HO! FOR THE KLONDIKE: Skagway and the Chilkoot Trail

We arrived in Skagway about the same time that four huge cruise ships docked.  We could tell they’d just arrived because there were hordes of people still concentrated in the first couple of blocks of town closest to the docks. The ships dock conveniently at the end of Broadway, and disgorge literally thousands of people into the tiny town.  There were so many of them, they reminded us first of salmon swimming in from the ocean then moving relentlessly upstream, heedless of danger.  Like salmon, they spread out across the stream.  But their stream was a street choked with tour busses, cars, and one horse and buggy. I really wanted to honk at the ones who walked, zombie-like, directly into the path of our Jeep.  Marsha wouldn’t let me.  But I really wanted to lay on the horn, if only to wake these people out of the trance apparently caused by the sight of what appeared to be hundreds of jewelry stores.

Spenddddddddddd.  It was like a chant that seemed to emanate from the zombies. They couldn’t hear it, but we could. They were rapidly buying everything in sight.  Spend before the ship leaves and the opportunity is gone forever!  What a great marketing ploy.

The first thing you come to at the ship dock end of Broadway is the National Park information center.  The US Park Service owns several blocks of the historic town, and also manages the Chilkoot Trail historic site nearby. City information is a block away. But oblivious people don't pick up on the park ranger uniform.  One woman from the ship crowd came up to the desk and engaged a ranger as if she were a store clerk:  “I need something for my grandchild.  Are there stores here?  What should I get her?” The ranger suggested there were indeed stores just out the door, staffed by people who were just dying to help her.  Another ranger was then asked, "Where should I eat lunch?"  What patience these rangers have.  "The Red Onion has great chili." Even the historic buildings owned by the park are leased back to businesses to support the cost of their restoration and maintenance.  Skagway is shopper heaven. That’s a good thing, because I needed a new wiper blade for the Jeep. 

We are camped in Carcross, originally known as Caribou Crossing, about 66 miles from Skagway.  This was a Tagish Indian village in the old days.  Tagish Charley, Kate Carmack and Skookum Jim (all co-discoverers of Klondike Gold) are buried here. It also has a really good coffee shop and a train station.  More on that in a minute.  Back to wiper blades.

The road to Skagway is breathtaking in its beauty. 

So, on our way down from the Yukon, through British Columbia to Alaska this morning I had affixed my new JeepCam to the outside windshield—to take wide-view movies and still photos of our journey there and the plummeting descent down the infamous White Pass.  This is a narrow road with a steep 11 percent grade.  All was well until it rained. When I turned on the wipers, one wiper blade destroyed itself trying to scrape the camera mount off the windshield.  I was actually happy with this outcome because one $9.99 wiper blade was certainly less painful to replace than one $400 camera.  So we stopped at True Value Hardware on Broadway, which was also mobbed with cruise ship people, and because they had no fitment chart a nice store employee from Clearfield, Utah, insisted on hiking the four blocks back to where we parked the Jeep to measure the blade for length. 

After measuring, as I drove him back to his store, I asked how Skagway residents could stay sane living in a tiny town that got mobbed daily by, literally, ten thousand tourists.  “Easy,” he said, “ by the time I get off work at 5 pm they will either have sailed, or they’ll be back on their ship eating that expensive food they already paid for.  Five o’clock is when we get our town back.”  Ah.

Skagway at 5 pm

Getting to the Klondike Wasn't Easy

In our earlier blog about Dawson, I told you about my grandfather, the sourdough.  Pop, John Emerson Badley, was nineteen years old when the Klondike fever struck him.  By then he’d already prospected in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Montana, and had driven a stagecoach from Silver City, NM to Lordsburg and Deming.  When I was a child he used to tell me stories about climbing the infamous Chilkoot Pass in the dead of winter on his way to Dawson and the Klondike gold fields.  The Chilkoot Pass is at the midway point of the Chilkoot Trail that leads inland from the former seaport of Dyea, about six miles north of Skagway.  Back then, these two towns were locked in a struggle to capture as many as possible of the 60,000 would-be miners getting off ships and launching off towards Dawson, more than 500 miles away in the Yukon.  What stood in their way was the rugged Chilcat Mountains. These had to be scaled, and winter was the worst possible time to try it. 

Skagway, on one hand, had its White Pass, advertised as less steep.  It was so easy, they lied, because you could use pack animals to carry all your supplies.  Three thousand horses and other pack animals died on the easy route.  Dyea, on the other hand, had the Chilkoot Pass, advertised as much shorter than White Pass.  Which it was….but...  You’ve no doubt seen the photos of a line of men, and probably a few women, burdened down with heavy backpacks, climbing up a steep wall of white ice using steps carved into the ice itself. That was the Chilkoot, which awaited you at the end of the shorter route. 

At stake was money.  Lots of money. The real money to be made on the gold stampede was not in mining, since most productive claims were already taken.  For the very savvy business people, opportunity came from selling supplies to the miners.  So the two towns were really battling over money. 

