A Pioneer Alaska Highway Vacation
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A Pioneer Alaska Highway Vacation |
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Chapter VII
It was still raining next morning when we slowly moved up the Lynn Canal towards Skagway. Long, threadlike waterfalls spun down from the mists shrouding mountain crest towering on either hand in almost perpendicular walls of cliff, and the air was iced. It seemed at last we had reached a doorway into the heart of the mountains towards which the voyage had led, for the gentle throb of engines had ceased and only the rain filled stillness lay between us and the way we had come. As we followed the curved half mile of board walk to the town the hollow knocking of footsteps echoed flatly from the rocks, mingling with the chatter and laughter. Against the encircling immensity we made no more impression than the confused imprint of bird’s tracks on an expanse of snow. When I looked back, the ship herself had become a solitary toy washed into the mountains. Ahead of me, young McCarthy was striding with hunched shoulders, his hands thrust into the pockets of his windbreaker and I wondered what he thought of his new surroundings. The name Skagway comes from an Indian word “Skagua” meaning the prevailing North Wind. A Sabbath quiet shrouded the dingy little shores and liquor shops, the unpaved streets and puddle-flecked boardwalk – all that remains of a place that once, for a wild, brief year, swelled to a city of fifteen thousand. In the raw misty morning it was scarcely imaginable that our surroundings once overflowed with hordes thrusting out from it on the first stage of their search for gold. In the office of the White Pass and Yukon Railroad, the atmosphere of ’98 was revived by the beard adorning, tweed clad figure dealing out tickets over a long counter. Black, spaded-shaped and of bear-like texture and luxuriance, it was the cynosure of eighty pairs of fascinated eyes, a scrutiny to which its wearer seemed quite accustomed. I suspected that as he proceeded with his transactions, he found us all equally entertaining. When it was my turn he scanned my voucher commenting that “he had heard about this” making me feel like a wanted miscreant, but adding with his faintly amused air that all he now needed was one dollar for my lunch ticket. The rain had stopped during the last half hour but now began falling again heavily and it was bitterly raw and cold. Thankfully we climbed into the train, which was drawn up casually like an abandoned bicycle, its engine propped against the boardwalk outside the baggage room window. A Customs official would board it at the top of White Pass, the International Boundary, so it was simpler to check through one’s belongings, a custom which here appeared to be regarded with complete leniency. After receiving permission to extract a dry pair of shoes and a map I noticed several other passengers on their knees in corners of the baggage room, scratching like terriers in their suitcases.
At one end of the observation car a girl wearing a Chinese coolie hat of brown felt pulled it back on a fluffy mass of blond hair and stood spreading her long, scarlet tipped fingers towards the stove which had recently been lit. Declaring herself frozen and at the same time warning her husband, who was trying to poke it, that it was different from their own and might explode if interfered with. Beneath a thick grey raincoat she was altered suitably for a drinking party and through cobweb stockings her lacquered toenails gleamed from gilt studded, high-heeled pumps. A small man wearing a blue suit and tweed cap rushed in, flung open the stove, hurled in several large lumps of coat from a nearby bucket and with the cheerful injunction that whoever occupied the chair nearest to it had the job of stoking and whirled out. Apparently he was the Guard. “Here’s Whiskers”, said someone as the Beard now wearing a townish looking hat, peered through the door. He came in, removed his hat and sat down, smoothing his hair with the air of a benevolent uncle joining a children’s party. “Looks like ’98 still round here”, remarked one of the passengers. “I saw a bunch of what looked like regular old-timers in the street there just now, whiskers and all!” The Beard smiled, explaining that there was a film company in Skagway just now. They had been up in the Arctic all summer and were making some shots for the film on their way back. He confided that he had a small part in it himself. “I’m a bartender! It’s only a small part, but still”, he laughed modestly. “It’s a beginning! Well I hope you’ll enjoy the trip.” He rose to leave, the children’s party atmosphere assured. The engine gave a shove and then stopped. The Beard stood outside waving his hat, and we waved back. With another shove and a jerk, the train, consisting of two observation cars, two freight, one piled