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Skagway: Where the Gold Rush Never Dies
If you were going to visit just one town in Southeast Alaska, it should be Skagway. While other towns in the region make for great jumping-off spots, this tiny community is a destination unto itself.
Part of Skagway’s charm lies in its preservation: the Park Service has rescued some 15 buildings from the Gold Rush era, and today those historic relics make this small town—just 23 blocks long and four blocks wide—as authentic an example of 19th-century life as you’ll find anywhere.
Gold Rush fever truly lives on here. Yet even with the preserved buildings, it’s hard to imagine the lawlessness and hardscrabble life that prospectors faced when tens of thousands of them poured into Skagway beginning in 1897. Just three months later this sleepy town had become a city of about 20,000 fueling a treacherous trek to the Klondike gold fields. The stampede had virtually ended by the summer of 1899, but the short-lived event was to Alaska what the Big Bang was to the universe.
Today, Skagway and its population of about 800 attract more than 700,000 visitors each year who come to follow in the prospectors’ footpaths. It’s a memorable journey. Tour the National Historic Park buildings, then stroll along the boardwalks, window shop, and admire the town’s collective green thumb; come May and you’ll be knocked over by the scent of lilacs. And don’t miss one of Alaska’s best day trips: riding the turn‑of‑the‑century parlor cars of the narrow-gauge White Pass & Yukon Railroad. It’s a spectacular journey that climbs from sea level to 2,865 feet.
Adventuresome travelers may want to more closely approximate the gold-seekers’ struggles by taking a backpacking hike. The Chilkoot Trail, which begins about nine miles out of town in Dyea, is the highway to the Klondike. A 33-mile climb up and over the “Golden Stairs,” immortalized in Charlie Chaplin’s silent film, “The Gold Rush,” takes you on the stampeders’ route to the gold mines. It’s a commitment: on average, the trek takes five days to complete and requires a permit to cross the border. But you don’t have to do the whole thing. You can also take a shuttle to the trail head and set off for a day hike.
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