The Dyea Ghost Town

Pop chose Dyea and the Chilkoot over Skagway and its White Pass. He never told me why.  But when I was little he kept telling me that when I was old enough we’d go to Dawson and “paint the town red.”  I mentioned earlier that I pictured us with cans of paint and brushes.  Sadly, he died when I was eight.  So this trip is long overdue and I’m doing it with Marsha instead of Pop.  Along the way I’ve been trying to piece together what his experience must have been like.

So we went to Dyea, where today there is not much left to mark what had become an overnight city of 8,000 residents in 1898.  Most residents had planned to stay permanently. But when the White Pass railroad was finished in 1899, any remaining stampeders were now able to ride the train over the mountains then board paddle wheelers for the run down the Yukon River to Dawson.  No more Chilkoot.  So, no more Dyea.

Interpretive Ranger Kira has a masters degree in biology

We took a Park Service walk at Dyea with Ranger Kira, an interpretive ranger from Juneau. She surprised us by explaining the grassy plain we had assumed had once been the original town site had actually been completely under water back in 1897-98. “Glacial rebound” had caused the whole area of land to rise 8 or 9 feet since Pop was here. The sea used to completely cover what is now the grassy plain, and the pilings we can still see here had actually been the end of a very long pier used to reach deeper water beyond these shallows.

Ranger Kira walked us into a thick spruce and hemlock forest and showed us where the town of Dyea had actually stood, a mile or more back from the current shoreline.  The river has changed course also, and now runs through part of where town had stood.  But traces still remain from Pop’s time.  We found remains of a warehouse that had stood along West St. near First St. 

And further back, at Fourth St. and Main, was an actual building front from a real estate office in old Dyea.  She had a photo with her that showed children playing in front of this very building, which at the time had several young spruce trees planted in front. The stumps of those trees are still visible today, in front of the original building. But, of course, the streets themselves have disappeared.

So Dyea is just a memory.  Like Pop himself, gone now more than sixty years.  But being able to go to old Dyea and see the hull of a boat, a row of trees, boards from a warehouse, all seemed to bring me closer to this man who had walked these streets and later had such a lasting effect on my life.  Pop was a consummate storyteller who shared his life experiences routinely with small grandchildren and large audiences alike  (judging from his news clippings). I’ve never wondered where I got the storyteller’s trait.  I just wish I’d been around him long enough to record his stories on paper.  Today his stories are just snippets of memory images almost lost as my mental computer loses RAM.

John Emerson Badley 1877-1952

He got to the Klondike early.  Before the Mounties set up the scale at the top of the pass; before the thousands of boats were built at Lake Bennett; before the vast horde of rushers arrived in Dawson.  We know from a news clipping that he  returned to Seattle in April 19, 1898 aboard the steamship Utopia. This was the ship that brought the news of the Palm Sunday avalanche on the Chilkoot that killed 63 rushers.  That suggests he was coming down the Chilkoot about the time so many rushers were killed going up it.  The article says his group of four men had claims on the Pelly and Stewart Rivers, south of Dawson.  Which would explain why I couldn't find a claim record for him in Dawson.  I can only imagine he left early because he had other places to be. 

The Klondike was just the beginning for him. He had many other stories just as exciting as the gold rush. By 1900 Pop was in the jungles of the Philippines fighting insurgents as a member of the US Army; ten years after that he was an engineer living on a houseboat on the Yangzi River in China, doing a flood control study of that river for the Red Cross.  Then he built dams, lots of dams, all over the west, including Hoover and Grand Coolie Dams.  And still later helped build the San Francisco Bay Bridge.

Bennett City

The next day we went off aboard the very train that had killed Dyea, to see the other end of the Chilkoot Trail. Prospectors and stampeders like Pop who were lucky enough to make it over the pass had hiked down the backside of the mountains to Lake Bennett. There they could fell trees and build a boat in which to travel another 800 miles down the Yukon River to Dawson.  Pop never mentioned a boat, so we think he may have made the trek down the frozen Yukon River with a dog team.  He talked a lot about his sled dogs and how to care for them.

The train skirts Lake Bennett in light rain

You can’t drive to Lake Bennett today, as there are still no roads.  But the White Pass & Yukon Route railroad has become a tourist enterprise. It still passes through what was once the thriving town of Bennett City that grew up at the point where the Chilkoot trail reached the lake. Friday morning we caught the westbound train here in Carcross and headed toward Skagway. We rumbled along the lake in an antique car until we reached what had once been the town of Bennett City. 

Today, Bennett ghost town it still marks the end of the Chilkoot trail. 

As we chugged into the rebuilt station we were surprised to find a sizeable crowd awaiting us on the platform.  They looked rugged and cold.  In fact, these people had just hiked the historic Chilkoot Trail and were now waiting for the train to take them back down to Skagway.