with timber, and a couple of engines came to life, and we were off. Across the floor of the valley the track wound, bridging the river, and turning past little wooden houses and shops, closed and silent in the rain. Creeping along its opposite shore, hugging the mountain foot, we stopped again. The rain drummed on the roof and the rushing of the Skagway River on our left was suddenly loud. The stove had yielded to treatment and the blond girl and I drew our chairs closer and kicking off our shoes, warmed our feet on its sides. Her husband, she told me, was in the Army and during the first year had been stationed at Whitehorse. They were returning there just now from a three week visit to Vancouver, largely taken up, it seemed, by an orgy of shopping for herself and their friends in the North. They had not appeared much during the voyage except when the ship called at a port, passing most of their time in their own cabin or with the card-players in the lounge and making brief sorties on deck. The girl wearing high-heeled dove grey slippers to match her rain-coat, teetering about the sopping decks with cat-like delicacy. She told me that before her marriage, her home had been in Ottawa and I thought of the manicured elegance of the flower-bordered city with its shaven lawns and Gallic turrets. From its ordered suavity to the careless rugged magnificence for which she had exchanged it was a far cry. But it seemed that this girl, who looked as if frost would splinter her, loved it. She had never felt so well in her life as in the Yukon she told me. Cold? Yes – it had been 80o below last winter, but she had enjoyed it. “Before I moved there I used always to be a sickly sort of person!” she told me. In the translucent pallor of her skin the lashes of her china-blue eyes were like threads of black cotton. Now as she exchanged her raincoat for a magnificent wrap of soft grey furs, her husband’s gift in Vancouver, I was again reminded, watching her sink into its luxuriant folds, of a fastidious cat. With the impatient tug of a little dog pulling at its collar, the train suddenly moved forward. We had acquired another car piled with rain-soaked, orange lumbar and two more engines. We now had four. For a while the track followed the River in its wide valley floor. Into the mountains back and forth we shuttled in long spirals and sharply rising bends on which one could watch the little engines puffing merrily ahead while the rest of the train still toiled around the last curve. Back and forth, up and up, till on one side of a valley we could look across at the way we had come and trace the track coiling hundreds of feet below. The rain stopped. The scrub, russet and golden, was splashed with low growing mountain ash, its leaves and berries already vermillion. We climbed so slowly it seemed one might lean out from the window to pick the little creeper and grey white arctic moss between the rocks lacquered with rain. Great waterfalls, softened by distance to gauzy sashes – one called Bridal Veils Falls – swept the gorges. We crossed little bridges, threads of steel slung tenuously above clefts on which we hung above a torrent clawing down the rocks until lost to sight hundreds of feet below. The stampede to the Klondike gold fields, begun in 1897 with the Chilkoot Pass, later, White Pass with a lower and easier grade, was discovered. Construction of the White Pass and Yukon Railroad began in April of the following year and reached Whitehorse, about a hundred and nine miles from Skagway in June 1990. To reach the summit of the Pass, the track had to be blasted from solid rock for about 20 miles and with every fresh rumour of gold, the labourers promptly departed with their picks and shovels to more rewarding toil than that of hewing a railroad. Until the Great War, all supplies for Whitehorse and the Interior had come by sea from Vancouver and the coast towns and on by railroad. Consequently the freight charges were the highest in the world. Now the construction of the Alaska Highway, and the air route from Edmonton and the States have created an alternative supply. The War had caused a boom on the railroad, carrying war supplies to the North and Whitehorse, while the great airport there was being built. Beside the track runs a four inch pipeline, part of the Canal Oil Project. Laid during the War by the U.S. army, aviation gasoline and oil were piped from Skagway to Whitehorse for servicing planes, which landed there on their way to the Aleutians and Russia. Later, when the oil refinery at Whitehorse was completed, oil from Norman Wells, away up in the North West Territories, was refined there and pumped to Skagway. After the War, the pipeline was unused for two years, but recently it had been leased and reopened by the White Pass and Yukon Railway. Oil is now pumped from the ocean going tankers into storage banks at Skagway, and on through a pumping