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!