Into the heart of the Klondike

Sunset, Jan, 1998 by Jeff Phillips

Stretching my hunched back and aching knees in the warm afternoon sun, I debate the wisdom of washing yet another pan of gravel. A cool breeze rustles stunted aspens struggling on the edge of huge mounds of gravel - tailings left by monster dredges. The goldfields win no prizes for scenery. Streambeds throughout the Klondike River drainage are riddled with these long ridges of gravel that look like tracks of giant prehistoric worms. Few of the scrubby spruces and firs dotting the low hills behind the scoured river bottom are taller than I am.

Whispers of wind carry the distant rumble of tractors at one of the small mining operations still scraping enough pay dirt from the Klondike to make a living. Turning away from the gritty landscape, I scoop another panful from the eroding bank of the trickling stream, but I have to laugh.

Even now, 100 years after the last and largest gold rush in American history brought more than 200,000 dreamers and schemers to Alaska and the Yukon, the lure of the Klondike is strong. Not as strong as a century ago, to be sure, but powerful enough to have pulled me north over the old Trail of '98, armed with a shiny new pan.

Still, as I stoop again to rinse some more gravel, I can't help but wonder about those original stampeders: how could so many have charged off on what was so clearly a fool's errand?

It's hard to imagine the impact the Klondike discovery had on the nation in July of 1897 when the steamship Portland pulled into Seattle with more than 2 tons of gold in her hold. To a country in the midst of one of the worst economic recessions in its short history, the news wasn't merely electrifying, it was nuclear. Seattle Mayor W. D. Wood resigned to join thousands of other gold-fevered argonauts cramming aboard any craft willing to take them north. They shipped out, as Robert Service wrote, "fearless, unfound, unfitted." Most headed up Alaska's Inside Passage to a mudhole called Skagway, trailhead to the goldfields.

Like the original gold seekers, contemporary Skagway visitors still arrive by water, although the vast majority step off luxury cruise ships. Huddled at the mouth of a narrow glacial valley, Skagway is hemmed in by steep, heavily forested mountains, whose sharp, snowy peaks are nearly always hidden behind prevailing marine overcast. Although the main street is now paved, weathered boardwalks still edge false-front shops and once-elegant Victorians that have somehow survived the ravages of nearly 100 harsh winters.

Steve Hites actually looks forward to the peace and quiet those winters bring. "This is the real gold rush," he says as tourists fill Skagway's streets on this five-ship summer day. A tour operator and historian by trade, Hites knows all the classic Klondike stories, especially those concerning a thief and con artist from Colorado named Soapy Smith, whose gang ran Skagway until July 1898, when Soapy stopped a bullet during a dockside gunfight. "A town like this has its modern Soapys," Hites Says as we pass old storefronts now crammed with T-shirts, overpriced jewelry, and gallery-chain art. "We've just legitimized some of the flimflam."

Stampeders who made it past Soapy faced an even more formidable obstacle - crossing Alaska's rugged Coast Mountains to get to the headwaters of the Yukon River at Lake Bennett. The choices: 33 miles over Chilkoot Pass, or the slightly shorter but even more difficult trail over White Pass.

Most took the Chilkoot, which former Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park ranger Bruce Reed calls "the longest museum in the world." Today's hikers can still find ample evidence of the tens of thousands who trudged back and forth carrying their ton of supplies, 100 pounds at a time, up the near-vertical face of the snowbound pass. One, a 20-year-old Californian named Walter Starr, made this diary entry on March 19, 1898: "Temperature ranges from 15 below to 10 above zero. So far I have traveled 270 miles to move our outfit over 35 miles of trail." He still had a long way to go.

Although hundreds now backpack the Chilkoot for pleasure each summer, thousands more board one of the old olive green parlor cars of the White Pass & Yukon Route Railroad for the three-hour round-trip excursion to the 2,888-foot summit of white Pass.

Settling into one of the refurbished bench seats in a railcar still heated by an oil-burning stove, I watch the scenery slowly open as the train climbs 20 miles from the thick stands of hemlock and Sitka spruce behind Skagway to broad patches of flower-dotted tundra near the summit at White Pass. It isn't until mile 17 that the slopes recede briefly to allow long views back past Skagway to the icy ramparts of Exit Glacier and the Chilkat Range.

There was little time for scenery in the winter of '97-'98. By May of 1898, when an article in the first issue of a new magazine called Sunset enthused over "the immense magnitude of Alaska's rich domain," more than 30,000 men and women had lugged their outfits over the passes to Lake Bennett. while the Sunset article cautioned against "reckless haste that sacrifices health and jeopardizes life," argonauts camped in the lakeside snow were finishing more than 7,000 green-timbered craft that, when the ice finally broke up, would take them 575 miles down the Yukon River to the gold diggings of the Klondike River Basin.