Sunday in Skagway

Day 74 – Sunday, August 25

We took a ride on the White Pass – Yukon Railway, which is a narrow gauge railway constructed during the gold rush.  It climbs from sea level in Skagway to almost 3,000 feet at the White Pass summit.  Like the Alaska Highway, it is amazing to think about the effort it took to build such a project in harsh conditions. 

(Our conductor looked like Mr. McFeeley on Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood! )

We got to see the rv park from the railroad side. 

And it was also fun to see the highway that we travelled on to get here from a different perspective….the highway runs along one side of the river, and the railroad goes on the other.

The train route twists and turns, goes through tunnels and up and down steep hills, and over a deep gorge.  We saw the steel bridge which was the tallest cantilever bridge in the world.  It was used until 1969.  It looked like the tracks on a roller coaster!

We could look down and see the path the stampeders took to get to the goldfields before the railroad was built.  About 100,000 people headed north, but only about 30,000 reached the gold fields in the Klondike.  We found out that one of those prospectors was Donald Trump’s grandfather!! (Who would have thought???)  

 

 

We even passed the border, which was marked with flags from both countries.  But, thank goodness we didn’t have to go through customs since we didn’t get off the train. 

It was a fun and interesting train ride.

 

We went to mass at St. Therese in a small quaint church that hardly looked like a church from the outside.  The priest was travelling, so a deacon from Haines came to lead prayer and give communion.  Most of the participants were from cruise ships and rv parks…of the 25 people there, only 5 were locals!

The downtown was slow today, but we were still able to do some shopping.  One of the clerks said they normally have 3,000-5,000 people per day from the cruise ships, but today there were only about 500!!  It’s such a neat setting with the mountains in the background at the end of the street.

We finished the evening with a group dinner at the Klondike Goldfields—fried salmon (yummy!) and ribs.  We were entertained by a guy who did a few Robert Service poems which described life during the gold rush days. (Robert Service was a famous poet from the area).  Then a crusty old miner gave us a tour of a dredge, shared gold panning stories, and then we tried our luck at gold panning again.  We got a few gold flakes…no big pay dirt!

 

 

We are down to our final week of the caravan, and now begin heading south, so that we can travel on the Cassier Highway. This will be our last night in Alaska—we cross the border to Canada tomorrow, and will travel through Canada for the rest of the trip. I still can’t believe how quickly the time has passed!