Juneau or bust...with whales!

Haines, Alaska

Aboard the Fjordland

On Sunday Ken fixed us a huge breakfast before we hustled down to the Skagway dock to catch the Fjordland Express to Juneau, an all day boat/bus/walking tour. Within minutes we were underway to Haines, a 14 mile (and 15 minute or so) trip by water, but a 362 mile (and 7 hour or so) trip by road. We picked up a few more passengers in Haines and continued down the Lynn Canal (actually a huge inlet), the water smooth as glass.

Harbor seals

Sea Lions!

Just up ahead we saw some harbor seals playing in the water, and some bald eagles flying overhead and perching on pilings near the dock. A bit farther down the fjord (1500 feet deep) we caught sight of a group of sea lions hanging out on the steep rocks of the east bank. There were literally hundreds of them and as Capt. George turned off the engines, we could hear them all grunting and yelling at each other. They are an aggressive lot, with the males about twice as big as the females, and rather territorial over their harems. We learned they like this spot because the water is very deep just below them and so the eatin’s good. We watched three of the large male sea lions get into a fight with one scooting away, the winner holding his own, and the loser sliding all the way down into the water. Apparently they more closely resemble bears (especially in the face) than lions…and watching them today we could easily see that.

Heading to Juneau

We motored on down the fjord toward Juneau, about a 3 hour ride away. All along the glassy path we saw little waterfalls of melted glacier ice, towering mountains capped with snow and little islands dotted with tall evergreen trees.

Humpback whale tail

A couple of times we stopped because someone caught sight of a humpback whale blowing water out of his blowhole way off in the distance. As we neared one after the other, we watched them swimming around or slapping the water with their huge pectoral fins to disorient the little fishies. One humpback showed his tail as he dove down deep into the water. It was great!

We continued down the canal and as we neared the big city, we could see a bunch of fishing boats all out for the second ‘opening’ of the season, a three-day window during which fishermen have to cast their nets and catch their living. Only 6 to 8 of these openings occur each summer, so the competition for the best spots is keen.
 

Our boat pulled into a little harbor north of Juneau near a town called Auke Harbor. A bus met us at the dock to drive all 45 or so of us into Juneau, a little over an hour away. Britt, our jovial busdriver, dropped us off near the main cruise ship docks in downtown and set us loose to see the sights. Ken and I first headed to a quick sandwich lunch across the street from the largest cruise ship I’ve ever seen, the Celebrity Millenium. This behemoth blocked all views of the port and harbor and mountains and even most of the sky…wow. After lunch, we walked uptown through the throngs of tourists and past scores of little colorful shops offering all manner of trinkets, furs, Russian dolls and such.

Alaska State Capitol

Juneau, Alaska

We found the state capitol, a large squarish building completed in 1931 with Alaskan marble columns in front. Alaska became a state in 1959. It was sold to the US for $7.2M in 1867 after the Russians had relieved the lower Pacific coast of the territory of most of the sea otter pelts. Thinking the land offered no other value, they sold it to the US, a decision quickly derided in Congress as ‘Seward’s Folly’, named for the congressman most in favor of Alaska's purchase. Only 30 short years later, gold was discovered and then later yet, oil. Both are still active industries for the state. Good job, Mr. Seward.

The city of Juneau began as a tent camp for gold seekers in 1880 after the first gold strike in the territory and quickly became a small town. Two mines operated until 1917, one of them producing $66M in gold until a cave-in and flood closed it. Subsequently, in 1916, the Alaska-Juneau mine was built and became the largest hard rock gold mine in the world, producing over $80M in gold (more than $4B today). Before the mine closed in 1944, Juneau’s economy was supported by fishing, canneries, transportation services, a sawmill, and as a popular cruise ship port for tourists.

Mural of Tlingit culture in Juneau

At the Juneau dock

We walked back down to the docks to see the Taku Fishing Company’s salmon smoking process, but, alas, they were not smoking anything when we arrived. We tasted some yummy samples and looked around, then headed back toward the bus. We wandered around the little shops on the south end of town, watched a man with two very tame Alaskan mushing dogs entertaining the crowds, and took pictures of a sea plane that had just landed noisily on the water. On various building walls, we saw elaborate murals had been painted depicting aspects of Juneau’s history and culture.

