Kayaks, Trains, and a Little Bit of History

Skagway. Hum. Skagway. By any other comparison, this would have been a great port and a great day. But after our amazing day in Juneau ... well, it was just okay. Maybe the crazy stoopid early arrival and crazy stoopid early excursion (6:30 am!) took a little bit out of us, too. And the weather was cold and dreary. Sort of like the gloom we've been wallowing in for the last month here in Dayton. Gah, S.A.D, anyone? (raises hand)

Anyway. Our bleary-eyed early arrival into Skagway. It's a tiny town on its own: its year-round population hovers around 850, double that in the summer for all of the tourism-oriented employment. And, in my opinion, it would not be anything more than a blip on the map that cruise ships motor right on past if it were not for the deep harbor and channel that most towns in SE Alaska do not possess. The deep harbor is also why it was an important town during the gold rush; big ships were able to carry passengers, equipment, and such into Skagway and prospectors could then make their way through the mountains and into the Yukon Territory of Canada to try their hand at gold mining/panning/one-in-ten-thousand-strike-it-rich-chances. So most of the excursions in Skagway were in one way or another related to the gold rush, and most centered around a ride on the White Pass and Yukon Route train, a narrow-gauge railroad that, at one time, served the gold rush crazies entrepreneurs. There were options to combine a train ride with gold panning, hiking, and other things, but Nick and I chose to combine ours with some kayaking on a glacial lake just over the border into the Yukon. Because the train ride itself is fairly slow, because for anyone but the geekiest train geeks a one-way ride is enough, and because there is this lovely modern highway (the Klondike Highway) that could get us up to up to our kayaking destination in a little over half an hour, we were bused up to the unnamed lake near Fraser.

The weather sucked (see? Told you) but the mountains were beautiful:

The driver kept pointing out bits of the trail to the summit at White Pass, nicknamed the Trail of '98, when they were visible from the road. One spot that really stuck with me was Dead Horse Gulch, one of the most harrowing spots along the trail and one in which so many horses/mules died from either getting stuck in the mud or from starvation and overexertion that the prospectors had to just push the dead animals off the cliff and into the gorge below. When the gold rush started, officials in Canada were concerned that prospectors were showing up to the incredibly rural Yukon with hardly any provisions or supplies and people were dying from starvation and exposure in that first winter. So they put out the word that if you made it to the Canadian border, you would be turned away unless you had ONE TON of supplies with you. Horses became a hot commodity in Skagway, many of them too sick or weak to survive the trek. When they died ... over they went. Apparently, if you hike the trail, you can still see bleached bones from the carcasses. This was a really interesting article I found about the horses and Dead Horse Gulch. The article highlights one interesting point about the Trail of '98, which is that it was neither the shortest route to the Yukon (it was 45 miles vs the 33-mile Chilkoot Trail beginning just down the shore in Dyea) nor was it nearly as passable in adverse weather. But it was less steep. And it originated in Skagway, with the deep harbor. Something like 3,000 horses ended up in the Gulch in the four years of the gold rush (1896 to 1900).

Once past the summit at White Pass, it was a couple downhill miles into Canada and then prospectors reached a series of lakes on which they could build crude rafts that could float them and their ton of supplies down to the hotbed of gold activity at Dawson. Our stop was one of those lakes:

The kayaks were ready and waiting for us -

We got suited up in the "aprons" that fit over your lap and keep you from flinging water into your kayak (definitely needed on that cold morning!), and got out there to start paddling.

There wasn't even a question about it - Nick was in the back and I was in the front. These sea kayaks have steering pedals that control the rudder, located GUESS WHERE. In the back. And we have been married long enough to intuitively know that Nick controlling those pedals and me telling us where to go would result in maximum enjoyment by both of us. =)

The lake was cold (COLD! It's GLACIAL, and all) and our fingers started to get a little chilled, but the mountain scenery was enough to keep us paddling.

