Day 6 - Skagway, Alaska

When I was dithering about booking a holiday this far in the north of Canada instead of opting for somewhere safe and warm like Italy, there was one photograph I found online that swung the balance.  It shows a line of prospectors climbing something called the Chilkoot Trail, and it chilled me to the bone, not just because of the amount of snow and ice in the picture, nor the angle at which the prospectors were climbing... but because something awesome and terrifying was driving mere men to attempt such a journey.

It wasn't just the gold, or the greed for gold: these men had a spirit of adventure like nothing I could begin to imagine.  And surely, if they could walk it, then I could fly/drive/train it?

When the Gold Rush began in 1897, miners and prospectors were falling over themselves to find fast, new, and not necessarily easy ways into the Klondike area.  Some came from the Canadian interior through the Peace River region; some came from the far end of the Yukon River, navigating - like the Chinook salmon - thousands of miles from that river's mouth in the far west of Alaska; and some, landing at the natural port of Skagway, Alaska, at the end of a sea journey through the Inside Passage, chose the desperate and narrow passes from southern Alaska over the Coast Mountains.  Of these latter routes, the Chilkoot Pass and the White Pass were the favourites.  The Chilkoot Pass was quicker but steeper and more physically challenging, while the White Pass was relatively easier but plagued by bandits.

As more and more prospectors poured into the Klondike region, the RCMP realised that the local resources couldn't support them all, and declared that each person could only enter if they had one ton of supplies, enough to last them a whole year.  The prospectors landing at Skagway bought pack horses or employed local Tlingit Indians to help carry this ton of provisions, increasing the volume of traffic through the passes.  The danger was inescapable.  Jack London, an American who went on to be a famous author associated with the Yukon, came in with the first wave of prospectors in 1897.  He wrote in his Tales of the Klondike, "The horses died like mosquitoes in the first frost and from Skagway to Bennett they rotted in heaps.   They died at the Rocks, they were poisoned at the Summit, and they starved at the Lakes."

In 1898, in an attempt to provide a sensible route through the mountains, a narrow gauge railway through the White Pass was proposed.  Though it was initially scoffed at, incredibly the 110 mile railway from Skagway to Whitehorse was completed in a little over two years, just in time for the Gold Rush to wind down.  The railway continued to operate as a commercial railroad for mining operations other than gold until 1982, when permanent road systems put it out of business.  However it was revamped and reopened as a tourist railway in 1988 as cruise ships started to dock at Skagway, tourists being the new prospectors.  It was this tourist railway I discovered online, and which swung the balance in the favour of this wide-ranging holiday I've planned.

This morning was the first morning on this holiday that the alarm clock has woken me up (admittedly it was 6 am).  We breakfasted, and caught the complimentary shuttle down to the White Horse and Yukon Route (WPYR) station on the edge of the river.  There we were picked up by a coach (boo, I was expecting a train all the way!), and driven, via Carcross, to Fraser in British Columbia, where we were in fact loaded onto the WPYR train, in a carriage named Klondike River.  There we were delayed for almost an hour thanks to coaches arriving late because of construction work on nearby roads.

Eventually we set off, the train moving slowly through a mountainous landscape made grey by low cloud.  I was fractious because of our late start; we were only due to have two hours in Skagway anyway, and a chunk of that had already been lost.  However this mood soon dispelled as we entered the first tunnel, and burst out onto a terrifying landscape of deep valleys, sickening drops, snow, only-recently defrosted lakes, and, worst of all, some of the most rickety wooden bridges I have ever seen.  Thankfully the worst of these bridges is no longer used, merely left as a reminder that, no matter how terrifying they look, they were still far safer than walking the pass on foot.

Though there was snow here and there, and though I could see deep down into the valley where rushing streams swirled white channels through the stunted trees, it really was only the palest reflection of what it must have been like in those last days of the 1890's, when hope of a fortune in gold drove men to risk everything they had to cross these mountains.

An hour and a half after we set off from Fraser, the conductor announced that we were nearing Skagway, and that a United States customs officer would be boarding the train to check our documents.  I'd already done my research and knew that we didn't need a visa entering the USA from Canada by land, but we would need to fill in a form and pay a processing fee.  I hadn't found out how much the fee was, and now I was worried it was going to be an extortionate amount.  We were told to remove all hats, sunglasses, and other face-disguising features, not to lock ourselves into the toilet, not to have any cameras, phones or other digital recording equipment with which we could photograph the customs officer's face, and absolutely not to stand up in his presence, as this would make him unhappy.  And we were told that we were not, under any circumstances - like an amateur cooking for Tom Kitchin on Masterchef - to make this man unhappy.

