5/10/23: Skagway: A Movie Set against a Gorgeous Backdrop

 

Our last day ashore of our week cruise from Vancouver to near Anchorage, Alaska was split between what felt like the movie-set town of Skagway and then along the Klondike Highway.

On the seven-block historical corridor along Broadway, Skagway's main street, was the Arctic Brotherhood Hall, a former club for gold prospectors and now a tourist center. Almost 9,000 pieces of driftwood covered the facade in 1899 and were painstakingly renovated, piece by piece, in 2005. The facade has been called a prime example of Victorian Rustic architecture.

It was so odd that at each of the ports our ship docked at, invariably one of the first sights would be a jewelry store selling exotic gems from the South Pacific! I may have understood if we were in that part of the world but in Alaska, nope. Perhaps it was the thought that all who cruise had oodles of money to spend on black pearls and the like.

In the center of town was the Klondike Gold Rush Museum. When the first gold was found in 1896, it sparked one of the greatest adventures in North America but it would be over in two short years. The word 'Klondike' became a magic word for many but a life of poverty only became a life of prosperity for some.

Though most gold seekers came to Skagway from the United States and Canada, others arrived from more than 40 countries in search of El Dorado. Their destination was the gold field in Dawson City in Canada's Yukon Territory about 500 miles north. Click on the photo so you can more easily see where both Skagway and Dawson City are and how the cities of Ketichan, Juneau, and Skagway are cut off from the rest of the state by Canada.

I'm sure most North Americans read stories about the adventure to find gold but the National Park's museum also suggested we consider the perspective of the indigenous people that the gold rush was an invasion with stampeders stealing land, bringing new diseases, and being treated as lesser people. Sadly, an altogether too familiar tale.

20-year-old Jack London, the future writer of The Call of the Wild, found his inspiration and literary treasure in the stories of his fellow travelers and the north's beauty.

Once news about the extraordinary gold discovery reached the public in 1898, people raced from around the globe to reach the Klondike in the hopes of becoming rich beyond their dreams. To reach the Klondike, gold seekers had to choose a trail that contained a torturous 1,000-foot climb known as the Golden Stairs or the Dead Horse Trail because pack animals died in huge numbers. As one old-timer said about choosing between the Chilkoot and the White Pass to reach Dawson City: "One's hell. The other's damnation." Both trails met in Bennett, British Columbia, where the stampeders had to buy or build boats to float 550 miles through the lake system and the Yukon River to reach Dawson City.

The museum gave me a deeper appreciation of how hard the miners had to work to recover gold as most gold wasn't on the surface but more than 10 feet deep. If endless digging wasn't bad enough, the men had to get through frozen muck and gravel to stand in a cold stream for endless hours to wash the gravel and search for the glint of gold and pay dirt. 

I reckon Klondike Bars are familiar to most readers but I never gave a second thought to their history until we were in Skagway. I've surely eaten my fair share of the yummy chocolate-covered ice cream bars that were created in the early 1920s by the Ohio Isaly Dairy Company!

I liked this shot because if you squint really hard, you can see our cruise ship through the train's window and the mountain backdrop!

Tourism has become the modern-day Gold Rush of Alaska!

I just couldn't get over the fact that every single building on Broadway looked like a movie set straight out of Hollywood. It may as well have been as the entire town was really part of a massive restoration project by the National Park Service begun in 1976. 

The only named streets in Skagway were Broadway, State, and Main - all the rest were numbered. We smiled when we learned that Alaska is famous for recycling buildings. There is no hospital in town, only a dentist who comes up once a month! If you're sick or are hurt, you have to be medically evacuated out. That sure struck a raw nerve with me as I'd been medically evacuated from Guatemala after breaking my femur last fall. Everybody in town pays just $125 annually for medical evacuation insurance - sounds pretty cheap to me.

Hmm, the mural said "Alaska's finest shopping in tiny Skagway." I was skeptical until we bought a striking five-foot-long table runner with caribou on it that we're now using as a wall hanging. If you ever make it to Skagway, stop at The Loom!

The view of Skagway's craggy mountains a street away from Broadway also included a sign advertising a jewelry store in town. Could have done without that to mar the view!

Just off Broadway was another cutesy street with more historic buildings that had also been gussied up. These weren't the attractive hotels on Broadway but small buildings representing the town's former red-light district. They had been moved here so they could be preserved and so visitors could understand more about the hardships and successes faced by prostitutes during the Gold Rush.

