Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A Time Machine Called the Chilkoot Trail
(Part 1)
What the HELL was I thinking?
—entry from Happy Camp log,
Chilkoot Trail
I WASN'T GOING TO
let anyone rush me. I wasn't going to let
me
rush me. I was going to
take it one foot at a time, one boulder at a time. I was going slow, I was going careful, I
was not going to slip or fall, there would be no Stabenow blood shed in the Chilkoot Pass
that day.
That was my plan. I slithered across the snow field to the foot of the Scales and got chest
to chest with a boulder taller than I was. Slowly, carefully, one fingernail at a time, I
thought my way over it.
One boulder behind me. A thousand to go. I stretched out a toe that was suddenly and in-
explicably prehensile for the next.
What the hell was I thinking, saying I'd hike the Chilkoot Pass with my friends Rhonda
Sleighter and Sharyn Wilson? I didn't even know what the Sheep Camp ranger meant when
she told us the pass was a class three rock scramble. Who was I, overweight, out of shape,
someone who voluntarily quit camping when she was twelve, who was I to think I could
hoist myself over a mountain pass which Henry De Windt had described in 1897 as, “diffi-
cult, even dangerous, to those not possessed of steady nerve?”
Plus, I was carrying half a tent, and at the end of every day of the five-day hike, I had to
help pitch it. Adding insult to serious injury, I then had to sleep in it, because there are no
cabins on the Chilkoot Trail, a situation I felt should be remedied. Preferably before I star-
ted.
I was an unhappy camper.
Again.
