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Then
Winter 1897-98:
With supplies running low, would-be prospectors on the Chilkoot Trail boiled old antlers for butter, used patent medicines for sauces, and brewed liquor out of their boot soles.
Now
2007:
Smoked salmon
appetizers, chicken with whole wheat fettuccine, baked brownies with raspberry sauce, and a postprandial glass of port are typical fare during a float of the Charley River with Arctic Wild.
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"There's a land where the mountains are nameless, / And the rivers all run God knows where," wrote poet Robert Service in 1898. A century later your GPS can pinpoint the rivers and put names to peaks, but the pull of the Alaska-Yukon borderland remains unquantifiable.
Gold once drew people here. Now the dreams are of a wilder hue: charcoal-gray peaks, white-water kayak runs, and the wildflower-strewed paths of history. True gold, it seems, comes in many colors.
The Alaska Moment:
Alaska Range |
ANWR | Glacier Bay | Tongass | Yukon | All Alaska Trips
New Frontier
Crossing the Chilkoot Pass
A piano. A peep of chickens. A 125-pound (54-kilogram) plow. During the winter of 1897-98, at the height of the Klondike Gold Rush, an estimated 30,000 people lined the trail up Chilkoot Pass shoving, pulling, and lugging the year's worth of supplies (a minimum of 1,250 pounds [567 kilograms] per person) required by local officials for passage into Canada and to the goldfields of the Klondike. Their collective misery created, one witness wrote, a "single, all encompassing groan which . . . rose from the bowl of these mountains like the hum of a thousand insects." With a modern-day imposed limit of 50 hikers a day over the famed Chilkoot Pass in Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park (www.nps.gov/klgo), the trail is much quieter now. Starting at the ghost town of Dyea, you can hike what was once called "the meanest 33 miles (53 kilometers) in history" at a decidedly un-gold-rushed pace. Take five to seven days, stopping to fish the Taiya River in the lower reaches and wait out a rainsquall in the Canyon City warming cabin at mile 7.5. (kilometer 12) Linger at Sheep Camp (mile 11.8 [kilometer 19]) to scour the brush for signs of the 1,500 hopefuls who once stopped here awaiting their turn at the pass and brace yourself for your own assault of what they called the "Golden Staircase," where the trail rears up 2,800 vertical feet (853 vertical meters) in 3.6 miles (6 kilometers). Once over the top, settle in at the aptly named Happy Camp and anticipate the long, slow, wildflower-filled 12.5-mile (20-kilometer) downhill hike to Bennett Lake, where your memories of the trip will be one of your most valued assets.
Need to Know:Feeling lucky? Panning for gold is allowed within the preserve but only with a gold pan. The largest gold nugget ever found: an 18.37-pound (8-kilogram) hunk discovered in 1998, valued today at over $200,000.
Classic
Running the River Wildest
Hundreds of prospectors who went bust in the Klondike lit out down the Yukon River, hot on the scent of a rumored gold strike in Nome, passing right by the Charley River in what is now the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve (www.nps.gov/yuch). Without bush pilots to whisk them to the Charley River headwaters, they missed out on one of the wildest float trips in Alaska. Dropping an average of 31 feet a mile (4.5 meters a kilometer), the Charley sings through a string of Class II and III rapids in a wilderness of moose, bear, mountain sheep, and sweet Arctic fishing. A 75-mile (121-kilometer), six-day ride with Arctic Wild ($2,700, including flights to and from Fairbanks; www.arcticwild.com) takes you down the Charley to its confluence with the mighty Yukon, where another two days and 70 miles (113 kilometers) leads to the take-out in the town of Circle.
The Alaska Moment:
Alaska Range | ANWR | Glacier Bay | Tongass | Yukon | All Alaska Trips
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