Aboard the bus without air conditioning or breeze, we all sweltered in the record high temperatures. Juneau reached 76 degrees on one thermometer we saw, while Skagway was in its second straight day of record setting temps.

Mendenhall Glacier

We drove out to the Mendenhall Glacier, a rapidly retreating glacier some 12 miles long, fed by the Juneau Icefield (a 1500 square mile expanse of snow and ice), one of 38 glaciers here. The visitor center is about a mile from the glacier, but in the mid-1700s the ice extended another 2 ½ miles from its current location and covered a portion of what is now the city of Juneau. Even in the 1930s the huge lake in front of the glacier did not exist. We walked down to the waterline and I dipped my toes in the frigid water of the melting glacier. Yikes, that was cold. We hiked up to the visitor center and looked through a couple of telescopes at the glacier and saw some mountain goats way up the side of the mountain next to it. We watched a short, very interesting film on glaciology and the plants and animals of the glacial region. After taking entirely too many pictures, we headed back to the bus.

On the boat again, under dramatically different conditions than in the morning, the catamaran leapt and jolted through rough waters under increasing cloud cover. We steered around the long nets dragged by the fishing boats that were still out on the water. Several times water crashed over the bow and across the roof and down onto some of the folks standing on the aft deck. Once that was me, another couple of times Ken got wet.

Another humpback whale!

Mom and baby humpback whales!

With the choppy water, the whales were out in full force. We saw a whole bunch of them, many breaching (leaping up out of the water and falling back in spectacularly with a big splash). This happened at least 8 or 9 times with all of us crowding around to take pictures, most of us only getting the splash on film.

Eldred Rock Lighthouse near Haines, Alaska

At one point, we saw a pod of 4 or 5 humpback whales swimming together, a couple of them breaching now and then off in the distance. All the while, the sun was glinting off the water to the west and casting sunlight on the pretty snow-capped mountains all around us. Over a tasty dinner of salmon chowder served by Iris, the energetic and sweet deckhand, we chatted with a friendly family from Edmonton. We thoroughly enjoyed the trip. We walked back to the RV park with the wind swirling around us and thick clouds blotting out the pretty skies we’d seen for the last several days and settled in for happy hour.

What a phenomenal day!

Dyea...a Gold Rush ghost town!

Taiya River

Wild Irises

On Saturday morning, we started chatting with some neighbors in the RV park who also happened to be at last night’s theater production. Donna was the audience member swindled of her $20 for a lousy bar of soap while Jerry took pictures from the front row. They both had taken pictures throughout the production, including my sorry turn in the can-can line, and so offered them to us. Ken jumped at the chance. Thanks. In any case, we four chatted for quite some time about all things Alaskan to do and see, it was great!

Lupine

Later, after some chores, we drove out of town to see the historic site of the competing gold rush town, Dyea (pronounced die-EE), where the gold seekers hoped to scale the Chilkoot Trail on their way to Dawson City and the gold fields. The town was settled at the mouth of the Taiya River on a huge stretch of shallow tidal flats, meaning the large vessels from Seattle and San Francisco carrying stampeders and their provisions to Dyea had to dock far out from town and then have the people and items ferried in on little boats, unlike Skagway’s deep port and wharf at the town’s edge. 

Real Estate office false front

Like Skagway, Dyea maintained a transient population of thousands of gold rushers beginning in July, 1897. But following the disastrous April 3rd, 1898, avalanche on the Golden Staircase of the Chilkoot Trail and the development of the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad out of Skagway, by 1903 Dyea had been reduced to a population of only 3 souls. A cemetery in the woods are where most of the folks killed in the avalanche were buried. 

All that remains now of the town’s carefully platted streets and once bustling throngs of businesses are the ruins of an old warehouse (read: a pile of lumber rotting into the ground), some pieces of an old rowboat, the false front of an old real estate office formerly on Main Street, and the odd artifact or two under the trees and moss that have grown over everything.

 

Taiya River near Dyea

The approach to Dyea allowed us to easily compare the geography of the two gold rush towns’ locations and Skagway’s advantages were readily obvious. However, the tidal flats where Dyea once stood are now beautiful marshes with ribbons of glacial water from the Taiya River flowing through them. We drove out onto the flats where several folks had set up their campers and others were taking photographs or walking their dogs. With the warmest day yet in the Skagway area, I just had to dip my toes in the chilly water…so nice for a split second and then the bones of my feet and ankles began to ache and throb in the arctic chill. Brr. We started back to Skagway but stopped at a scenic overlook of the town where we could see the port and harbor and much of the town itself.

