Yes we are now officially heading home. We expect to make it a slow trip with lots of exploring. But even here in the Yukon with its millions of acres of wilderness you can run into old friends and make new friends.
Old Friends: These are Al and Audrey from St. Helens Oregon. Now we knew we were going to meet up here, so it sounds like this shouldn’t count. However after traveling together a few days a couple weeks ago, we went separate ways. We went to Haines and Skagway and they went to Dawson City in the opposite direction. We had a vague time to join up again around Whitehorse. Today we pulled into a campground chosen mostly at random from the dozen available, and sure enough there were Al and Audrey. They had pulled in an hour earlier and just finished setting up. “It’s A Small World After All.”
New Friends: Judy and I like to ride our recumbent bicycle at every opportunity. This morning before breaking camp we set out on a ten mile ride along the Alaska Highway. In this part of the Yukon the highway is good quality chip-seal and it is nice and wide. As we rode over the rolling hills I caught sight of two cyclists ahead of us. Well of course we started pushing a little harder and within about three miles we were able to catch up with them. We had a nice chat alongside the road with world travelers, Rachael and Patrick from Boise Idaho. They were riding from the Arctic Circle through Montana and Glacier Park back to Idaho this summer. We rode along with them for a while, but then we had to turn around and de-camp Arcturus and continue with our travels. Be sure and check below for their photo.
Haines, Alaska compared to Skagway, Alaska: We visited both of these towns, and it makes an interesting comparison.
Haines is very laid back. It is a quaint village of about 2,000 people. It has a single dock that can handle a cruise ship, so they do get one occasionally. All of the little tourist shops open up when one stops, and the Chilkat dancers do their program and there are people wandering all over town. The shops do seem to be all locally owned and the folks are very friendly.
Skagway in comparison has a permanent population of under a thousand. Skagway has facilities to handle four or more of the largest cruise ships. The people in this tiny town are wall-to-wall when the ships are in. The White Pass and Yukon Route narrow gauge railroad is the feature exhibit in town. There were four diesel excursion trains and one steam engine ready to roll when we arrived at noon on the Fast Ferry from Haines. (Yes Neil, I have a hundred or more photos of the steamer. I also found a very unique 2-5-0 engine in the yard.) The shops in Skagway were mostly upscale jewelry stores and tourist curio shops and they were packed. At lunch we asked our waiter where his home is. He is from Bulgaria; and when asked why he came, it was for the money. We then asked if he was enjoying his summer and he was emphatic that it was ‘hell.’ He said that when the ships leave in the evening the whole town simply shuts down: Nothing to do, nowhere to go. Many of the workers are foreign nationals and many of the shops and the railroad are owned by Princess Cruises. We started looking for the little sign in the window to find the shops that were locally owned.
Many of Skagway’s original buildings from the 1897 gold rush are still preserved by the National Park Service, and we enjoyed visiting these. The gold rush was from 1897 to 1898 and the story of those thousands of people who poured through Skagway is simply incredible. The trek overland to Whitehorse, 140 miles distant by air is totally unimaginable by today’s standards. They climbed 3,739 foot Chilcoot Pass. The Northwest Mounties in Canada let no one pass unless they had supplies for a full year. This was reckoned to be a full ton of supplies. The men climbed the “Golden Stairs” cut in the glacier with fifty pound packs, and of course they did that 40 times over. The saddest part was the great majority got there too late to claim any of the profitable sites.
Skagway has the gold rush history, but our pick is Haines because of the friendly people.
Goodbye from Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada.
Gary and Judy
Yukon – Retraction
8/3/2007
I must correct a grave injustice. I applied too large a brush to the tourist industry in Skagway. I made this statement. “ many of the shops and the railroad are owned by Princess Cruises.” In Whitehorse I was able to do further research into this subject at the Yukon Transportation Museum and I am happy to report that the White Pass and Yukon Route is still it’s own entity. It is owned by the Tri-White Corporation traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The original company was made up of three companies one chartered in each of the Yukon, British Columbia and Alaska to hold that portion of the rail that ran through each of those political entities in 1898.
