A small diversion into the past

Chatting to a fellow motorcyclist in the Airforce Lodge (our hotel) a couple of nights ago, we discovered that there is a ferry from Skagway to Haines. We had planned to ride down to Skagway and back to see the route the Klondike Prospectors used to get to the goldfields. By using the ferry we could ride to Skagway over the White Pass, cross to Haines and ride back over the other Prospector route, the Chilkoot Pass, and so back to Whitehorse for the start of our own ride to the goldfields of the Yukon.

For those of you unfamiliar with the political geography of this part of North America; Skagway and Haines are in Alaska (part of USA) but are not connected to the rest of the state by land except via Canada. A ferry system, called the Alaska Marine Highway ties all the disparate Alaskan ports together and that's what we will be using.

So we started in Yukon (a Canadian Province), crossed the provincial border into British Columbia for 5 miles, then over the White Pass and the border into America and finally Skagway. From there, a ferry to Haines for the night, over the Canadian border into BC and then across the Provincial border again to reach the capital of the Yukon, Whitehorse. All of which  borders mean nothing to the towering mountains, vast fjords, broad rivers, pale blue lakes and Brown Bear. They just ARE and man's clever work with a pencil and a map is irrelevant.

The road to Skagaway is superb but it's easy on a motorbike. The prospectors had to walk over the same territory to reach the headwaters of the Yukon River and then float down to Dawson City and the goldfields. The climb out of Skagway up the White Pass would be daunting for any experienced hill walker. The old photographs show continuous lines of men and women walking up the snow covered slopes.

The Prospectors climbed this pass carrying one ton of supplies. Yes, you read that right. The Canadian Government insisted that every Prospector had to have one ton of food and other supplies before they entered Canada to try stop people starving to death in the Yukon. Before the railway was built, Prospectors had to climb the pass 40 times just to shift their gear into Canada!

The stats are all incredible. 100,000 Prospectors set out from Seattle, 3,000 made it to the Yukon and only 300 got rich. The whole Klondike Gold Rush was over in a couple of years. So quickly that Prospectors who traveled there by the overland route from Canada took 3 years and arrived to find it was all over.

Today Skagway is a tourist town. Cruise ships exploring the Inside Passage dock most days and the town is a retro-Western shopping centre. The ferry takes cars, RVs and bikes down the Lynn Channel (named by Sir George Vancouver after his home town of King's Lynn) and in an hour you reach the charming, quiet town of Haines. We stayed in the somewhat faded and peeling comfort of the officer's quarters in the former US Army base: Fort Seward.

Then a fabulous ride over the Chilkat Pass, a high bare wilderness between snow covered mountains with tops lost in the clouds. This road was another Prospector route. According to the Canadian Border Guard, this was the route that people took when they didn't have the ton of supplies as there wasn't a Canadian checkpoint in those days.

Today's road was built by the US Army in 1943 to connect Haines to the new Alaska Highway completed the previous year. The reason for the additional route was to facilitate the evacuation of Alaska in the event of Japanese invasion.

PS Saw A Brown Bear with two cubs on the rode as well. Top day!