Skagway in our wake

Our getaway vehicle docks in Skagway Friday evening

Copyright 2006 Lydia Hinshaw

SOMEWHERE IN THE INSIDE PASSAGE, AK -- I’ve always loved starting a trip at night.
Other people are home eating dinners and dozing off in front of their televisions, and preparing for another day in the same place, but I will be somewhere else tomorrow, moving on to the next thing.
It never matters whether I’m heading for something new, or returning to some familiar and comfortable place. The appeal is the same.
Over the past few weeks Prince Charming and I have walked down to the docks in Skagway several evenings to watch ferries load and depart. Friday night, finally, it was our turn.
The lights of Skagway have blurred and faded in the distance and the Alaska ferry MV Taku will be our home for two nights and two days, until we drive ashore at Prince Rupert, BC, a place we’ve never been, to begin the long drive back to Florida.
Someday we may look back on our summer in Skagway with fondness and laughter, but now we just feel relieved and exhausted, as if we’d just completed a marathon. In the rain.
Hundreds of thousands of tourists spent 12 hours, give or take, in Skagway this summer and most of them found it to be a cute little waterfront town with troublesome weather and a curiously high concentration of jewelry stores.
One day is about the right amount of time to spend in Skagway. We were there nearly five months, and there were times when it felt like 10 years.
We arrived in late April to work as bus drivers and tour guides, having boned up during the winter and spring on the history of the Klondike Gold Rush.
We had gazed with wonder at the picture-postcard versions of Skagway on the Internet, the blue sky and 360 panorama of snow-capped peaks, the giant Harding Glacier looming over the harbor. Who wouldn’t want to spend a summer in a place as lovely as this?
We figured we’d spend our days off having Alaskan and Canadian adventures, roaming the mountains with backpacks, or cycling up the 14-mile mountain pass and then flying back down.
But adventure wouldn’t be adventure if it all went as planned. It rained out of low clouds our first nine days in town, and we couldn’t see any of those pretty mountains.
We spent our workdays washing buses in the cold, and our off-hours huddled near the propane heater in our tiny but pricey cabin.
Things got better. The weather improved, at times, but cloudy, rainy days were the rule rather than the exception all summer long.
When the cruise ships started arriving in the middle of May, we quickly learned that work would be the best and most fun part of our hitch in Skagway.
At work we took busloads of tourists over “the hill,” into British Columbia and the Yukon Territory, where the weather was invariably better, the scenery invariably stupendous. Unlike Skagway’s almost perpetually cloud-veiled peaks, the mountains in Canada nearly always showed us their faces, lovelier with each trip.
Our customers marveled and so did we. The drive north to Carcross, YT, never got boring. Every day, we saw some new view that was nicer than we remembered from the day before. Or the light painted a particular peak in particularly stunning detail. Or the lake waters went mirror-still to reflect the mountains and sky.
In four months, we saw four seasons in the Coast Range, from snow to the pale green of spring to the wildflower riot of summer. Finally, these last few weeks, the aspens and alders turned all shades of yellow, from neon to dull gold.
Back down the hill in Skagway, there was only one season: Rainy. But we enjoyed our co-workers, fun folks all. There were several excellent cooks who would prepare dinner for the lot of us on occasion. Sadly, we did not possess the culinary skills to contribute much more than nachos and salsa to these dinners.
Skagway is four blocks wide and 23 blocks long, as we told tourists every day, and this was the best thing about it. There wasn’t much of anyplace to go, but at least you could walk there. The laundromat was across the street. I took yoga and Pilates classes at the rec center, three blocks south.
The public library, which the Prince and I closed down many a night, was eight blocks away. The Post Office, the supermarket, the medical clinic (which we thankfully never needed), the airport, the cruise-ship and ferry docks, could all be reached easily on foot.
Our day-off adventures would be limited by the relentlessly bad weather, the minimal hiking opportunities locally and the distance to places where the weather, and the hiking, were better.
Our bikes stayed under a tarp all summer. Nothing in town was far enough away to warrant using them. And after two grueling trips up the pass, I found I had little interest in doing it again, perhaps because it was the same road I drove up as many as 10 times per week. Perhaps because I’m getting old.
By August, we had done everything we wanted to do in Skagway, three or four times.
We’d also traveled. We found great hikes in Haines, AK ($90 away by ferry), Atlin, B.C. (320 miles round trip) and Kluane National Park, YT (500 round trip.)
On our one three-day weekend, just before the Fourth of July, we’d driven 250 miles north up the Klondike and Alaska Highways to Kluane Lake, for two nights of camping in a heavenly setting.
We wanted to get back to Kluane, but there were no other three-day weekends. In late July we found ourselves unable to face another day off in Skagway, or another expensive ferry ride or another long weekend in the car.
That left Whitehorse, a city of 23,000, and the capital of the Yukon Territory. Whitehorse, 110 miles from Skagway, retains a frontier feel despite its collection of modern government buildings, its car dealerships, it’s pair of McDonald’s and its Wal-Mart.
Spend enough time in Skagway, and little Whitehorse begins to resemble Paris in sophistication.
We would drive to Whitehorse on Friday after work, check in to the tents-only Robert Service Campground for two nights and return to Skagway on Sunday evening.
Each weekend we’d find a hike to do, fish ladder to watch the salmon, take a drive to the local hot springs, update this blog at a favorite coffee shop, swim or ice skate or both at the brand new rec center, browse the bookstore on Main Street or the public library, and then, in the cool evening, sit by the campfire and enjoy the peaceful sound of the Yukon River rushing by.
Whitehorse was balm to sanity worn raw by endless rainy days in a professional cruise-ship town.
Finally, when we had just a week left, the weather turned perfect. For four straight days, the picture-postcard version of Skagway yanked at our heartstrings. We had complained about it all summer, but who would want to leave a place as lovely as this?
The cure came quickly enough, with the return of the clouds and rain, and finally, a trademark Skagway howling gale that celebrated our last day in town.
We'll never forget Skagway, but we're glad it's behind us.