The Chilkoot Trail Journals, Ch. 2, Getting There

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.
 

My lead dog, Kolega.

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. 

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.

Leaving Girdwood on a rainy day in 1973.  The Mustang is loaded, my lead dog is in the passenger seat, the trunk is loaded, and there are a couple 50-lb. sacks of Purina dog show in the back seat..  There are five huskies in the trailer, plus a bunch of supplies and stuff.  Tied on top of the Mustang is a dog sled, two spare tires, and a pair of snowshoes.  On top of the trailer is the base of a 3-wheeled cart for summer dog training, and a spare for the trailer.  I figured if it fit, the Mustang could handle it.

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.

I left behind my beloved cabin in Girdwood.

The Chilkoot Trail Journals, Ch. 1, Spreading Faster than a Rumor

The only thing that travels faster than a  rumor is the word “gold,”and rumor had it that an inbound ship had a lot of gold in its belly.  They said a ton.   That wasn’t quite correct; it was more like two tons.

By the time the SS Portland tied up to Shwaubacher Wharf at 6 o’clock on the early morning of July 17, 1897, five thousand men  gathered to see if the rumor was true.  

We can surmise that rain dripped on those assembled because, after all, this was Seattle.  The sun was up, perhaps obscured by leaden clouds.  All that most likely went unnoticed by men who were already showing symptoms of fever, gold fever.

Gold arrives in Seattle.

SS Portland

Three days prior, a different steamship tied up San Francisco, also loaded with gold from some place called the Klondike, wherever that was.  The men didn’t care, they were going anyway.   First, though, they had to get to Skagway in Alaska.

 

The fever spread faster than any viral or bacterial pandemic, and 10 days later, 1500 hopeful men departed Seattle for the gold fields and the riches there.  Two thousand New Yorkers tried to buy tickets within 24 hours, but the locals had purchased them first.

Later that day there were so many people in the streets of Seattle, the street cars had to shut down.  When word about the gold strike reached Seattle’s mayor, who was in San Francisco at a convention, he wired his resignation immediately and headed north, not even bothering to stop in Seattle along the way.

Eventually, more than 100,000 hopefuls would travel north to cross the treacherous Chilkoot Trail in Alaska.

Leaving San Francisco for the Klondike gold fields.

By the time the rush was over in less than a year, only 30,000 made it to Dawson City in the Yukon Territory.

But, for now, the rush was on.

SS Excelsior leaving San Francisco for the gold fields.

to be continued

(I don't know what I did to throw blogspot into such a tizzy, but I'm going to have to post this chapter without adding how I am connected to it before I lose the whole thing.)

Skagway Serenade in Saw

There are images of a long-ago Fourth of July on my internal memory screen, images fuzzy and indistinct and subject to infinite revision, with creative license filling in the gaps. I could call my friends, the ones who were with me when these events transpired, but perhaps their images would be as moth-eaten as mine.

The year is 1973. I am Skagway, Alaska, the town most known for two things: the Klondike Gold Rush portal to the Yukon; and Soapy Smith, con man extraordinaire. With nine friends, we plan to start hiking the infamous Chilkoot Trail the next day.

We would have started this morning, but we didn’t learn until we arrived that we had to inform the local law enforcement of our plans because we will be crossing into Canadian territory. Local notification is in lieu of passport and border control. So, we are whiling away the day in Skagway until the local “border control” office opens.

We wander up and down the main street, looking at buildings both historic and made to look historic, in keeping with the architecture prevalent in the late 1800s. Familiar names in Alaska's history appear now and then, forging a link between us today and the tens of thousands of men and women who passed through Skagway to the Klondike gold fields. Eventually we come upon the Golden North Hotel and go inside to look at displays in the lobby.

Some of us sit on the couches in the lobby, facing the main street. An elderly gentleman approaches, and I fear we will be asked to leave as we are not guests in the hotel. Our lodgings are a mile away where our tents are pitched in the city’s primitive campground.

Instead, he introduces himself and explains he is there to help his son and daughter-in-law (or, perhaps it’s the other way around—daughter and son-in-law) run the hotel for their first season. It is an old, old building, but the management of it is new to the young couple. We tell him who we are, where we’re from, and that we are there to hike “the trail.” In Skagway, there is no need to specify which trail.

Instead of asking us to leave, he asks if we’ve ever heard a musical saw. When we answer “no,” he takes what appears to be an ordinary carpenter’s wood-cutting saw and seats himself in front of the fireplace. He is between us and the large lobby windows.

With the handle of the saw captured between his legs, he holds the far end of the blade with the teeth facing away from him. He bends it into a shallow “s” shape. In the flat of the “s” is the “sweet spot,” and when stroked with a violinist’s bow, a tone as clear as a woman’s voice soars from the metal. He bends the blade towards the thinner end and a higher note sings, bends it again for a broader “sweet spot” to reach lower notes.

Recognizable, haunting melodies fill the lobby with ethereal tones. We sit quietly, dazed by what we are hearing. The names of the songs have long since trickled away from my memory.

Carefully, so as not to distract him, I reach for my camera. I take the shot, hoping for a silhouette with enough light to identify the subject and what he is doing.

The images of our trip, the reasons we lingered a day or so, and the 4^th of July parade that occurred shortly after I took the photo are difficult to recall and are moth-eaten by the passage of almost four decades, but this image remains as vivid as the day it happened.