We went into the station where the WP&YR was setting up a lunch they’d carried in with us on the train.  We enjoyed a hot stew loaded with potatoes, peas, celery, peas, peas and more peas.  I’m not a big fan of peas. Then we had some really good apple pie before hustling back outside to explore the town site in the 40 minutes we had left before the train was to depart. This disappeared town was actually built after Pop passed through here, but it was interesting anyway. 

Our train guide Ron, who was from Australia (and looked and sounded just like Crocodile Dundee’s partner Wally), led us around and pointed out where the ferry docks had been, the Grand Palace Hotel, post office, and so on.

And he took us uphill to the St Andrews Presbyterian Church, which still stands.  At the ferry docks he mentioned one German immigrant who made a fortune here then lost it when his development corporation went bust.  But his son did better in Whitehorse.  And his grandson better still.  In the process they simplified their hard-to-pronounce family name into Trump.  The Donald’s fortune has its early roots right here in the Bennett City ghost town. 

We also noticed piles of cans the stampeders left laying around.  These were real tin with lead seals that Ron told us made some of the better provisioned miners go mad from lead poisoning over the long winter.  

At a hilltop in the middle of Bennett City we came to  the reason for our visit. End of trail. Here Pop had come off the Chilkoot more than 115 years ago.  So now we’ve seen both ends. The middle, with its iconic steep pass, still eludes me.  The train whistle beckoned us back, so we boarded again to chug on down to the Fraser siding where we detrained then boarded a bus to return us to Carcross. Most everyone else continued on down to Skagway.

The next day we drove back to Skagway, and as we headed back up White Pass, we noticed a black lump in the road ahead of us.  It turned out to be a black bear. 

Another Bear Butt

He was caught between a sheer cliff up on one side and a sheer drop on the other.  He tried ambling on ahead of us, but when we went to pass him he freaked out and squeezed under the guard rail.  But watched us pass, then came back out on the road again.  We don’t know where he was going but when he got to the Canadian Customs check point up the road we figured he was going to need a passport and a good explanation.

The Trip from Valdez to Carcross

I thought we might tell you how we got to Carcross.  We departed Valdez a week ago in rain and cold, then headed up Thompson Pass into clouds. 

At lunch at the Princess cruise line’s hotel near Copper Center we were able to look out over the Wrangell--St. Elias National Park and some really tall mountains there.  Then we turned right at Glennallen and drove west to Tok through some spectacular scenery. 

As we drove the weather had turned from cold and rainy to hot and dry.  Tok brought us  full circle to where we first entered Alaska back in June.  It had been hot and dry then, too. After one night in Tok we turned south onto the Alcan Highway, went across the Canadian border again, and stopped for the night on Lake Kluane (pronounced Clue Onnie), Yukon's largest lake.

The Congdon provincial campground at the lake's Destruction Bay was probably the nicest place we camped on the entire trip.  For $12.  We built a fire (free firewood was thoughtfully provided) and roasted hot dogs. Then the next day we journeyed on to Haines Junction for another night in a Provincial campground.  We had thought we’d stay here and explore nearby Kluane National Park, but found that unlike Yellowstone or Grand Tetons, some parks in Canada are places you can see only on foot.  You don’t drive through Kluane. But we did get to visit Kathleen Lake, at Kluane.

We then stayed overnight at a different provincial campground near Haines Junction, and because it was a short day we had time to barbeque some steaks and Marsha was able to harvest some Fireweed seeds as the flowers turned to seed pods then into a cotton candy-like fiber.  When you touch it, the seeds fly out like seeds from a dandelion and blow everywhere.

The next day we continued on to Whitehorse, Yukon’s capital. We’d already spent a week there a seemingly few eons ago.  So, that same day, after a quick visit to Walmart, we continued on south to Carcross where Jack and Gaye Stayton caught up with us on Saturday. We rode back down to Skagway with them Sunday.

One of the really nice Canadian Customs inspectors at the entry station going to Skagway clued us in on how to know when winter is coming.  He explained that when you see only a few blossoms left on the top of each Fireweed stalk, it will snow in six weeks.  They are like that now. 

How far we have come! The Yukon River was still frozen solid when we left home in May; now we are looking at snow coming before long. On our way up, just before we got to Dawson we discovered it never got dark at night.  Now we have darkness about 10:30 pm.  And the leaves are turning on the trees.  So, it must be time to head home. Hard to believe that summer is over.  It seems that summer, and we, just got here.

So Monday we will launch off back down the Alcan 300 miles to Watson Lake.  At that point we have to decide if we will turn south into British Columbia on the Cassier-Stewart Highway, one of the most isolated roads in North America, or continue back down the Alcan to its origin at Dawson Creek (not to be confused with the Dawson in the Yukon). Either way we will end up at Jasper, Lake Louise and Banff.  About 2000 miles from where we are now. Dang, this is a big country.

So stay tuned, we're done with Alaska but there is still a lot of Canada left to explore.

John and Marsha Taylor

(All photos copyright 2013 by John and Marsha Taylor)