Skagway, Alaska

 

One of the few complains we had of our cabin was the placement of the faucet.  We had to keep a towel by it because we watered the counter every time we washed our hands.

Tenders waiting to pick up people.

What was really weird is that we were at the dock.

We thought maybe it was because a landslide had taken out the train and road access but the passengers of the Majestic Princess docked behind us were being tendered to the end of the same dock.  So buses were parked on the dock beside us.  Interesting.

Note how businesses had used the rocks to put up advertisements.

I found this sign on shore that showed us where our ship was docked.

Front of the Nieuw Amsterdam from the shore.

The larger ships, Quantum of the Seas (4,180 passengers) and the Disney Wonder (2,400), behind the small boat harbor

There were a lot of helicopter tours from Skagway.  

Sign on a cafe along the bayfront.

Description of our tour for the day. 

One of Nolan's biggest complaints for the whole trip was the legroom on the buses.  Here he just had enough.

As the bus started into Skagway, we passed these restrooms where they were labeled with native names. 

We had seen one of these rotary train plows in Duluth, MN in 1992.

This building, whose facade is made of 1,000's of pieces of driftwood, was the meeting house of the Arctic Brotherhood.  It is now an information center. 
From the Arctic Brotherhood website (Arctic Brotherhood – "Ordinary Men on Extraordinary Adventures Since 1899" )  "The Arctic Brotherhood was formed as a fraternal organization in 1899 by gold-seeking stampeders headed for the Klondike.  It wasn’t long before every northern frontier town, settlement and mining camp of any importance boasted its Arctic Brotherhood chapter.  Eventually 32 original Camps were established; and at its height, the Arctic Brotherhood boasted some 10,000 members."

Heading out of town, we crossed the Skagway River. 

Notice the tree covered mountains.  Where we are going, there are way less trees due to the harsh environment they have to grow in. 

We are on the Klondike Highway that starts out running alongside the Skagway River with the Yukon & White Pass Railroad on the other side.  This highway is 445 miles long and connects Skagway, Alaska to Whitehorse and Dawson City, Yukon.  It roughly parallels the route taken by the prospectors in the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush

Pitchfork Falls runs out of Goat Lake, high up in the mountains. 

Markers for the snow plows

We stopped at pullout so we could look back at the Captain William Henry Moore Bridge and the bypass that we used to cross the creek. 

The Captain William Moore Bridge is an historic 300-foot asymmetric single-pylon cable-stayed bridge on the Klondike Highway that spans the Moore Creek Gorge in the borough of Skagway, Alaska, United States, about 17 miles north of the city of Skagway. Before the bridge was built in 1976, Whitehorse, Yukon, was only accessible from Skagway by the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad. The bridge connects Skagway to the Yukon highway network and allows traffic to pass over the Moore Creek Gorge, which flows along a fault line. To minimize bridge damage from earthquake movements along the fault line, the bridge was designed with anchors only at one end, which in this case was the south bank. Over the decades, heavy ore truck traffic weakened the bridge. In 2019 a replacement buried bridge located 150 feet west of the historic bridge was opened, and the 1976 cable-stayed bridge was repurposed as a pedestrian viewpoint and wayside historic attraction.

From the pullout we could look down the William Henry Moore Creek, which eventually runs into the Skagway River. 

Our bus was from the Yukon. 

The US/Canadian border. 

We stopped at the Skagway Grade Summit Rest area, called the international restrooms by our driver/tour guide. 

She talked about how hard this area was to traverse on foot due to all the rocks.  This, and the many ponds and lakes, made the Yukon gold seekers to go through here in the winter.  

Back on the road, we saw many ponds and lakes. 

I was struck by the varying colors of the ponds.  Maybe one was mostly glacier run off and the other just melted snow?

These trees grow this way due to the harsh weather conditions and wind.

We went through the Canadian checkpoint then stopped at the Fraser Lookout.

Interesting.  Welcome to the Yukon even though
 we were still in British Columbia. 

Notice the railroad tracks run just below the overlook. 

Heading back down the highway, we could see the north end of the now abandoned Captain William Henry Moore Bridge. 

Well we started our vacation with a broken plane, now we have broken bus.  Yes, our bus suddenly quit so the driver let it roll toward the side of the road.  She got on the radio and started calling for help.  One bus stopped but it could only hold 5 people.  A second bus stopped and it was completely empty.  It had taken a group of people up to Fraser to get on the train.  What luck!  It was less than 10 minutes from the time our bus died to the time bus driver Kirk had us loaded onto the Enterprise and headed back down the road.  

Once back to Skagway, we headed to the cemetery.  Not just any cemetery, but the place where Frank Reid and "Soapy" Smith were buried.  Never heard of them?  Well here's the story. The founding of Skagway, in December 1897, attracted western crime boss Jefferson Randolph "Soapy" Smith. Smith had been well known as a streetside confidence trickster and racketeer in Denver and Creede, Colorado, where he was threatened with imprisonment as a criminal in 1895 and fled the state. He set up his swindle operations in Skagway and quickly became known as a con man.  
The people he swindled out of money couldn't get any justice because the Deputy US Marshal in the area was paid off by Soapy. Vigilance committees formed. To keep order, one committee chairman appointed four men "to guard the approach to the dock in order that no objectionable characters might be admitted to disturb the deliberations of the meeting."  Frank Reid was one of these people. He was the city engineer and operated lot sales to miners.  When Soapy came to disrupt the meeting, all the guards except Reid let him pass.  Reid and Soapy got into an argument and ended up shooting each other.