With a deafening roar, a 600-pound chunk of ice breaks suddenly from the edge of the tidal glacier and plunges with a ginormous splash into the ocean.”You’ve just seen an iceberg calving, folks,” comes a too-cheerful voice from the loudspeaker of Holland America’s Zuiderdam, which, at this moment, is cruising in an Alaska waterway known as Glacier Bay. Snow-capped mountains soar into the sky and blue-tinged tidal glaciers stretch as far as the eye can see.

Around me, people with cameras and binoculars pressed to their faces are exclaiming in wonder. “What a sight!” I hear someone say. “Isn’t that amazing!”

Three miles away from that calving glacier, our cruise ship is drifting while its captain carefully avoids the minivan-sized chunks of floating ice that surround us.

“If we were in the way of that calving iceberg, it could easily sink the ship,” Captain Werner Timmers confesses to me later from the Bridge, where he and a handful of finely uniformed navigation officers control the direction and speed of the 3,082-person-capacity vessel.

I am glad for his sharp wits, for despite the day’s bright sunshine, I have no inclination to go swimming. Fall overboard in this water, its temperature hovering at the freezing point, and hypothermia would kill you within two-to-four minutes. “The lifejackets are only there to help identify and locate the bodies,” a passenger quips.

There are parts of Alaska, such as this inside passage of Glacier Bay, that are pristine, untouched by human hands and breathtakingly beautiful. But there are also parts of the landscape where gift shops, restaurants and souvenir stores are ubiquitous, and the shopping landscape looks much like many American small towns.

Skagway, Alaska is one such place. The historic gold rush city that forms one of the major ports of call for many massive cruise lines including Holland America, Skagway has been completely transformed since cruise ship passengers began walking off the gangplank in the 1980s.

“Tuesdays and Thursdays are big days for us,” confesses Carlin “Buckwheat” Donahue, who heads up communications for the Skagway CVB. “Some days we get 9,000 tourists coming into town.”

The city wasn’t always flooded with tourists. In 1982, the closure of a major ore mine left Skagway in a state of economic depression, with an unemployment rate of 60 per cent.

“It was devastating for us,” Buckwheat reflects. “We looked at the opportunities, and decided to actively start courting the cruise lines.”

The courtship worked, and the arrival of the ships brought a revival to Skagway, with new stores and an influx of 1,800 new summer workers to man the tourism boom. “We went from economic depression to having the highest income in the state,” Buckwheat says.

That has brought changes, good and bad. For one, only 16 of the 80-odd stores on the main strip of Broadway Street are now locally owned, the majority of them multi-national chains selling gifts and jewelry.

An hour after the last cruise ship pulls away from the dock in September, 80 per cent of the city’s stores are closed and boarded up for the next seven months. “This city undergoes an amazing transformation then,” says Buckwheat, with more than a trace of irony.

One attraction that draws most visitors to Skagway is the White Pass & Yukon Route train. Passengers embark on a three hour ride on a route that snakes around the mountain curves, teetering close to the edge of many precipices.

The history of the railroad parallels the history of Skagway, so more than a relaxing way to appreciate the scenery, this railroad trip gives visitors insight into the city’s genesis and development.

It began in the 1890s with the discovery of gold, when tens of thousands of prospectors, the vast majority highly inexperienced in the area’s somewhat hostile terrain, tried to get to the Klondike to make their fortunes.

The steep valleys we pass along the way hold the bones of 3,000 unfortunate horses, for whom the torturous trail at the turn of the century proved deadly.

By 1900 the railway’s 110 miles of track were completed, not without a few fatalities. We pass a massive boulder, and are told of two railway workers who were crushed to death beneath it while toiling on the railroad. No-one was ever able to move the boulder, so their remains are interred in the same place they met their end.

We learn, on the journey, that of the 100,000 prospectors who tried to reach the Klondike gold fields, less than half made it there and only 4,000 of them found gold.

But though they left Skagway to seek greener pastures, the railroad built to help them get there continues to this day, with a long, endearing history.

For the past 100 years, it has been an economic lifeline to Skagway, transporting the gold mining operations of the first stampeders and later assisting the large corporations who control mining in the Klondike.

The railroad closed for six years in 1982, when world metal prices plummeted and the mines closed. But by 1988, the trains were hurtling merrily along the tracks once again, this time as a narrow gauge excursion railroad for Skagway visitors.

It is a relief, though, to clamber back on the ship after a full day of sightseeing and touring, and to surround yourself with the familiarity of its 11 decks.

Dusk is settling in as we pull away from port, and within hours, we are surrounded by heavily forested mountains, waterfalls tumbling from great heights down their steep slopes.

As the melancholy sound of the ship’s horn fills the air, we disappear into the misty night.

About the author:

This week Traveling Tales welcomes freelance travel writer Lauren Kramer, who lives in Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver, B.C.

About the photos:
1: Holland America’s Zuiderdam in Glacier Bay. Holland America photo.
2: Passengers up and close to the glacier face. Holland America photo.
3: Snow-capped peaks form a backdrop for Skagway. Photo by Andrew Cremata for Skagway CVB.

