Skagway

OK, this seems like it was years ago, but I’ll try to give you my impressions of Skagway. I suppose we started our side trip down to Skagway with very high expectations, as everyone had great things to say about it. As mentioned earlier, we only had limited views of White Summit and the gorge as we descended to the town, and once we made it down, it was gray and very windy.

There’s a sense of two towns as you drive through, with the Skagway that people actually live in, and the Skagway that people get off of large boats to see. In season, Skagway is very much driven by the cruise ship industry, and there was at least one boat in each day that we were there. While the ships are there, the “touristy” shops are all open plying their wares (which are exactly the same as was available, or will be available, at all the other ports of call in the inside passage with the exception of “Skagway” being printed on all the shirts). Somewhere, there is a clothing producer with a bunch of stock t-shirt and jacket designs with an “insert town name here” computer program. As soon as the last ship leaves for the day there is this collective sigh of relief from the town, and the tourist drags suddenly become a veritable ghost town. You can walk down the center of the street with no fear of being hit by any tour buses, and see only the occasional seasonal employee scurrying into the only businesses remaining open (the bars, of course). You can even hear the hanging signs creaking in the wind. The only thing missing are the tumbleweeds blowing though.

One of the reasons I was excited to visit Skagway was the history of the town as it relates to the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898, and while some of this historical perspective was a bit kitschy, with the tour guides dressed in their period costumes dramatizing the life and death of Soapy Smith, there was still enough for those seeking greater historical depth. There is a small, but legitimate museum in the McCabe building, which was built of granite in 1899, and has served as everything from a school and college, to a court house, jail and marshal’s office over the years. Now it houses the museum and otherwise serves as city hall.

This is the hall of the Arctic Brotherhood, which is decorated with the ever popular driftwood siding.

This is the main drag of Skagway just one half hour after the last ship of the day left. This is about 5 PM, and the rush hour pretty much consisted of a guy riding by on his bike with not one, but two dogs jogging alongside. Clearly, just short of gridlock... (Laura makes a cameo at the street corner in the yellow jacket). On the kitschy side, Laura was determined to have a beer in the local brothel, The Red Onion, which offers tours of the “facility” at the rate of “$5 for 15 minutes, the same as in 1899,” in addition to the bar and souvenir shop on the first floor. I went along, but only because she made me.

The other historical highlight in town is the White Pass and Yukon Route small gauge railroad, which was built to transport gold miners that didn’t feel like carrying their literal ton of gear up Chilkoot Trail and Pass. Unfortunately, by the time the railroad was ready to go, most of the Rush had passed, but it served the US Military well transporting men and equipment to the construction of the Alaska Highway during WWII.

This is the White Pass & Yukon Route "Snow Plow No. 1," which was built in 1899 by the Cooke Locomotive and Machinery Company of Patterson, NJ, and was in service until 1964. During that time, it made 2580 trips and logged 181,000 miles, clearing the tracks of snow via it's huge bladed snow thrower.

My personal highlight was our trip out to the start of the aforementioned Chilkoot Trail, which started at the town of Dyea. Before the Klondike Stampede, it was a tiny native village and trading post, but during the Rush, it boomed to 8000 people in a muddy shanty town, built to exploit the miners as they began their quest for riches. However, with the completion of the railroad, the steady supply of stampeders dried up, and by 1903, the population was a massive 3 people. For the most part, the town was disassembled and the materials were packed off, leaving very little signs that the town ever existed. The town site is now trees and meadow, and it is amazing to try to picture a bustling town existed there just over a century ago. It’s now a national historical park run by the park service, and you can walk through the woods trying to imagine the street grid as shown in the walking tour handout. All that’s left are a few ruins of a rowboat, a warehouse, and the false front of a business in the town (these fronts were used to make a more impressive first impression to prospective customers, as opposed to the flap of a tent.

This is the remains of the Vining and Wilkes Warehouse, which is described by the sign below. Note all the buildings around it in the sign, as compared to the literal forest surrounding the lonely remains above.

There is also a stampeder’s cemetery for those killed in an April 3, 1898 avalanche, which includes at least one from what we think was Punxsutawney PA, spelling issues aside. It was a pretty surreal experience to imagine what it would have been like to be one of those miners arriving in Dyea a century ago, just starting out on their Alaska and Yukon adventure.

Oh, yeah, Skagway has a pretty good micro-brewery too, and they also have a good Spruce-Tip Ale. They were closed when we first got to town for their end of season employee party (much to the consternation of some of the cruise ship tourists who were only in town for the day), but a few bleary-eyed, hung-over, junior employees had the honor of dragging themselves in the next day for our benefit.

The Alaska Highway:

OK, getting back on the road, I have just one more thing to say about the Alaska Highway, as I think I’ve already beaten that horse pretty well. While some stretches were monotonous and boring, and others were stressful due to the road conditions and our seemly daily required allotment of fog, I have to be fair. We were fortunate to be on the highway during the height of the fall colors for most of the highway, and there were stretches that were just incredible. The area surrounding Muncho Lake is flat beautiful, and I found myself gawking at the northern portion of the Canadian Rockies (it was fortunate that traffic is light at this time of year, because we were able to rubberneck and really take in the scenery as we drove). Those of you that know me know I’m not prone to hyperbole, but expressions such as “child-like wonder” and “dumbstruck and speechless” came to mind during those stretches (yeah, I can hear the wise-ass remarks regarding me and ‘speechless’ already).

The big draw at Watson Lake is the sign forest, shown below, which now has well over 100,000 signs. Seems a homesick GI assigned to the construction of the highway during WWII put up a sign indicating the distance to his hometown, and since then the idea has taken root (sorry for the pun, but they're necessary once in a while). Now, many people traveling the highway actually have signs made ahead of time for the express purpose of leaving them behind. There are also quite a few travelers who evidently decided that their license plates were extraneous and left them behind as signs.

Getting to Dawson Creek, the start of the Alaska Highway, turned out to be pleasant weather-wise, but somewhat anti-climactic. I kinda thought there'd be more from a historical standpoint than the little visitor's centers/gift shops that were near mile zero and mile one. So much so, that I never even bothered getting out the camera to take a picture of the zero milepost. In any event, we took a day to refresh ourselves and clean out the RV a bit before heading south.

For my next edition, I’ll wrap up Canada with our visits to the Jasper/Banff area and Calgary.