I loved seeing these teeny tiny Sitka Spruce. When I commented on them to one of our guides, she said that they were probably hundreds of years old. The rocky ground and harsh weather at that elevation keeps them miniature and they have to utilize all of their energy just to put out those sad-looking tufts of needles at the top!

Before we knew it, we were heading back to the beach to get ready for our train ride down to Skagway. We climbed out of our kayaks, wiggled our way out of the aprons, grabbed a cup of hot chocolate, and had a few minutes to enjoy the scenery. The whole shoreline of the lake was covered in fireweed, the ubiquitous summer wildflower of Alaska. We heard someone call it the summer doomsday clock, because it begins blooming at the beginning of summer, continues to bloom higher and higher on the stalk as the summer progresses, and by the time the final blooms are turning to seed, it's almost time for winter (otherwise known in the lower 48 as "October").

The train arrived at the stop and we meandered over to board our car.

The conductor was nice enough to pose with his train for us:

We were told our car was nicknamed the "party car" although the reason is unclear. It's definitely a special car - the only one of the line that is unnamed. Well, that's not true - it IS named, but it's the only one that doesn't have its name painted on the side. All of the cars are named for lakes that the train line passes along the route - 211 is named for Goat Lake. It's also one of the oldest cars still in service, built in 1918 (its windows were smaller than the modern cars and still had mostly original glass that was slightly wavy). And it's the only car with a cupola still used by the railroad.

In other words, our car was SOOOOO MUCH BETTER than your car. (nayh nayh nayh NAYYYH nayhhh)

Once we got going, Nick stuck his camera up into the cupola to get a shot of the top of the train. The glass was certainly not clear, but it's a unique shot:

It was so cool being near the end of the train (we were the second-to-last car), not only because we could look ahead and see the entire train stretching before us, but because we could look back and see the tracks behind us:

And yet we could use that last car as a photographic prop!

Each car had a small platform on the back and on the front, and Nick and I spent most of our time bouncing back and forth between the two, catching the views from either side. We weren't the only ones!

The empty last car -

We were so absorbed in the surroundings, we would lose track of where the other was standing, but occasionally one of us would change sides and get a nice surprise view of the other -

(Oh HI, honey!)

But most of the time, we'd just see strangers.

Maybe a third of the way into the trip down to Skagway, most people got tired of standing out on the platforms taking pictures and went inside their cars to relax and enjoy the views from the windows. But of course, me being as, uh, intense as I am (that's the polite way to say it, right?), I had to be out there taking pictures the whole time. Which means I ended up with a whole lotta shots to sort through in the picture-processing process. And I shoot everything in RAW, which requires manual development of the images in a digital darkroom (I use Lightroom and Photoshop CS2). It's quite a process. That can get tedious. Which is partially why it's taken me so long to get through them all! Anyway, I've gotten better at being more selective about the shots I take. I try not to take three or four of the same thing (which is what I used to do. I'd just snap away, thinking "hey, ONE of these must be a keeper!" And then I'd hate myself when I had to sort through 800 pictures.) and instead I try to be more careful about how I frame an image, what the light is like, envisioning what the result will be post-processing. And most of the time I just won't take the shot if I know it'll turn out subpar. But on vacation ... something else takes over. I don't get to choose the lighting or elect not to take a picture, 'cause I'LL ONLY EVER BE HERE ONCE! CLICK CLICK CLICCLICLICLICLICK!!! I take a ton of pictures, knowing the light is harsh, knowing that I don't have the luxury of bracketing my exposures and blending several shots in Photoshop (I'm on a moving, bumping train for chrissakes), and I do the best I can in manual mode to try and compensate for a foreground that will certainly be too dark and a sky whose highlights will inevitably be totally blown out. 'Cause these are our precious memories, dammit.

