Tlingit

Chilkoot Trail

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21 year old Jack London arrived in 1897, along with many other stampeders in the Klondike Gold Rush. There were two ways to get from Seattle to the Klondike, the easy way by water, or the hard way overland. The folks who could afford it, sailed 2500 miles to the mouth of the Yukon at St Michael on the Bering Strait, and then they transferred to steam stern paddle wheelers to travel 1500 miles up the Yukon River. Most people, especially after the 1893 Depression, traveled 900 miles by packed steamship to Skagway, then walked up the trail above into the snow capped mountains. Once in Canada, they were still some 500 winding miles from where gold was discovered.

Since the coastal Tlingit (klinkit) tribe had kicked out the Hudson Bay company, they had a trading route over the mountains, trading oily fish for fur with their inland relatives and the Tagish tribe near Carcross. In 1890 Jack Dalton explored, mapped and publicized the trail over the pass. Then a Tagish guide and his American prospector brother in law struck gold near a Yukon tributary in Canada on 16 August 1896. Together the Tlingit and Tagish people guided the stampede over the Chilkoot pass on their route and helped carry gear.

At first, the trail is quite easy, following the shallow, flat valley along the Taiya river above from the long wharf at Dyea (die-ee) where Jack landed on 7 August 1897. But approaching the border with British Columbia at mile 33, the trail rises sharply to 3,750 feet at latitude 60º. The combination of high altitude and high northern latitude meant snow and ice almost year round.

And the trail up the pass is more of a wall, climbing at a ~40º angle for the last 1000 feet, with 1500 steps carved in ice. And to prevent unprepared people from starving, the Mounties required a year’s supply of food and gear to continue into Canada. So, Jack climbed the golden steps dozens of times hauling his gear to the top. Since the trail was crowded, this meant slowly climbing in a long line on the stairs, at the speed of the slowest climber, with a 60 pound pack on your back each time.

On Palm Sunday 1898, at a time the native guides warned folks not to go, there were a series of avalanches that killed up to 100 stampeders climbing the Chilkoot pass. Many were buried at the Slide Cemetery in Dyea, now a ghost town.

The Canadian side was not easier, depending on the weather. If your timing was fortuitous the rivers were flowing, and you hiked slowly down over some very rough terrain. Then you simply built a boat big enough to carry you and your gear down the long lakes and down the river and sturdy enough to get through the rapids and narrow canyons. If your timing was not so lucky, then everything at the top was frozen and you had to make camp at altitude—no ultralight down sleeping bags back then—for months waiting for the thaw near the beginning of summer. Jack was lucky enough to make it almost all the way before wintering about 80 miles from the gold fields. He would later write a short story called “To Build a Fire” about a man trying to survive in the cold.

For Jack and the hardy ones who made it all the way to the Klondike, they discovered that local prospectors had already staked claims on the gold fields, that Dawson City had been built and that the prices were astronomical. Jack London spun his experiences into gold eventually, writing Daughter of the Snows, Call of the Wild and White Fang among many adventure books and short stories.

Today, the Chilkoot National Historic Trail is part of the Klondike National Historical Park in Seattle & Skagway, and together with the Chilkoot Trail National Historic Site in British Columbia, it is recognized as the Klondike Gold Rush International Historical Park. Unfortunately, the trail is closed at the border for unfathomable reasons.

Glacier Bay National Park

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Glacier Bay is a great national park, a biosphere and part of a huge world heritage site with Canada. I arrived by Alaska Marine Highway ferry from Skagway via a night in Juneau, which took about 24 hours to the lodge. The ranger-narrated day boat tour out to see the last few tidewater glaciers was awesome. While I saw a humpback whale breeching, the highlight was definitely sliding through the icy waters to see glaciers like the Marjorie above and Johns Hopkins below.

While glaciers often cycle through advancing and retreating cycles, Glacier Bay makes it plainly clear how one way the retreat of ice has been since industrialization began. Tidewater glaciers are ones that normally advance into the water and then recede after the saltwater changes their freezing point. Once common below the arctic circle, now they’re rare, with the one above likely being one of the last. Although the huge bay was entirely full of ice when our country was founded, the bay—technically a fjord—is now virtually all open water. The many glaciers described by John Muir are still here, but most neither reach nor can be seen from the water. Over a hundred years of tourists have documented the dramatic retreat in millions of photographs from steamships to cruise ships.

Once, many people assumed that similar landscapes scraped clean around the world were evidence of a global Biblical flood, but they were caused by glaciers. Besides Muir, an ecologist named William Cooper conducted a historic and ongoing study of plant succession for decades here. While some might imagine that retreating ice will simply open up new fertile land in the north, the truth is that glaciers scrape the ground down to bedrock. It takes centuries to build up enough biological material to sustain even the short simple forest ecosystems found in the wintry northern latitudes. The Tlingit people have an oral tradition that describes how their productive valley was covered by an advancing glacier and was stripped bare when it finally retreated. But they’re still here, co-managing the park and conducting interpretive presentations on site. Be sure to visit their clan house next to the Glacier Bay Lodge.