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Wanderung 13

Any Which Way But Loose:

Meandering Many Miles in Multitudinous Mechanisms

September 2006

Tuesday, September 12th - Skagway, Alaska.

Fortunately, Bill had basically recovered from his illness and been released from quarantine; so all five of us had breakfast in the Lido restaurant and then walked down the pier into the town of Skagway. Right off the end of the pier we found a small pocket park on Broadway with a huge snow blower that was used on the White Pass and Yukon Railroad until it was retired in 1965 or thereabouts.

Skagway had 3 streets of about 8 blocks long, but only Broadway had the cheek by jowl shops that cater to the tourist trade. About half of those shops, I would estimate, were jewelry shops and Lois and Phyllis tended to gravitate to them while Bill, Monika and I waited outside. Proceeding slowly down Broadway I had plenty of chances to photograph the restored storefronts, totem poles, and other curiosities on display. Bill and I even found a hardware store that we wandered through, but the thought of carrying things back 3,000 miles to home dissuaded me from purchasing any tools or other hardware supplies.


 

After a quick stop for lunch back at the ship, we were picked up at the pier for a ride up the White Pass and Yukon Railroad. It was as much fun and as impressively scenic on this trip as I remembered it from our previous trip to Alaska. The valleys dropped sheer below us at many points, and rushing streams formed waterfalls on either side of the tracks as we wound our way uphill toward the pass. At times we were alongside the trail that the stampeders took in 1898.


 

Monika and I spent much of our time on the exposed end of our antique coach car, taking pictures on both sides of the train. The train rocked and rolled and creaked and groaned just like I remembered it doing last time, and it was great fun to ride on the heaving, exposed platform. We had only a low railing to keep us from falling off the train and in the rough spots we had to hang on tight to avoid being tossed about, which rather added to the excitement.


 

As we steadily ascended the air became noticeably cooler. That combined with the wind whipping by our exposed perch finally forced us to don our gloves to keep our hands warm enough to work our cameras. The train passed through a couple of tunnels, and at one point went straight from a rickety old trestle into a pitch black tunnel, which was exactly like plunging into a hole in the gigantic wall.

Crossing over the White Pass we arrived in the town of Fraser, Yukon, really more of a Canadian Customs outpost, where we transferred from the train to a tour bus for the drive back. Fortunately the bus driver let us off in several places to take pictures, so we got some nice pictures of the Tormented Valley surrounding Fraser. The Sawtooth mountains across the way really did resemble the blades of an old saw; it was easy to see how they got their name.

On the outskirts of Skagway we paused for an hour at "Liarsville", a tourist attraction that recreated the tent city that had sprung up in the area after the discovery of gold in the Yukon in 1897. The entrance to Liarville had a very nice waterfall where I, of course, stopped to take a picture. We also looked at the exhibit tents, skipping the ubiquitous gift shop, and then listened to a choreographed rendition of Robert Service's "The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill" given by a dramatic reader and two "ladies of negotiable affection" to the accompaniment of a guitarist. The humor was broad and the broads were humorous, so a good time was had by all. We finished up our visit to Liarsville by panning for gold with some ore imported from Dawson Creek, and I had fun trying to master the rather tricky art of washing out the gravel but not the gold flakes. At the end I found two miniscule flakes of what might have been gold at the bottom of my pan, and that was good enough for the likes of me.


 

After experiencing all the amenities of Liarsville, we returned to our ship. Bill and Phyllis went back on board while Lois, Monika and I checked out the White Pass and Yukon Railroad gift shop where I found a book of Robert Service's poetry. Monika and I continued on to try to visit a sculpture garden, which turned out to be closed, but along the way we ran across the original home of William Moore, a German-born man who had homesteaded the entire Skagway area. His home had been converted to a museum by the National Park Service and the Ranger obligingly stayed open a few minutes after 5 p.m. so that we could read and photograph the exhibits. Moore was an interesting guy who had been a steamboat captain on the Mississippi and Yukon Rivers before settling down to homestead in Alaska. However, the stampeders of 1898 completely ignored Mr. Moore's homestead boundaries and just erected their tent city, which ultimately turned into Skagway, on his property without paying him a red cent, which was a disappointment I'm sure.

Hustling back to the ship, we managed to arrive in time to have dinner with Phyllis, Bill, and Lois in the formal dining room before returning to our stateroom for the evening. Our ship eased away from the dock at Skagway so gently that I couldn't really be sure when it had started moving. Finally, though, my eyes shut of their own accord while I was trying to update the journal, so I threw in the towel and turned in for the night.

Copyright 2006 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog
Map
September 2006
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Epilog

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