Carrie’s Ramblings

Skagway
Carrie posted in Uncategorized on May 20th, 2007

Yesterday a girl from the hostel and I drove down to Skagway, Alaska. You have to get on the Alaskan Highway and make one right-hand turn and just stay on that road (not that there are any options) until you get to the ocean. We missed the turn. The girl who gave us directions said you’ll come to something called Carcross Corner and you need to turn right there. Well it wasn’t a corner at all it was a little side street with a tiny sign. So we were driving along and then I said “Marsh Lake? I think Marsh Lake is supposed to be in on our lefthand side…” Well sure enough we were in the wrong spot but there are no signs and no people to stop and ask if we had gone the wrong way! All we could do was keep driving and if we came to Jake’s Crossing then we knew we were wrong. When I saw a sign advertising some campground in Atlin I confirmed our suspicions. Not to worry though there was a road that cut across through Tagish (booming metropolis of,) to Carcross itself. We laughed it off and actually got to see 2 Mule Deer as a result. There are worse things that could have happened.

Driving down to Skagway is reputed as one of the most of beautiful drives you could ever take. Really spectacular. You go through so many different mini-climate zones to get there: chilly interior mountains, desert (no joke), alpine tundra, muskeg, snow covered mountain tops, and down to the warm sunny Skagway fjord by the ocean. The drive was honestly the best part. Just before Carcross is the world’s smallest desert and it’s just that. You pull over on the highway and walk out on to sand dune with scraggily pine trees growing out of it. Crazy! Apparently the sand was left there after an ancient glacial lake dried up and the prevailing wind off of Lake Bennett prevents anything else from taking over. I have pictures and I’ll add them as soon as I get them off of my friend’s camera. You can also see Emerald Lake (which is in all the post cards) where the diatoms and algae-leaking limestone left behind by prehistoric coral reefs in a warm sea causes the water to appear an emerald green. It really looks like an Aurora Borealis in the water. So cool.

The border crossing was bizarre because you drive by the Canadian Customs (we were all ready with our ID) but you don’t have to stop. Instead you drive for about 20 km and then you get to the actual border. There’s a sign saying Welcome to Alaska and beside is a small boulder with a Canadian flag on one side and an American on the other. Right there at the top of this mountain with snow all around. That’s it. Okay…so we keep driving about about 8 km later we come to the US Customs office. We sorta wondered what happens if you get trapped in no-man’s-land in between. Anyway, my friend was expecting to get hassled a bit because she was born in Lebanon but they just took are drivers licences and asked us where we were going (where the heck do you think we’re going? The road only goes ONE place…) and if we had any firearms. Excuse me? A gun? No, we’re not packing…And we got through.

Skagway itself: kinda underwhelming. Unless you want to buy diamonds. Lots and lots of diamond stores. Which we thought was weird considering it’s the Northwest Territories that is known for their diamonds and they had all this gold stuff too and all the gold was in the Yukon. It also felt like Disneyworld. Everything was so fake…too perfect. There were tours with people in costume, the railroad conductors had old uniforms on and the streets had no cars because most of the people there came off the cruise ships. It felt like they hadn’t done any work actually restoring the old town. I mean, the shops were clearly housed in new buildings but if you walked down a side street you see The Livery, 1889 was just sitting there rotting away. I feel like the only reason Skagway exists is for it’s historical value and yet none of that has been preserved. It’s not the focus and had I not read Pierre Berton’s Klondike we would have been hard pressed to find out about what really was going on in Skagway and it’s original purpose. It would have been very disappointing except that I had been warned that it was very much like Disneyland before so I didn’t have high hopes.

We ate our sandwiches in the “National Historic Park” which consisted of a statue and an old train…yeah that’s it…and went to look at the cruise ships and went into some cheap souvenir shops that were scattered between the diamond stores. I bought a post card for 21 cents (US!) and they told me they wouldn’t accept Canadian coins. I said, “Of course you don’t…the smallest Canadian bill is a $5.00…” Well I gave her a $10 and thought I’d use the American change to get a fruit smoothie for the drive back and she gave me $6.89 in return. I was about to leave when I stopped and said “Wait! I just paid $4 for this post card?!?!!!” Well we did the math and they were exchanging at 1.5!!! The dollars are practically even, what a rip off! I said forget it but then my friend found an American quarter and we laid it down and walked out with my postcard. It wasn’t even that nice of a post card. So we spent the rest of the time watching the tourists get hosed. Quite interesting actually. And fitting since the town of Skagway was originally founded by con men and now they’re just continuing the tradition with the tourists! Made me laugh.

We then drove up to the Gold Rush Cemetery and saw Soapy Smith’s grave and Frank Reid’s (the guy who shot Soapy Smith…actually they shot each other) and walked up to Reid Falls. The falls come down 300 m which was actually quite impressive and the water was so clear. A good find. Then we drove down this super sketchy (some might even say DICEY) road to the ghost town of Dyea. Nothing there now but a campground and the head of the Chilkoot trail but we walked the trail for a couple of metres and then headed home. The road was carved right out of the moutains with the fjord on the other side and it was scary but really beautiful.

On the way home we took the correct road and stopped at every single historical plaque we could find. We turned a 1.5 hour trip into 3.5 hours but speed wasn’t the point. Unfortunately we only saw a porqupine on the road and NO other wildlife. When Bill and Gisele did the drive last week they saw a bear, a caribou and a wolf! We did see a bald eagle on the river ice bergs just before we pulled into the hostel. That made us feel a bit better.

The moral: it’s worth the drive to Skagway. Just not Skagway itself. Turn around at the border.