station and by way of the pipeline to storage tanks near the Whitehorse airfield. From there it is distributed by tank truck to the Canadian Army, R.C.A.F. and commercial users. Higher up the Pass the line crosses Dead Horse Gulch, the cleft in which several thousand pack horses were killed by a landslide during the Gold Rush. Six hundred feet above, and on the opposite side of the valley, the track appears again but so steep is the grade that it makes a detour of nearly four mile to get up Tunnel Mountain, so called because the only tunnel on the line was cut here a thousand feet above the floor of the gulch. This part of the track was the most difficult to construct, as it had to be cut from the solid granite of the mountainside, the crews suspended from ropes to drill the rock. Two thousand four hundred feet above Skagway, at Inspiration Point, the train stopped as if to draw breath and proclaim the view. A tangled, tossing expanse of peaks and gorges and misty, spray-blown waterfalls, their roar silenced by distance, spread out range on range to the line of the Sawtooth Mountains dimly scrawled on the sky. Far below us, infinitely far it seemed though actually but a few miles, Lynn canal gleamed like a fragment of green glass dropped in the hills. A bronze plaque beside the line here was erected in memory of the packhorses whose death gave the gorge below its sinister name. “In Memory of us three thousand pack animals that laid our bones on these cruel hills during the Gold Rush of 1897 – 98…” Two hundred and fifteen feet above its floor, the track spans the gorge by a steel cantilever bridge, the most northerly of its kind and height in the world. Beyond it, the original Gold Trail is quite distinct, a mere shelf, scarcely two feet wide, scraped precariously along the side of the gorge. A large armoured placard at the top of the Pass
marked the international Boundary with Canada. It had taken us an hour
and a half to come twenty miles but we had climbed nearly three thousand
feet. We shed two of our engines, and skirting the shores of Summit
Lake, whose waters, linking with others, eventually join the Yukon
River, set off over a high tundra-like plateau. For another twenty miles we scurried on across the painted wilderness from which distant great mountain peaks stood back, remote, wrapped in their own snow-peaked silence we passed Log Cabin, once in boom days, a town and the headquarters of the North West Mounted Police. Today, just as its name implies, stood a single log cabin beside the track in whose doorway a man stood waving as we passed. On and on until the plateau was left behind and again mountains closed in, the track serpentines among them until on a long curve, for no apparent reason, we slackened and Lake Bennett lay before us, a panel of gleaming jade. A huddle of wooden buildings beside the track, a tiny, steeple church built by the stampeders, of intricately woven logs crowning a low promontory at the head of the Lake - was all that marked the town which had blazed to a population of ten thousand when the gold seekers paused here to build boats and rafts to carry them down this lake on the next stage of their incredible journey. Today the train halts here briefly, just long enough for the travelers to have lunch and for those returning to Skagway to change to another tiny train waiting on a siding. The cook and his assistants had heard us coming and were standing at the doorway of the dining room waving as we stepped from the roasting warmth of the cars – the stove was now almost red hot – into the piercing cold of a fine, sunless noon. Laughter and voices splintered the quartz-like stillness as we all crowded into the big warm room and settled down at long tables. Our Head Steward, Mr. Peters, taking the day off had joined us just before we left Skagway and now appeared to be the life and soul of the party. Bounding into our car with a whoop totally unlike his habitual staid deportment, he had passed the morning in hilarious flirtation with the two small dark sisters wearing sponge bag check slacks and dazzling jerseys, who, throughout the voyage had kept a roving and predatory eye on all male passengers. I had never eaten a better meal than that lunch served so lavishly in the wilderness - the apple pies were not of this world, as several of us told the cook. Just outside the door an old Indian woman squatted, selling moccasins. Beside her three tiny children posing with the practiced ease of film stars with a husky and miniature sled, drew their fur-trimmed hoods over their heads. A large black bear someone had shot earlier had now been placed life size beside the track, causing a ripple of excitement among the travelers, who hastened, if somewhat gingerly, to view it, exclaiming to each other that, just for a moment they really had thought it was alive! For another twenty-six miles of winding track beyond Bennett