Scenic overlook of Skagway from Dyea Road

After lunch in the RV, we returned to the Moore House, which we had briefly visited a couple of days earlier on our guided tour. We took more time to read about Capt. William Moore, his son Ben and their family’s impact on the town’s development. Several rooms in the little house have been restored to much the way the Moores had them when they lived there until 1905.

View of Skagway from the
Dewey Lakes Trail

Next we walked over to the Skagway Museum, a lovely collection of all things Skagway, including the town's history during both the gold rush as well as World War II. We watched a film on the US Army’s invasion of tiny Skagway in order to provide material support to the teams building the Alaska-Canada Military Highway (the Alcan Highway, now called the Alaska Highway) via the town’s railroad to Whitehorse, the mid-point on the highway project. The highway was built so the US government could truck airplanes into Alaska to be sent to the Soviet Union to fight Hitler’s invading forces. Once the Japanese landed on the Aleutian Islands on the opposite side of Alaska, Skagway’s role became even more important both in supporting the highway’s construction and ferrying soldiers from the port to the interior via the WP&YR Railroad. Fascinating. We also saw exhibits about some of the early townspeople like the Moores, Soapy Smith, and Harriet Pullen. Other exhibits highlighted the Native Tlingit items used for centuries in the area before the stampeders arrived. The museum was really interesting.

Tlingit petroglyph along
the Dewey Lakes Trail

Not wanting the touring fun to end, we hiked up to Lower Dewey Lake, a trail advertised as ‘moderate’, but whose description does NOT match its intensity. We huffed and puffed our way up a steep path gaining 500 feet in elevation in only 350 feet of trail. After that it leveled off, and thankfully, so did our heart rates.

After much sweating we finally reached the lake and both stuck our feet in to cool off. The water feels like melted snow because, well, it is. We stayed there for a few minutes letting our tired feet enjoy the cool water while the mosquitoes enjoyed us. Nice.

We hiked back down the side of the mountain and into the Red Onion Saloon, whose accompanying Brothel Museum is pitched as "15 minutes for $5, Just like in 1898!" Nice, though it was closed when we were there. We shared a pitcher of beer and a light dinner of salmon dip with pita points and a mozzarella caprese sandwich. Very tasty…and, as it turns out, our nice waitress, Kendall, is from DC! She was wearing a DC Brau Brewing Company t-shirt with the motto ‘Fermentation without Representation’ on the back, so we got into a lengthy discussion about all things DC. It was great. We retired to the RV to rest up for our super duper boat trip to Juneau tomorrow. We can’t wait!

Gold Rush Cemetery and the Days of '98

Old caboose

Skagway Small Boat Dock

On Friday morning (June 22nd), we headed down to the dock to see if we could find a place on the Fjord Express to Juneau, a sightseeing tour that was fully booked. We could not, there were no cancellations, much to my happiness (meaning we could stay in Skagway another two nights awaiting our trip on the Fjord Express on Sunday. Woo hoo!). 

Old train near the
WP&YR train yard

Tiny maintenance railcar!

We left the dock and walked into town to finish the second half of the walking tour we started the evening before and midway through took a side trip to the Gold Rush Cemetery and Reid Falls. Our trip took us past the WP&YR train yard where a huge steam engine was parked along with a bunch of colorful railcars. We found a rusted old train locomotive in the grass on its side. Cool!

Frank Reid's huge gravestone

Soapy Smith's meager gravestone

The Gold Rush Cemetery holds the graves of a number of colorful characters from Skagway’s heyday including Soapy Smith, buried with a simple wooden gravestone off in a corner, and Frank Reid (who shot Soapy), whose 7 foot monument erected by the townsfolk boasts an epitaph that reads, “He gave his life for the honor of Skagway.” Ella Wilson, a resident of Skagway’s red-light district, is also buried here and her epitaph reads, “She gave her honor for the life of Skagway.” Ha! 

Lower Reid Falls

About a quarter mile beyond the graveyard we found Lower Reid Falls, a spectacular 300 foot cascade of rushing water spilling over the cliff above. Wow.