Though they came to seek their fortunes like the miners, few succeeded. Tents, boarding houses, and cramped cribs like this building were their homes. Some women brought to Skagway from other countries as "white slaves," had to repay their managers for their transport. Many suffered violent attacks in fights with pimps or clients or died by suicide or disease.

To try and get a sense of the 'real' Skagway, Steven and I walked a few streets away from Broadway. We saw a few homes but nary a grocery store, drug store, town hall, police station, church, recreation center, or anything that resembled a typical town. It was all just too artificial for my liking.

This avenue of mountain ash trees was planted by Alaska's Garden City in the summer of 1986 and dedicated to the city's future. A garden city in Alaska - wow!

How odd that the most attractive, non-NPS place was the town bathroom with the native painting!

In the afternoon, we took a pre-arranged bus tour along the Klondike Highway to step over the Canadian border. John, our driver, was quick to point out, "If you have to pee, go now or forever hold your pee." And, since our altitude would change from sea level to 3,292 ft. above sea level, he hoped we had dressed like an onion, i.e. in layers! As we drove the two minutes it took us through Skagway, John joked the historic district meant the shopping district. The town's name came from the Tlingit language and meant home to a thousand winds.

Skagway River:

The previous day we'd spent time in the Tongass National Forest while in Juneau. Here it was again as the forest was so huge at 17 million acres it was the largest in the US. 

It would be a 500-mile-long trek along the Klondike Highway all the way to Klondike, much of it an 8% grade. We'd only be going about 15 miles in each direction, enough to find out that there were no Canadian customs at the border at least.

Some people on the ship had chosen to take the train which paralleled much of the highway. As beautiful as it looked, we were happy we'd picked the highway because there'd be stops along the way and we had a train trip planned later in the trip.

Being from the Lower 48, it was weird to think people choose to retire in and around Skagway because there's only an average of 25 inches of rain a year. The pipeline coming down the mountain carried water from 900 ft. deep to Skagway. 

Jack London called this area Dead Horse Gulch after the avalanche of 1898. It's now called the Laurentian Glacier Overlook.

If you're an American or followed US news a while back, former Alaska Governor and VP candidate with John McCain, Sarah Palin was always associated for her comments about the 'Bridge to Nowhere' located in Ketichan. But John stopped so we could all troop out and see another 'bridge to nowhere.' It was called that because snow plows were too heavy for the bridge AND it was built as the junction of two fault lines! Sure didn't sound like the best place to build a bridge as earthquakes were pretty common here.

A few miles up the road was the Welcome to Alaska sign for people coming from The Far North, aka Canada, my homeland. It was the summit of the Klondike Highway which connects with the city of Whitehorse in Canada and the Alcan Highway.

I was pretty stoked being at the border or, to be honest, over the border, as you can see in the second photo where I hugged the sign as it was the closest I would be to Canada for goodness only knows how long!

From the Canadian border, it was all downhill on the way back to Skagway!

The amount of snow just a shortish drive from Skagway was staggering and the views even more so!

Though we were all required to bring our passports on the bus ride, the customs official only took a perfunctory look. That was likely due to his seeing our driver make the same stop several times a day.

Once back in balmy Skagway, John pointed out the local K-12 school. There were 9 graduates this year: 6 guys and 3 girls. John quipped, "The odds may be good but the goods might be as odd as they come." I bet no graduate would like to hear that!

In town, the Lil Dippers are those in daycare while the Big Dippers are in the old age home!

The largest consumption of ice cream in the country was at this shop! I guess hearty Alaskans must love the cold stuff all winter long! 

Seeing our ship in the harbor just a two-minute walk from town made me think of what you wrote in a post, Phil, a good while back. It was something about how a cruise ship overwhelms a town's character and atmosphere when its passengers are disgorged for a matter of hours before the town can become itself again. All of a sudden, we were those types of people, cruisers who invaded a town and dropped a bundle of moolah, and doing the same at the next port of call.

But back aboard our luxury conveyance was darned comfortable and lovely under the evening skies.

I think I could get sort of used to another cruise sometime - perhaps the Caribbean might lure us!

Next post: With our shore excursions behind us now we have two sailing days amid College Fjord and Glacier Bay National Park ahead. 

Posted on June 21st, 2023, from sunny Denver. We've been having so much rain, we thought the sun might never shine again! Please be safe, and take care of yourself and your loved ones.