September 10, 2007 (Day Four): Skagway, Kayaking the Klondike Trail

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Monday, September 10 was, for most people, the start of their work week. You get up early, you shower, dress, and head off for work. Not so for us. We got up early. Real early. 5:30 in the morning early, maybe earlier. We had to shower, dress, get our gear together, order some fruit and rolls and yogurt and coffee from the ship's room service (nothing cooked was available before 7 am), and be ready to get our butts out to the pier as soon as they lowered the gangway. We were going to catch a bus to a train, take the train on a scenic excursion trip to the gates of the Yukon, and then paddle on a glacial lake high up the Klondike Trail.

Our first warning that we were "there" was when we glanced out our stateroom window and saw graffiti painted on a cliff directly outside our window. Not only had we not expected graffiti, we hadn't even realized that the ship had slipped up to the dock and stopped. The ship's thrusters were still running but the ship wasn't moving; as soon as we tied up and put out lines, even the thrusters turned off.

The graffiti, as it turned out, was part of a local cruise ship ritual. Every cruise ship to make a regular run to Skagway over the last few decades was apparently supposed to paint their ship's name and the year and often the name of the captain on a big cliff right next to the pier. Jay got a bit of a blast-from-the-past experience when he noticed the name of the MS Prinsendam, a Holland America cruise ship that sank off the coast of Alaska in 1980. The graffiti even included the name of the captain of the doomed ship, Cornelius Wabeke. The graffiti was from 1977, three years before the sinking. All 520 passengers survived, but it was an ugly mess. If you're interested, you can read about it here, here, and here. (The current ship sailing under the name MS Prinsendam is a successor ship, much larger than its sunken counterpart.)

We found our tour operator waiting beyond the security zone at the end of the pier and found that we'd forgotten one critical piece of gear: our passports. Since we'd be crossing an international frontier at the border between Alaska and British Columbia, we needed them. While drivers' licenses are good enough at most spots on the US/Canadian border, for some reason the cruise line insisted we have our actual passports with us. So, Jay had to run pell-mell all the way down the pier, half a mile, back onto the ship, back down to our stateroom, grab our passports, and run back all in ten minutes. No problem for those in good shape, but Jay wasn't even fully awake and he wasn't dressed for a track meet. He was more than a little out of breath when he returned. Thank heavens we weren't tendering in at Skagway; we'd have been out of luck if we'd had to send Jay back to the ship via a tender.

Our first item on the itinerary was a 25-mile trip on the White Pass & Yukon Route Railway, a narrow-gauge railway running from Skagway up the Klondike Trail through the White Pass and on into British Columbia and the Yukon. Our shore excursion description said we'd be paddling on Bennett Lake, which actually straddles the Yukon/BC boundary, but to Jay's dismay it turned out that we'd be paddling on Bernard Lake, which is comfortably and completely inside British Columbia. His hopes of being able to cross off another territory were dashed. Ah, well.

The WP&YR dates back to the turn of the 20th century and was used to haul gear and supplies and miners up from the docks in Skagway to the headwaters of the Yukon River where they could either board boats down to Whitehorse and the gold fields or they could continue on the train. Not that the train was there in the really crazy early days of the gold rush in 1897; the railway wasn't ready until 1899-1900. There's a paved highway through the Pass and on to Whitehorse now, so the train isn't really needed except as a tourist attraction. It certainly was scenic, though. Very steep mountains and clouds of mist surrounded us on all sides as we climbed up out of Skagway and toward British Columbia. You couldn't help but feel for the miners of a bygone era, having to take thousands upon thousands of pounds of supplies and gear on horseback and muleback and their own backs up the Klondike Trail just to be allowed into the Yukon by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who didn't want mass starvation of miners on their watch.

All too quickly, the train pulled in at Fraser, British Columbia, and a Canadian customs official came on board and checked to make sure we all had our proper identification. We were told where to go for each excursion -- the folks who'd be bicycling back down were to go here, the folks who'd be riding back in a bus were to go there, and we, we happy few, who'd be staying to paddle nearby Lake Bernard were to go over there.