We walked back the almost 2 miles into town and stopped to rest along Broadway on a bench in the sun in front of one of the many gift shops. We had lunch at Bombay Curry, and then knuckle-dragged our tired feet back to the RV to rest. But first, we stopped in to pay for two more nights in the RV park (yay!) and to buy our tickets for Sunday’s boat ride to Juneau.

Michael Baish reciting Robert Service poetry

After a lengthy recovery from the morning’s walk, we strolled into town for an ice cream at the Kone Kompany on Broadway Street. Dee-lish. Afterwards, we walked over to the Days of ’98 show at the local theater house (which doubles as a Fraternal Order of the Eagles Aerie, #25). The show was outstanding. For an hour before the show began we were given $1000 in casino chips to play in Soapy Smith’s parlor. And despite the normally crooked dealers, we both came out ahead, me with $4,000, Ken with $21,000…too bad we weren’t in Vegas with real money.

Squirrel Tooth Alice, Belle and Molly

Arvin from Minnesota with his two 'ladies'

The show began with a couple of musical numbers by a local legend, Michael Baish, who also recited (very animatedly) some Robert Service poems. Robert Service was a bank teller from Whitehorse during the Klondike Gold Rush who used to recite famous poems during vaudeville shows. After everyone in Whitehorse had heard them all, he began making up his own, mostly about the stampeders and life in the Yukon. Michael was fascinating to listen to, especially given the excellent material Mr. Service provided him.

The Can-Can Number

The main show was a comedic version of the events of Soapy Smith’s short tenure in the town of Skagway. One skit was particularly funny involving an older, unsuspecting Minnesotan man of the audience named Arvin, two prostitutes (Molly and Squirrel Tooth Alice) competing for his attentions and a madam (Belle).

Another skit involved two more unsuspecting audience members doing the can-can on stage with all three ladies…embarrassingly, one of them was me. But it was great fun.

Jefferson "Soapy" Smith

The actor playing Soapy managed to con one woman out of $20 for a bar of soap after he had insulted the rest of us (for not buying his soap) as the great unwashed, while implying we were all unclean of either spirit, conscience or body. It was hilarious. The show ended, we congratulated each of the cast members individually for a job well done and walked out still laughing. What a great time we had!

GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!

Skagway Harbor

On Thursday morning (June 21st), we awoke to the sun streaming into the RV and the sound of the train pulling in just across the street. We re-awoke to the sounds of more big cruise ships pulling into dock…four of them. A steady flow of tourists walked past the RV park and descended on the little town. They began filling the streets and shops…so we joined them. 

Klondike Gold Rush NHP Visitor Center

We started with the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park visitor center, formerly the White Pass and Yukon Railroad Depot, at 2nd and Broadway where we signed up for a ranger-guided tour for later in the day. We proceeded to walk around town, with the hordes of people, looking at some of the other 21 properties the National Park Service owns in town. We first walked into the restored saloon, The Mascot, on Broadway. This establishment dates to 1898, one of more than 80 saloons in town at the time. It operated until Prohibition shut it down in August 1916.

Soapy Smith's Parlor

We also found Jeff Smith’s Parlor on 2nd Street, named for Jefferson “Soapy” Smith, a legendary con man and leader of, eventually, over 200 gamblers, swindlers and thugs. Soapy was a master of relieving many naïve stampeders of their cash through elaborate trickery and ruses, mostly done with accomplices. In the end, he died in a gun battle in front of a crowd of 500 people on the Juneau Co. wharf, shot allegedly by Frank Reid, a town surveyor. The story goes that Soapy died from a single gunshot wound to the heart, and Frank died 12 days later from a gunshot to the leg, though he died a hero for restoring the town’s honor. Oddly, on our tour later in the day, our ranger tour guide mentioned that an autopsy of Soapy showed he sustained a whole bunch of gunshots of different calibers from different guns. She said there are many theories about what actually took place, though, and history will probably never know the whole truth. 

We ate lunch down near the dock at the Skagway Fish Company, a lively place at lunchtime between the ships and the town. The food was very good, the service was awesome. After a tasty lunch of salmon burgers, we joined the ranger guided tour at the visitor center. We learned a lot about the Klondike Gold Rush and the area around Skagway.