Fast forward six months, when I am sitting in front of a computer, irritated by how many pictures I took, frustrated at how bad the light was, and disappointed by how flat the colors are, how blown out the skies are, and how bland the photos are. And I get to the point where I say FUCK IT. Actually, I think it came out more as one word: FUGGIT. More like that. With a tinge of "Larry the Cable Guy" hickness. And I start doing crazy things to the pictures. I increase the clarity slider to +80. I drop the vibrance but up the saturation, or vice versa. I start applying different tones to the shadows and then go opposite on the color wheel and apply those tones to the highlights (aka "split toning"). I go crazy with the luminance sliders. I realize that Lightroom can do so many things I never knew it could. I start smiling again at my crazy FUGGIT pictures. And I think to myself that maybe I actually salvaged some of these lame pictures! Or maybe I just salvaged my sanity ... or maybe ... I did a little bit of both?

Commence the FUGGIT pictures.

Train gears, done with a sort of gritty effect:

Erin and Nick!

An old-timey effect, which seemed appropriate because of the fallen timber that littered the slope next to the tracks. Those logs just seemed so ... period.

We went through two tunnels that were created in the 60's when the original trestle bridges became too dangerous to use. The railroad itself wasn't actually completed until the gold rush was pretty much over, and it survived by transporting tourist passengers (at insane rates) and by carrying ore back from Canada. The drop in ore prices in the early 80's forced the railroad to suspend operation, but eventually increased cruise ship traffic in SE Alaska led to refurbishment of the railroad and now it is open for tourists in the summer months.

The original bridge over Dead Horse Gulch:

Another trestle bridge, STILL IN USE. Good lord.

One of my favorite Fuggit pictures, with the lines of the train and the vast mountain wall in the distance.

A quick view of the Trail of '98, marked to commemorate those who perished on the journey (and so that tourists on the train can go "SAY WHAAAA?" when they see how narrow and perilous it is).

The light through the clouds was very harsh, which left the colors pretty flat. With a bit of overall sepia toning and some super subtle split toning effects, I pulled out some of the hillside colors:

But I think this was my favorite of the Fuggits. I called Nick over when I was done playing with it and his eyes got wide and he nodded appreciatively. I don't even want to show you what the original shot looked like. It was blech. And no one ever likes knowing too much about the man behind the curtain.

Here's our adorable conductor again, checking out the route ahead and preparing for a stop.

This stop, approximately two thirds of the way down from Canada, was where we picked up a group that had done a "heli-hike," that is, a helicopter ride up to and a hike down one of the nearby trails. Nick and I had checked out that excursion but were disappointed that it involved so little of the train ride. Turns out, it missed most of the good scenic stuff.

The heli-hike passengers boarded that empty last car and we settled back in for the rest of the ride into Skagway. One of the heli-hikers was a woman, Lisa, who we'd met earlier in the cruise. After we got home, she emailed me this picture she'd taken:


I love that picture!!

Once we reached Skagway, Nick and I were both surprised to realize that it was only 11:30 am. We'd had a very full 5 hours! The boat didn't depart until 6 pm, so we had the whole afternoon to wander around town. We stopped over to check out the White Pass and Yukon Route train station and the historic cars displayed nearby.

The original, historic caboose:

One of the original steam train engines:

When the line still ran in the winter, the tracks would often be covered in feet and feet of snow. They had these huge snowbuster ("snow fleet") engines that could plow right through the snow. Yes, dey're DIS BIG!

I don't how historic this sign was, but I loved the light on it. And after a day of crappy light, I went ahead and took the picture.

We headed to the cruise ship dock to go aboard, change clothes, and get some lunch before heading back into "town" (or whatever you'd call the "historic" area of Skagway), and we had the pleasure of seeing the White Pass Steam Train, a smaller chain of cars powered by the ancient steam engine, chug by along the dock, getting ready to depart for White Pass. Heaven for train junkies. They were backing up along the tracks:

And then they stopped and blew the whistle and Nick and I both knew what was coming. STEAM!

And not just a little bit of it, either. The plume went probably 60 feet into the air, maybe more (I'm not so good at gauging vertical distance) and the sound was deafening. Everyone near the docks stopped and watched in awe.

