17 June 2013; In and Around Skagway --
This day, the 65th
Anniversary of my marriage to The First Wife (the One and Only),
began with sunshine and warmth; a beautiful day to remember our wedding day and
the joy of the more than 63 and half happy years we had together.
It was also a beautiful day to
ride the White Pass and Yukon Railroad out of Skagway to the top of White Pass, with views of blue-sky outlined mountains along the way.
We climbed aboard the antique, but restored and upgraded, passenger cars of the
late 1890’s and inched along behind a modern diesel-electric locomotive toward
White Pass.
The narrow-gauge railway went
past the Gold Rush cemetery that we had visited the previous afternoon, so we
heard again of the local legend of “Soapy” Smith and Skagway hero Frank Reid.
We saw numerous impressive waterfalls teeming with melt-water from
snow fields – and a few glaciers – lounging on the hillsides and valleys a
thousand feet or more above us. Along one stretch of the way we were on a
man-made ledge with a vertical (or even overhanging!) wall on the uphill side
and a near-vertical cliff on the downhill side.
A narrator on board this
excursion train told of the sad tale of the greedy entrepreneur who used a massive
number of horses as pack animals to carry prospectors’ supplies from Skagway up
and over White Pass. Each prospector had to have at least 2,000 pounds of
supplies in order to be permitted into Canada by the Northwest Mounted Police.
The horses were usually overloaded, underfed and generally treated cruelly. As
a consequence, many – in fact, most! – eventually died along the rocky trail
that preceded the railroad. Many stumbled and fell to their death; others,
unable to go on, were simply pushed over the cliff and left there to suffer and
die, their bodies ultimately to rot and decay; the area was called “Dead Horse
Canyon”.
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| A Surprised-to-be-seen Brother Ahead |
We crossed a couple of
picturesque trestle bridges, each of which incorporated a curve such that those
of us in the foremost car could photograph the rear cars of our train. Some people stood on the platform between the cars to capture the views fore and aft. Two
tunnels entertained us with the presence of near-total darkness as these
ancient passenger cars had no interior lights of any kind.
White Pass marks the boundary between Canada and
the United States. Shortly after crossing the Pass and the border, we stopped
and waited in our rail car while the engine was disconnected from our end and
reattached to the opposite end; we thus became the “caboose” for the return
trip back to Skagway. Because none of us
on the excursion train were allowed to get off the train, we did not have to
have passports.
Grumpy was fascinated with this abandoned, old wooden trestle, a remnant of the road bed completed in 1899. Its dilapidated condition reminds us of how fortunate we are to be living in the age when steel-structure had replaced these wooden, decay-prone bridges.
When we returned to 82 degree Skagway, some of us enjoyed the shade of a handy tree to savor the local ice cream. Our ferry to Bellingham had a 1700 departure, so our stay in Skagway ended and our voyage down the "Inside Passage" began as the Southeast Alaskan sunset bade us "goodbye" and "bon voyage".
Tomorrow morning we will wake up as the ferry leaves Auke terminal (Juneau).
When we returned to 82 degree Skagway, some of us enjoyed the shade of a handy tree to savor the local ice cream. Our ferry to Bellingham had a 1700 departure, so our stay in Skagway ended and our voyage down the "Inside Passage" began as the Southeast Alaskan sunset bade us "goodbye" and "bon voyage".