we followed the bays and promontories of the Lake’s shore. Across the jade-like water the lower mountain slopes were gold with poplar and birch forest – gold so intense that in the grey clarity of a sunless afternoon its reflection lay in the farthest shore. Higher, low growing shrub lit the topmost peaks with velvet softness, as the roots themselves shimmered with colour, and the flight of a solitary gull low above an inlet reflected jade. The scarlet flutter of a myriad leaves about an inlet – stabbed the heart with colour. Beside me were the two sisters who had returned to the ship from Bennett. Temporarily losing their quarry, one was now engrossed in the knitting of a grass green sweater and the other sound asleep. The porcelain-like girl, discarding her furs, had brought down from the rack a beauty case of immense size and elegance and was now wrapped in a prolonged study of her face. Her husband was asleep, and beyond him the slumped figure of the kindly man with a wife in blue tweeds who always spoke as if she had a bad cold in the head, alike testified, far from silently, to the excellence of their lunch. Fifty three miles from Skagway a rocky islet in the Lake holding a large board casually marked “B.C. – Y.T.” announced the boundary between the two provinces. Ten miles on it at the foot of the Lake the train crossed the narrow neck of water connecting it and Lake Nares by a swing bridge to stop at Carcross. Originally known as Caribou Crossing because of the wandering herds that had crossed by this natural ford throughout the summer months. I was told by Patsy Henderson, an Indian who had taken part in the original discovery of the Klondike. He lectures to tourists about the Yukon, and his talks about it and his people’s hunting and fishing exploits had become a local institution. But today, Carcross was sleepy and deserted as the tourist season was almost over and the only signs of life were a big shaggy dog and a staring cluster of small children beside the row of log and clapboard houses. From here the track lifted above Watson River, and we followed the rushing torrent through brilliant woods. Nearly an hour later, after passing Lewis Lake a break in the trees brought the sudden white flash of Whitehorse Rapids and just beyond we slowed to stop beside Ear Lake, a peaceful little stretch of water shaped like a human ear. For the last time the train pulled itself forward for three miles. Then was clipped off neatly as a ribbon with scissors, as the steel rail ended at the banks of the Yukon River! Whitehorse is nearly a thousand feet lower than the summit of White Pass, but on leaving the train I felt I was stepping into space! Before me the widely spread town seemed tossed out like a handful of rice on the flat roof of some immense gateway from which on every horizon, great snow peaks stood aside, lifting to the North. Nick Solley had told me the hotel was just up the street, Broad, unpaved and empty, it passed the Post Office and the well-stocked windows of the principal store and cluster of clapboard houses with petunias and late roses round their low porches. Across the street the River swirled, swift, green and silent. The Regina Hotel stood on a corner, and the windows of its lobby reached to the sidewalk as those in a store. People sitting around the stove were visible from the street, as goldfish in a bowl, enabling the inhabitants of Whitehorse to tell at a glance whether any of their friends were in town. Skirting several large muddy pools I pushed open the door, to find I was expected. “Ah ha”, there had been a letter from Mr. Solley. Mr. Eriksen, grey-haired, kindly, slow speaking, shook my hand. “Anna?” He turned to his wife who was as quick moving as her husband was slow. Quiet, and neat she was wearing a plain, housekeeper style black dress, her still fair hair was drawn smoothly back from an observant, unlined face. There was a letter, too, she said for me from Mrs. Nolan, out at Marsh Lake. Searching swiftly in the back of the desk she handed me a note and then led me along a passage redolent of orange woodwork and speckless varnish to a small white bedroom, its lace curtained window level with the street, and after enjoining me to ask for anything I might need, left. After the clacking of the train, the total stillness now as the door closed behind her held almost the quality of sound. I sat on the bed and read Mrs. Nolan’s letter whose husband was away on a hunting trip but if, as expected, he returned tomorrow, he would pick me up on his way through Whitehorse. Or Mr. Graves, in charge of maintenance work on their stretch of Highway, might be coming in to Whitehorse some time during the day and if so, he could bring me out in his truck. Failing either of these she would expect me by the bus leaving Whitehorse on Tuesday morning. She had added a postscript, “Do not be alarmed by my husband’s appearance – he