During the winter of 1972-73, my friend Kathy decided it was
time to get serious about a career, one with benefits like health insurance and
retirement. She gave notice to her
employer at the Alyeska Ski Resort in Girdwood, Alaska, and loaded her
belongings into her Toyotal Corolla station
wagon.
In mid-June, she headed north, because if you are in Alaska and yu want to get to southern
California, you had to drive north a few hundred miles and then turn south on
the Alcan Highway through Canada. When she passed through Canadian customs at
Beaver Creek, she was in Canada’s Yukon Territory. Not even a full-blown Canadian province, but
a territory.
The Yukon, as it’s called for short, evokes its own colorful
images—the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a town on the Yukon River called
Whitehorse, and a gold rush that brought a hundred thousand hopeful, gold-rush-crazed
people to a little spot called the Klondike.
At the same time Kathy was preparing to drive north/south, I
decided my life needed new horizons. Unlike
Kathy, I couldn’t load all my possessions in my 1965 Ford Mustang, though I
gave it a sporting try.
I boxed up most of my extensive collection of books in beer
boxes because those boxes were the most readily-attainable cardboard storage
containers available in a ski town, and hauled them to Anchorage to store at my
parents’ house, along with a dozen boxes of things I couldn’t part with.
My lead dog, Kolega. |
I became the owner of a dubious surplus military trailer and hired a local
fellow to build a “camping box” on it.
It had a bed and two plywood cabinets on either side. A couple boxes of books and boxes of clothing
and supplies went under the bed.
And then I loaded six huskies—no, make that five because the
lead dog rode shotgun with me in the Mustang—in the trailer. But that’s not all I took with me.
I’ll say this in my defense:
Had I known any better, I never would have had the adventures I had in
the next two years, and I’m really glad they are part of my life. I made it back to Alaska alive two years
later, this time with seven huskies, because dogs kept in close quarters have a
way of multiplying their numbers.
But in the meantime, Kathy and I were taking the scenic
route to Whitehorse where we would meet seven friends. We had two weeks to get there, so we included visits to Denali National Park and Fairbanks. We also stopped in Anchorage long enough to say goodbye to my folks. My mother almost fainted, while my dad just shook his head and turned away with a smile.
Our destination? The Chilkoot Trail—a 35-mile hike from the gold rush town of Skagway to Lake Bennett, which straddles the boundary of the Yukon Territory and British Columbia.
Our destination? The Chilkoot Trail—a 35-mile hike from the gold rush town of Skagway to Lake Bennett, which straddles the boundary of the Yukon Territory and British Columbia.
I left behind my beloved cabin in Girdwood. |