Day 4 Skagway

Jena Petrie
Oct 2
2 min read

The day following our Juneau stop, our ship berthed in Skagway. During the gold rush of the 1890s, this was the gateway to the Klondike. Back then, it had around 10,000 residents, but now the number is less than 1,000, with the majority of them relying on tourists for their income.

If you’ve read either of Jack London’s books, Call of the Wild or White Fang, you may be interested to learn that it was this area that gave him his inspiration for those stories. I’d read the first book as a teenager, and then on the cruise, I watched the movie of the other one. Viewing the conditions those miners suffered was a real eye-opener, and knowing a bit of background to the time period eg, this was during a depression, explained why so many men risked their lives in the harsh conditions and remote area to go looking for gold.

After an early lunch that day, we climbed aboard the train for our shore excursion – a return ride to White Pass on the route to the Klondike and where Alaska meets Canada.

This route was expressly built to carry those miners during the gold rush, and climbs almost 3,000 feet in only 20 miles. Fortunately for tourists like us, it offers a variety of views, including steep gullies, tree-covered hillsides, a three-tiered waterfall, mountains, a couple of small lakes, two tunnels, and a partially collapsed bridge, to name the highlights. After doing a loop at the summit, we headed back down the mountain, stopping several times to allow other trains to pass, traveling in the opposite direction. There is just a narrow ledge for these trains, so they’ve been built with a small gauge and only just fit side-by-side.

Our two-and-a-half hour excursion finished all too soon, but early enough to give us time to check out the Skagway shops and buy souvenirs and gifts before we had to be back on board for our departure.