After lunch, we decided to take a short hike to Lower Dewey Lake. The sun had started peeking out and the temperature was on the rise, but it was a lovely afternoon for a hike. The steepest part had some concrete stairs, and I happened to notice this emblem stamped into the face of one of the steps:

Getting a bit closer to nature:

We soon realized that, up to that point, we'd stayed almost entirely on either the immediate coastline or on ice. But late July, up in the forest ... I started seeing mosquitoes the size of dinosaurs. FREAKIN' PTERODACTYLS. So when we made it to Lower Dewey Lake, we went "Oh, pretty!" and "Nice reflections!" and didn't dawdle too long. Because even though it was hard not to notice them landing on us, given the abrupt change in our centers of gravity, I'm pretty sure if we'd allowed one to actually sink its FANG in, it would have required a near-immediate blood transfusion. Blood-sucking needle-nosed condors.

So yes, the reflections were beautiful.

On the hike up, I'd seen a large pipeline following much of the trail. I figured it was connected to something, but I wasn't sure what ... it didn't seem to be connected to Dewey Lake ... so we took an offshoot of the trail and found the Skagway town reservoir! Unlike the lakes, the reservoir was that same silty milky green color that we'd seen all over SE Alaska, and it made for a cool reflection.

Having escaped safely from the vampires, we realized we still had HOURS to kill in town. So we wandered around Skagway. This was the part I could have taken or left. It was ... meh. Most of the original buildings from the gold rush era were either left to collapse or were pulled down after the collapse of the boom. There are a few original buildings that remain, and I will fully admit that some of the reading I did after the cruise about the history of Skagway was interesting. The lawlessness, the seedy characters, etc. But now it's a whole lotta shops selling tourist tack, capitalizing on an image of the town that probably never actually existed. Are we supposed to believe that the family-friendly burlesque shows that they put on for tourists have ANYTHING in common with the ones that would have appeared in a town full of lawless gold rushers? Gah. The Disney-ification of history.

I guess I just don't like being hit over the head with it all. I mean, GET IT? It was all wild-westy and gold rushy! Insert cynical face here.

But there were other interesting things about the town. There was signage for a walking tour that highlighted Tlingit heritage. You could go view the gold rush cemetery, saved from demolition after the gold bust. There was a microbrewery serving its own beer, brewed on site. Guess which one we did?

And there were shops that weren't at all historical, nor were they pretending to be:

And there were still hints of the gold rush era, like these "billboards" that had been painted up on the hillside. I read that Moe's Frontier Bar had closed its doors for good just months before we visited.

And then there was this weird, iconic building whose facade was comprised entirely of driftwood sticks. Bizarre yet fascinating.

I figured this picture said "Hey, we're in Skagway" just about as well as if Nick were standing in front of a sign that said "Hey, we're in Skagway."

The weather had been pretty junky all day, and it didn't let up during the sailaway. Our routing through the Inside Passage was based more on dock schedules than on taking the most direct route - we headed Southeast from Sitka to Juneau but then headed back North to Skagway before continuing South toward Ketchikan. So the beautiful weather we'd experienced in Juneau had not, apparently, gotten as far North as Skagway. On our sail out, we saw plenty of mountains and glaciers, but the day was so gray and hazy, the pictures were blah. This one, taken at the full 640mm that my lens provided, was the clearest image we got. Which isn't saying much. But the glacier itself was magnificent with its dramatic melt-waterfall plunging down the mountainside.

And we passed by yet another lighthouse (de rigeur for the Inside Passage) in the foggy grayness. Another Fuggit.

So, of course, the sunset was nothing to catch your breath over. But we watched dusk from a window in the lounge, sipping cocktails, while waiting for a window table for 2. And we had fun playing with manual controls on Nick's camera, forcing a slow shutter speed and trying to hold it still enough to get something other than a blurry mess. I like this shot in particular because of the silkiness of the water. It's a good way to remember the end of the day.