has been up north for a month!” which presumably meant he would be bearded. A knock at the door heralded friends from the ship – the Kentucky ladies. They were spending the night at the other hotel, and had come now to ask if I would like to accompany them to see the rapids later this evening as there wouldn’t be time for them to go in the morning. Mr. Eriksen telephoned for a car. His son, a jolly little boy in a tweed suit, was dispatched to fetch my suitcase from the station. Mrs. Eriksen enjoined us to not to be one moment later than seven o’clock when she served dinner, as we set off. The driver, aged about seventeen, was evidently anxious that we should miss nothing, offered to take us out by way of the oil refineries, just now being dismantled, and by the airport, neither of which we had any particular desire to see, but he assured us so eagerly that it wouldn’t be going out of our way and we might as well have a look at them. We admired both before leaving the town. At the head of a muddy slope a signboard pointing north west was marked “FAIRBANKS” and we turned onto the Highway. Miss Marion’s cup was full. “I just can’t believe it!” she exclaimed with the naïve zest of a child. “Imagine! Me – riding down the Alcan Highway! I certainly never supposed I’d be doing that. My! How I would love to be going with you all the rest of the way down it!” The driver shared our enthusiasm, pouring out an account of everything he thought might interest us concerning Whitehorse. It seemed that for him it was the Mecca of his hopes. His own home was in Calgary, but always he had wanted to come to the North and he had been in Whitehorse for a year now. He told us about his work, his friends, the room he shared with two other boys – all such good chaps. One of them was a bus driver on the Alcan. He spoke of the fun they had cooking their own meals – the fishing, expeditions, hunting too, and oh – the cold in Winter! All the coloured threads that made his life here – something he wouldn’t exchange! “And are you very busy?” Miss Juliet asked. “Have you a lot more calls tonight after you take us back?” From his reply we were to imagine that, with the number of visitors in town, he expected his evening would be a whirlpool of activity, ‘til nearly midnight. A narrow road dipped off the Highway, twisting downhill through the orange and gold woods, and after two or three miles of it he stopped the car. “Listen! You can hear them”, our guide announced proudly. The air quaked with a dull roar. Through the dripping undergrowth he led us, the roar becoming reverberating thunder as the narrow trail widened. On a low grassy bank and around a wide bend, the River swung in the sunset. It was the headwaters of the Yukon, five miles of jade green, foam-ripped rapids racing north in untamed magnificence. Almost stunned by its roar and colour, we turned back and drove on to Miles Canyon. Here, slithering down a cleft from the road we stood on a little quivering bridge suspended across the gorge - the only bridge spanning the River in its two thousand and sixty mile course from Whitehorse to the Bering Sea. Seventy feet below us the River swept between the canyon walls it had carved into pillars, hung now with coppery orange moss, and even their depths held the glint of gold. It seemed incredible that any living creature could survive that surge, but in their hunger for gold many made the attempt to run these rapids as they were the short route to Whitehorse. Then they continue by riverboats to Dawson City and the Klondike. Many hundreds perished, some survived. Whitehorse, incidentally, took its name from these rapids, the “white horse”. Reluctantly we returned to the road and to Miss Marion who, to her disgust, had been unable to scramble down the gorge because of her stiff knee. On the outskirts of the town we stopped to climb to the Indian burial ground, a little enclosed plot on a bluff, and here Miss Marion, refusing to be daunted twice, insisted on coming with us. The graves were fenced like children’s playpens, with low palings, and over some of them were little wooden houses. Peering through the wind-cracked windows, their lace curtains held by a ribbon band, we could make out bunches of withered flowers or an old can on the earthen floors. In one, a tattered moccasin lay beside a cap. Above the doors of several, a small cross was set, dating from the Russian influence when the Orthodox Church sent missionaries among the Indians. A chill breeze shivered the long grasses, and in the waning light the little houses and their offerings of faded finery were pathetically forlorn. We turned to go. Our young driver proved a gallant squire and from the road I looked back
to see him in cheerful conversation with Miss Marion as arm-in-arm they
slithered together down the steep path. Previous Chapter | Next Chapter
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