bus, were in our cruise group.