Maybe It's Fun to Be Insane

Today I finished my morning's work, then drove over to Dyea. Skagway gets all the press as where the gold rush filtered through, but really, until the White Pass & Yukon Route got its tracks laid, more of the miners started in Dyea, a couple miles west of here, because it was closer to the Chilkoot Pass trailhead.

The big problem with Dyea is that the ocean there ends in a massive mud flats. Miners would get off the boats, throw their gear onto the mud, then run, back and forth, trying to get everything to solid ground, before the tide came back in. For a while there was a pier, close to a mile long, but it wasn't all that wide and it wasn't all that helpful.

Not a whole lot's left of Dyea: some boards where the warehouse used to be, a few other scraps of wood that were once buildings. Further up the trail, there were towns with 20,000 and more people in them, now vanished without a trace.

You had to get to Dyea in the winter, because you wanted to be at Lake Bennett, at the top of the pass, before the ice broke, so you could build your boat and be ready to take the Yukon up to Dawson City.

It was 25 degrees in the ruins of Dyea today. Everybody I'm meeting is telling me winter hasn't even started this year. The river was half frozen, there was a dusting of snow on everything, and the mountains north are huge and jagged and pure, pure white.

Now, imagine facing that in canvas clothes and with a ton of gear that you have to get over the pass.

Official estimates are that of the nearly quarter million people who headed for the goldfields, fewer than fifty got rich from gold strikes.