Moore Homestead

In 1887 Tlingit packer, “Skookum Jim”, and Capt. William Moore set out to survey a new pass through the Skaguay River valley, later called White Pass. On August 17, 1896, gold was discovered by Skookum Jim and two others in a tributary of the Klondike River some 600 miles away from Skagway. The news of the discovery reached Seattle and San Francisco in the coming months, amplified by the press, which set off the Klondike Gold Rush. At the end of July 1897, Capt. Moore saw the first boats stuffed with gold seekers pulling into the harbor.

Original Moore Cabin, first home in Skagway

By the end of the rush in the summer of 1900, over 100,000 stampeders had passed through Skaguay River Valley to begin their trek toward the gold in Dawson City. The first 33 miles of their route was over some of the toughest, snowiest, hardest terrain around and most didn’t make it. They were required, by Canadian Mounties trying to ensure these stampeders wouldn’t die by the hundreds in the harsh conditions, to pack in over 2,000 pounds of provisions per person, most of it food. Some lost all their money to Soapy Smith and his gang just after landing in Skagway, others simply didn’t have the means to hire native men to pack their goods over the route. In any case, about 30,000 people managed to complete the trek from Skagway to Lake Bennett and the headwaters of the Yukon River, by either the White Pass (very dangerous) or the Chilkoot Trail (very steep).

Exhibit of Mascot Saloon during Gold Rush

The White Pass Trail was 10 miles longer, but 600 feet lower, than the Chilkoot Trail. Billed falsely as an “all-weather” option, the trail's first few miles were wide enough to accommodate wagons but quickly narrowed to only 2 feet wide. Its sharp rocks, boulder fields and deep muddy bogs proved to be too difficult for the stampeders’ favored pack animal, the horse. Over 3,000 horses died there in the winter of 1897-1898, earning the trail the nickname ‘Dead Horse Gulch’.

"Golden Staircase" on the Chilkoot Pass
(historic picture, ca. 1898)

The Chilkoot Trail out of the nearby town of Dyea was not much better. This 33 mile trek culminated in the Golden Staircase, a quarter-mile climb to gain 1,000 feet in altitude. And with the requirement to pack a ton of food per person (a year’s supply), most scaled the stairs 20 to 40 times over 3 months to shuttle their supplies forward. On April 3, 1898 an avalanche on this climb claimed the lives of over 100 naïve goldseekers who ignored the advice of the native Tlingits who knew it was imminent.

The choice between the White Pass Trail and the Chilkoot Trail was described by one stampeder, “One was hell; the other, damnation.” Once they cleared this hurdle, they still had a whopping 550 miles to go before they reached the gold fields in Dawson City. The ones that made it there soon discovered they were two years too late…most of the gold fields had already been claimed. Either they toiled in other men's gold mines or they sold their gear and supplies for a ticket home. Some stayed and eventually opened businesses of their own to profit from the gold seekers.

Klondike Gold Rush Museum

The tour about the town’s history during the gold rush was fascinating. At their peak, Skagway and Dyea boasted a floating population of between 8,000 and 10,000 people each, with businesses of both high standing and ill repute established to serve them all. By 1900 the population of Skagway had dropped to 3,711 and Dyea had been all but abandoned. Today Skagway is home to only 920 residents, but it hosts over a million tourists each summer season. Dyea’s once thriving town is now only a few scattered ruins. The rest of what used to be the town has been taken over by nature in the 110 years or so since its last residents left.

Kirme's Curios and Antiques

By the end of the tour, the calm sunny weather we’d been experiencing changed quickly to dark skies and an angry wind. Apparently, the name Skagway in its original Tlingit language means “windy place”, so at least we got to see why it was named that, even if only for a half hour or so. The wind blew and the rain started and within a short bit of time, it was over. Most of the tourists had fled back to the boats while we ducked into a bar for a brew. By the time we finished our beers, the sun was back out and the wind was all but gone.

We strolled around the streets, again virtually alone like the evening before, and we walked back to the RV for dinner. After dinner, we completed the first half of the Skagway Walking Tour, a wonderful self-guided tour of the historic buildings in town.

We reached the docks again around 9pm, just in time to watch the last of the four cruise ships pull out of the harbor in complete sunshine, of course. Ha!