Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
We were triumphant at one crossing of the pass, but the stampeders had to haul enough
supplies to support themselves in Canada for one year without outside help. This amoun-
ted to about a ton of goods. Some of them had to climb the Chilkoot Pass thirty-five times
to bring it all across. Through seventy feet of snow, a glacier fall in September that killed
three, and an avalanche in April that took more than sixty lives, not to mention Soapy
Smith's gang waiting to rob and frequently kill them from Skagway all the way to the
pass.
Thirty-five times. I couldn't bend my mind around that number before I climbed the
Chilkoot. Now, I find it even more unthinkable.
We set out again, through a broad valley filled with a careless spill of deep sapphire
lakes and rimmed with wedges of mountain that seemed to have risen whole from the cen-
ter of the earth, chilling into single monoliths when they reached the surface. We passed
the Stone Crib, the northern anchor for the aerial tramway. It was beautiful, but the trail
here was a seemingly endless series of snow fields, boulder fields and creek crossings and
we were exhausted before we began. By the time we got to Happy Camp we were literally
staggering with fatigue. It was after five o'clock, we'd been hiking for almost eleven
hours, and the campsite, hewn from an alpine slope, looked like kitty corner from heaven.
The log at the Happy Camp warming cabin was filled with comments written by people
who hadn't had the luck of good weather. One man who crossed the pass the day before us
wrote, “I've never seen it rain uphill before.” I, on the other hand, was sunburned. Len's
group didn't make it in until after seven, and Sharyn said she had watched Len guide
someone step by step up the pass—”Okay, you're doing great, put your right hand here,
your left hand there, okay, terrific, now put your left foot here—” It turned out he had
three people in his group who were afraid of heights. His assistant, Deb, who has a moun-
tain goat somewhere in her ancestry, climbed the Scales three times carrying someone
else's pack. Happy Camp was the first time I saw either one of them tired.
Cara's group celebrated crossing the pass with Yukon Jack. “It seemed appropriate,”
she explained. I wished I'd thought of that.
The weather held, sunshine all the way to Lindeman City, a glorious hike that follows
first a mountain ridge with a view that puts you at eye level with the surrounding moun-
tains and then the narrow edge of deep gorge filled with a jumbled, tumbling mass of rap-
