The Skagway AK unit of the Klondike Gold Rush Park is a collection of buildings and sites interspersed with other buildings: some historic, some residential, and many gift shops with more tchotchkes than would fill up your grandmother’s china closet owned by and only open when the cruise ships were docked. I was prepared to hate it all. Did I? Nope. Well, yes on the gift shops, but Cindy immediately found a must have purse.
The back story was amazing. The Klondike Gold Rush lasted fewer than three years, from August of ’96 to 1899 with a peak of only 18 months. The shortest route to the gold fields - by a long shot - was through Skagway which grew from an outpost to a chaotic city. Dyea, next door, was also booming but today is nearly all fields and forest owned by the NPS with trails worth a visit. Tens of thousands landed but only 30,000 made it to the gold fields hundreds of miles away. A handful became rich, a small percentage paid for the trip, most lost everything. The Canadian government (gold was north of Whitehorse near Dawson in the Yukon) required nearly 2000 pounds of equipment for each person to be granted passage into Canada. Each man carried this on his back up the Chilkoot Pass in 50-60 pound packs. Up the trail, dump the load, back five miles, pick up another and repeat. 20 trips for every five miles. Horses were useless, sleds were too heavy, some dogs could assist but they required food and care. The last 500 miles were covered on boats and rafts that the prospectors hand built. It was grueling, dangerous, cold and largely unsuccessful for all but a fraction of the people who tried the journey.
The park has a good visitor center, several restored buildings, a homestead that predated the gold frenzy, and several outdoor statues and plaques in Skagway and the nearby remnant town of Dyea. You can hike a lot of the original trail, and they do not require you to carry 60 pounds of goods.
We liked the ranger tour of Jeff Smith’s Parlor. A book could be written about that character. Actually there have been several books about him. The Parlor is unique. Once a bar and headquarters of the infamous outlaw Jefferson “Soapy” Smith, it was turned into a weird museum in 1935 where it was a highly promoted part of Skagway’s tourist attractions for 30 years. It is restored to the 1960’s iteration. Wandering about the small town is the best way to discover.
One of the more popular activities is to ride the train up the Chilkoot Pass and into Canada. We opted out of this because it covered essentially the same route we took by the spectacular drive from Whitehorse in Yukon Territory, Canada where we camped for two days. Whitehorse is the largest town on the Alaskan Highway and a welcome stop on our journey.
We did take a flightseeing trip over Glacier Bay National Park from Skagway, and you can read about it HERE. We ate at Skagway Brewing Company - excellent cheese soup - and found the shops with local handcrafts to be pretty interesting.
Cadillac’s Viewpoint: What a great town! Coffee shops and oddly dressed people to watch, cool. Good watery land abounds, neighborhood moose and trains and planes and boats - my antlers are tingling with captain anticipation. Cadillac’s Elevation 5 Antlers