So I was terrified when a man who looked like a cross between Billy Joel and Jim Belushi appeared, snatched up our passports and recently completed waiver forms, stared briefly at them and then snapped, "I'll deal with you two after the rest", before moving efficiently and emotionlessly on through the rest of the carriages.  Still carrying our passports.  Have you any idea how naked you feel when an official takes your passport away from you?

Please note he might not have really looked like a cross between Billy Joel and Jim Belushi.

After a while our carriage emptied leaving behind the two of us, as well as an Australian woman and a German man.  No sign of Billy Belushi.  Time ticked on.  The cleaners appeared, emptying bins and cleaning the carriages for the return journey.  They had no idea whether we should be waiting in the carriage or somewhere else.

Time ticked on some more.

New passengers appeared, herded along by WPYR employees.  Where was Jim Joel?  "Why, he's over at the Customs building, that's where you guys should be, didn't anyone tell you?"  Ruffled, affronted, but still scared, the four of us made our way over to the Customs building where Billy Jim was roasting a party of approximately 400 Brazilians who, it had to be said, all looked like each other.  "Are you his brother?  Then why did you put your name on his form?  Why are you standing together?  Who are you?  Are you with this guy?"

Time was ticking, and I was more terrified than ever that our trip to Skagway was to be spent in this tiny Customs shed being grilled by someone who looked like he should be singing Just The Way You Are instead of terrorising English people on their first visit to the good ole US of A.  At last he dismissed the Brazilians ("not that way... NOT THAT WAY... THAT'S THE EXIT OVER THERE... Thank you, have a good day"), and turned his attention to the German man.  "What are you here for?  Well why didn't you put that in your declaration?  Put your hand on there.  No, your whole hand.  Not that way up.  That's right.  Now your thumb.  Your whole thumb.  Now your other hand.  No, your WHOLE hand, like you did before".

I began to see something... this was a man who was trying to do his job quickly and efficiently, but who was being constantly frustrated by people who weren't listening to him.  I suddenly felt a kinship with him.  And, as if by magic, with the German man dismissed, Joel Belushi seemed to relax.  "And now it gets easy, you people have done everything right," he said, "and though I'm supposed to charge you $6 to process your forms, I'm not going to charge you anything.  Just on this one occasion."

I won't say that he didn't charge us, but I will say that I had enough US dollars left over to buy a WPYR t-shirt.

Finally we were given a stamped visa and allowed into this great and powerful country, even if only the arse-end of it.  With only 80 minutes left of our two hours, we dashed about like mad things, experiencing and photographing the things we'd come to experience and photograph.

Skagway is basically a harbour at the end of a cruise ship run (or the beginning, depending upon your direction of travel).  As a result a staggering number of cruise ships dock here on a daily basis.  There were four or five there while we were there.  The docks stretch out and become the main streets of this town, full of gift shops and clothes shops and jewellery shops; it's a town that only exists because of the tourism the ships bring in.  Once the starting-off point for thousands of fortune hunters, it has become a fortune hunter itself, an end rather than a means to an end.  It's a pretty town, but I think you would have to spend more than the 80 minutes we had to find its heart.

We dipped into a sandwich bar and ordered some food to go, then finally made our way to the coach with minutes to spare (it was coach all the way for the return journey, the train was just for the journey down).  My earlier fractiousness was gone, replaced with excitement and joy at having made it to this strange place in the Alaska panhandle, at the foot of the mountains whose images had spurred me on to start this journey in the first place.

And so back on the coach, scarfing our sandwiches while being driven back up through Alaska and BC and into the Yukon... State to Province to Territory, rain forest to subalpine to semi-arid.  We stopped off again for a break at Carcross (so called because there were lots of towns called "Caribou Crossing" around in the early Yukon and the mail kept getting lost, so for this town they took the first syllable from each word and made "Carcross"), then got back to Whitehorse just over ten hours after we left.

Weary, we walked back to the hotel, washed up, changed, then headed back into town for sushi because the Mexican restaurant was just that little bit too far.

We'll go there tomorrow.