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?
– Robert Browning

Just beyond the cruise ship dock in Skagway, Alaska, I look at a display of photographs taken just over a century ago. One of them is a shot of the harbour. The shoreline, seen through the cameraman’s lens, is a quagmire of mud. Horses, dogs, bundles of clothing, cooking utensils, camping gear and provisions lie strewn above the high-water mark. The year is 1897.

In my mind’s eye, I see men, glaze-eyed with fatigue, wading through water from scows moored off shore and hauling equipment up the beach trying to beat the sixteen-foot high tides that could wash away their possessions—and dreams—in minutes.

They have travelled from San Francisco and Seattle, packed like cattle in tramp steamers, hungry for Yukon gold. Some are self-proclaimed gentleman adventurers on the road to El Dorado; others are ordinary citizens, bank clerks and blue-collar workers.

Most are desperados: stubble-chinned, brawling toughs who would give Skagway, with its bars, flop-houses and con-artists, the reputation of being the most lawless town in Alaska.

Of the 100,000 prospectors who arrived on these shores, only 40,000 would make it to Dawson City in the Yukon.

Some took the short but gruelling Chilkoot trail out of Dyea; others with equipment loaded on horses or dog-sleds, opted for the White Pass-Klondike trail winding for 40 miles through a wilderness of slush, shale and unyielding rock-face to Lake Bennett—and thence a further 500 miles up the Yukon River by boat.

Fast forward a century: our tour bus halts on the broad Klondike Highway and the group dismounts to gaze at the remnants of the White Pass trail only two feet wide in sections, and overgrown now by vegetation.

I am awed by the stampeders’ tenacity in the face of terrifying odds—and aghast at the sight of Dead Horse Gulch where 3,000 horses plunged down the 500-foot canyon to their deaths. The trail snakes past rushing streams and precipitous gullies; ice-age glaciers stand jagged-toothed against the sky, inscrutable witnesses to humanity’s quest for greed and glory.

On the return trip, our driver and guide, Brian, regales us with tales of Skagway’s colourful characters—confidence tricksters like Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith and heroes like city engineer Frank Reid.

On July 8, 1898, Reid and Soapy came muzzle to muzzle in a melodramatic shoot-out. Soapy aged 37, was killed instantly; Reid died twelve days later of gunshot wounds. Reid has an elaborate memorial in the Skagway cemetery; Soapy was buried unceremoniously in an unmarked grave.

Today hardly anyone in Skagway remembers much about Reid. Soapy however has become a folk legend! Ballads are sung about his escapades, the local theatre puts on “The Days of ’98 Show with Soapy Smith”, and on July 8th every year the town hosts a ceremonial wake in his memory!

En-route back to Skagway, our tour bus pulls into Liarsville—a replica of a Klondike campsite.

Our hosts tell us that “Liarsville” derived its name from the pressmen who arrived here in pursuit of the hottest media scoop of the decade. Needless to say, after one horrified look, they vamoosed in a hurry.

However, to satisfy their editors (and the public panting for information), they filed reports that read like holiday brochures: trails winding through lush evergreen forests with picture-postcard mountain peaks in the background and a cruise through the sparkling waters of Lake Bennett and the Yukon River. “Typical yellow journalism!” says the speaker. “No different from today!” The crowd chuckles. I surreptitiously remove my press badge!

Liarsville is artfully reconstructed. There is a barber’s shop stocked with what looks like medieval instruments of torture, a laundry and dry goods store (read ‘gift shop’!) whose porch boasts a honky-tonk piano.

The stampeders paused here to bolster their spirits at the bar (literally and figuratively), and to linger in the company of ladies offering the delights of “negotiable affection”. They exchanged yarns of braggadocio, and stocked up on tobacco and provisions before hitting the relentless trail once more.

A vaudeville show is in progress. Cookies and mulled cider in hand, I chuckle at anecdotes, boo/hiss villainous characters, envy the lissom curves of “Klondike Kate” and thrill to the verses of Robert Service.

I also pan for gold, and go “aaaah!” as I find a teensy speck in my pan. Real gold, but, shhh…planted to ensure that all tourists leave with a fleck or two in their pockets!

Which is more than what the sourdoughs (miners) took home.

By the time they reached Dawson City, all the claims had been staked and the owners of the mines had already raked in their millions’ worth of gleaming nuggets. For some stampeders, however, the journey was accomplishment enough: an adventure of heroic proportions.

They were metaphorical Argonauts, in search of the Golden Fleece—and, ironically enough, ‘fleeced’ is what they were!

About the author:

Margaret Deefholts is a Canadian author, and much travelled freelance travel writer/photographer. Visit her website at www.margaretdeefholts.com

The photos:
1: House of Negotiable Affection on Skagway’s Broadway.
2: Broadway, Skagway’s main street.
3: Soapy Smith photo from U.S. Library of Congress
4: Author finds gold (“Aaaah!) in Liarsville.