Alaska: After the Gold Rush

Arctic rain forest, ice cliffs and fjords, bears, bald eagles, reindeer sausage and the dying memories of gold fever. All encountered by Marion Bull on her trip beyond America’s last frontier

Looking out to sea over the Cook Inlet with jet lag, it feels like the freshest air you can ever breathe, but even in mid-September the north wind is starting to bite. I wandered off past a few Tlingit wooden carvings outside Anchorage’s tourist shops for a lunch of clam chowder, but to me and my jetlag it was still only 2am.

The inlet is named after Captain Cook who searched for a sea route in 1778 – the Inside Passage – that would link the Pacific and the Atlantic.

The Last Frontier, as Alaska is known in the States, is a vast pristine wilderness of glaciers, massive ice fields and a sprinkling of towns, some so far apart that the locals really are pleased to see you. Because of the terrain – some of the ice fields, up to 40 miles across, resemble giant tubs of ice cream marbled with sauce – many places are only reached by air.

Glacier Bay seemed a good place to start. I flew from Anchorage to Juneau and then to Gustavus, a small village with an airstrip in the middle of nowhere. Near the entrance to the Bay, I strolled through Arctic rainforest of spruce and hemlock. The trees are festooned with moss that hangs from the branches like teddy bears, but I didn’t like any of the advice I’d been given about finding a real one. “Don’t run”, “play dead”, “back off slowly”, or even “ring a bell” (you can buy bear bells in Anchorage shops, but that was a long way off by now). It seemed safer to view them from a boat.

The entrance to the Bay is at Bartlett Cove, where daily tour boats take you to some 16 tidewater glaciers that didn’t exist 200 years ago. Early explorers were met by a wall of blue pack ice, with a 15,000ft backdrop of Mount Fairweather. With phenomenal glacial retreat, finger-like fjords appeared, and you can sail round them to view spectacular wildlife. A flock of terns hitched a ride on a passing ice floe as I watched, a humpback whale left a geyser of spray in the distance, and a pair of bald eagles circled overhead, while seals flopped over the rocks. A young brown bear did appear, but only briefly, sniffing around the shoreline.

The light is painful. Water, sky, and ice combine to make a continually changing show of reflections. Suddenly the sea dipped to accommodate a glacier’s snout that broke away with a terrible boom into the meltwater, in a dynamic powdery explosion, leaving natural ice sculptures in its wake. It’s known as White Thunder. Large icebergs have been known to carry off bridges, or even whole buildings along the coast.

Suddenly a mist descended over some of the glaciers, and it was time to head back. Not sure where to go next, I asked one of the locals whether I should get a small plane to Skagway (described by one 19th century visiting Mountie as “little better than hell on earth”) or go to Juneau. “Oh, Juneau. It’s nicer,” she said. So I got on the plane to Skagway, late afternoon, the only passenger, although it did have two can-can dancers painted on the fuselage.

Skagway, meaning “Spirit of the Cruel Wind” in Tlingit language, is the most northerly point of the Inside Passage. I’d flown over the crusty tops of glaciers at sunset to get here. There was only one road out, leading north to Whitehorse, across the Canadian border.

Skagway’s main street, Broadway, with its historical building facades and the Red Onion Saloon (a former bordello) is like stepping back into the Wild West, except that the entire town sprang up almost overnight to accommodate treasure seekers during the Gold Rush. Amazingly it was Alaska’s biggest town then, but nowadays it’s little more than a village, apart from in summer when it’s the most popular port of call on Alaskan cruises. Most of the town’s carefully restored buildings, boardwalks, and stores boasting reindeer sausage and moose milk are accessible.

I stayed in Skagway’s Home Hostel, where I had a glacier view. Next morning, an amazing natural phenomenon occurred, that sometimes happens on clear days. It takes so long for the sun to reach this little town (there is a 7,000ft mountain to climb), that when it does, the whole place steams and smokes as though the valley were on fire, and in the fields Alaskan fireweed glows red.

Everywhere there are references to the Gold Rush. Prospectors left from here via the White Pass, or from nearby Dyea – now a ghost town, struggling on foot up the Chilcoot Trail, to get to the Yukon. Skagway’s most famous rogue of the time, Jefferson “Soapy” Smith, conned gullible newcomers out of $5 apiece for telegraph messages home. What no one knew was that there was no telegraph office here, and the wires in the wall led nowhere. He died in a shoot-out, aged 38, and is buried in Skagway’s Gold Rush cemetery.

Only half of the 60,000 who set off in the winter of 1897 actually made it to the Yukon. Many were killed in an avalanche. 3,000 abandoned horses littered the trail in an area that became known as Death Horse Creek. By 1900 when the White Pass railroad was completed, it was too late – the Gold Rush had ended. Nowadays the accessible narrow railway is used to transport tourists through some of the most fantastic scenery on day trips from Skagway to Canada’s Yukon Territory. There are wheelchair lifts on each side of most trains.

It seems as though the early prospectors paved the way for the tourists to have an easy time. But what drove them to take on such a trip in the first place? It may have been greed – but no one made any money. For many – and they came from all walks of life, from waiters to solicitors – it was a voyage of self-discovery. For the first time, an opportunity to experience nature at its most raw. Perhaps this is why the toughest had no desire to return home.

But taking in the panorama around Skagway, even in the face of the north wind, I like to think that some of them stayed on to admire the view.

Information
Compare flights from UK to Anchorage: cheapflights.co.uk

Further information: travelalaska.com

Skagway tourism: skagway.com
skagwayinfo@gmail.com
Tel: (907) 983 2524

White Pass railway tours: wpyr.com