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ids. At Lindeman there is an interpretive exhibit, and a warden who displayed a stamped-
er's homemade crampon a bear looking for ants had dug up the day before.
The last day was a seven-mile hike over an up-and-down trail made mostly of sharp-
edged granite. It isn't fun, and neither is the last half-mile, a long hill up of sand. “It's a
good thing I have a can-do attitude,” Sharyn said, “otherwise I'd be in complete despair.”
If I'd known, I would have offered my body to the Lindeman City warden in exchange for
a boat ride to Bennett and eschewed the last day's hike entirely.
That night we were down to one freeze-dried package of Santa Fe Chicken. Fortunately,
the honeymooning couple had a package of corn tortillas they didn't like and gladly
offered us. The tortillas were dry and tough and ambrosial. Sharyn remarked on how clev-
er it was to get them to carry the tortillas for us all the way to Bennett Lake.
Bennett is where a tent city sprang up overnight in 1897, where the stampeders built
their boats to sail the seven hundred miles to Dawson and gold. There isn't much left but a
stove made of three sheets of rusted iron held together with bent nails, a lot of broken
glass, and St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church.
But at Bennett the earth rises up and folds in upon itself in abrupt granite inclines and
precipitous descents of rock and boulder and shale that I did not have to climb, only ap-
preciate. The lake is a narrow, inland fjord, made a grayer blue than the pass lakes with
glacial silt. The sun was reluctant to set, painting a lingering glow on the mountain faces
raised to it.
I felt as if I had walked backwards through time. The same mountains and lakes and
passes that we crossed, the same path we walked are in the photographs of the time. The
trail is strewn with the debris of those who went before us, shoes (“Another damn shoe”
Len says), boats, stoves, boilers, saws, cans, machine parts.
Did they look up, the stampeders? Did they look up from their packs and their sawpits
and their boat building, from their frantic preparations for the last leg of the journey to the
Klondike gold fields? Did they look up and see the beauty of the mountains, of alpine vale
and sapphire lake and rain forest, of hanging glacier and endless sky and rushing stream?
I hope so.
Okay, that's it. No more tent camping for this girl. No more hauling tents, no more
pitching them at night when I'm already worn out by the day's hike, no more striking
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