Lake Bernard is right next to the rail station in Fraser. The lake surface is around 2770 feet above sea level, occupying a glacially-carved groove in the landscape. It's one of the many lakes that serve as the headwaters for the Yukon River, which flows north into the Yukon, then west into Alaska finally emerging in the Bering Sea. Absolutely incredible scenery, which more than made up for us not seeing much in the way of wildlife. It's hard to capture how beautiful everything was, using the narrow scope of a camera, but take a look at the panoramic picture below for a wider view.

A large trailer was parked next to the lake and next to that was the usual flotilla of kayaks, all waiting for the latest gang of cruise ship passengers to pilot them out onto the waters of the lake. We were met by two employees of tour operator Packer Expeditions and outfitted with the necessary gear. Some folks used spray skirts, some didn't. We chose to. Jay had the digital camera along and decided, after looking at the breezy conditions and choppiness of the lake, to put it in its waterproof housing suitable for underwater shots. This kept the camera safe and dry but unfortunately some of the shots he took were marred by large droplets of water which clung to the transparent housing, right in front of the lens. On the other hand, without the housing the camera would have been getting wet, so...

There were five tandem kayaks in the flotilla plus two solo kayaks operated by our tour operator. The day was pretty windy but the water didn't get choppy enough to call the paddle off, so in general we had a good time. Of the ten passengers on the excursion, it was obvious that four of them didn't have much kayaking experience. Fortunately, the tour operator had two guides with us and one was able to hang back and see to it that they didn't run into trouble. The rest of us forged ahead, with our kayak generally in the lead, thanks in all likelihood to our extensive experience paddling in windy conditions on Lake Champlain.

All in all, we had a good time. We were out on the water for only 75 minutes but in that time we paddled almost four miles, two miles up toward one end of Bernard Lake and then two miles back, rounding some islands as we returned to the launching spot.

Our return down to Skagway was much more ordinary than our trip up. We were met at the rail station in Fraser, across from the kayak trailer, by the same nice English woman who'd collected us at the pier and taken us to the train station for our trip up. She drove us all the way back to Skagway down the Skagway/Whitehorse highway and before we knew it, we were in sight of the fjord and the Vision of the Seas.

A lot of our fellow passengers were still getting off the ship when we returned. Some had slept in, had a leisurely breakfast, gotten their shoppin' shoes on, and were just heading in to town when we returned from our kayaking trip. Skagway, even moreso than Juneau, was a BARGAIN BARGAIN BARGAIN-hunter's paradise. One long street with a few cross streets, and in every shop window, a sign encouraging us to BUY BUY BUY because the season was ending and EVERYTHING MUST GO. Unlike Juneau, there was nothing else to the town. No reason to live there or work there once cruise ship season ended. While the jewelry and crafts for sale did look much more 'authentic' and in many cases had information about the actual artists and their cultural heritage, we found that in most cases the stuff we said "hey, that's pretty nice" about was priced outside the range we considered reasonable. When you a) have to cram your selling season into five months, and b) have plenty of gullible and low-sales-resistance cruise ship passengers to sell to, can you blame the merchants for pricing accordingly?

We did a bit of shopping, buying a couple of t-shirts that weren't incredibly tacky and picking up a couple little bits of jewelry, including one pendant Carole really liked depicting a sea otter on a chip of whalebone. Mostly, though, we just strolled around, looked-but-didn't-buy, and eventually, when tiredness took a strong hold on us, we found our way back to the ship. That early-morning wakeup and the hard paddling had robbed us of a bit of our get-up-and-go.

So we just showered, put our gear away, and put on our "smart casual" clothing for the dining room. A suit for Jay and a nice outfit Carole had picked up at Chico's in Burlington. Once again, we were pleased to find that the majority of the passengers had dressed in similar fashion; very few t-shirts and sneakers.

But after dinner, we were once again too tired to do much of anything. We skipped the evening's show and spent the evening in our stateroom. The next day was scheduled to be the day the Vision of the Seas sailed down the Tracy Arm Fjord and Jay wanted to be up and on deck when the ship started into the fjord at 7 am, so needless to say, another early-to-bed evening was called for.

Cruise Compass Newsletter: Day 4 of 7

Video:

White Pass & Yukon Route Railway (Recommended; gives a better sense of the trip than the snapshots below.)