years of operation. Also on the grounds is a section of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline for a close-up look. Today, visitors pan for gold at water-filled tables. Tilting the dirt-filled pans at just the right angle, the same way late 19th-century prospectors did, shakes out loose gravel and soil leaving behind bits of the heavier gold. In my case, I found several tiny nuggets that when weighed were worth only $9. “When you first see that flash in the pan, it really makes people’s eyes glitter and light up and they can’t helpwanting to come back for more and more,” says dredge guide Tim Lamkin. “Gold fever is a very real phenomenon.” The drive from Fairbanks to Skagway is about 700 miles, taking approximately15 hours along Alaska Route 2, which becomes Yukon Highway 1 and then to Yukon Highway 2, the Klondike Highway, just south of Whitehorse. On the Route of the Klondike Gold Rush Our helicopter smoothly glides through a stiff wind between green-topped mountain peaks, where waterfalls trickle down like icy fingers. I’m on a half day excursion from Skagway to the Meade Glacier, which from the air looks like a superhighway of ice bands snaking through the valley below. When stepping out, however, it’s a much
Panning for gold at Gold Dredge 8 in Fairbanks.
The Meade Glacier is fed by Southeast Alaska’s enormous 1,500-square-mile Juneau Ice Field from where stems the Mendenhall Glacier and many others. Hiking the Meade is a popular side trip from Skagway, one of the Wild West towns with saloons and brothels sparked to life by the Klondike Gold Rush in the late 1890s. Most who flocked to such towns, including Yukon’s Dawson City and Whitehorse, had dreams of getting rich. Instead, they endured extreme hardships—thieves, rugged trails, and perhaps most deadly, the minus 50-degree winter temperatures. Once the “Gateway to the Klondike,” Skagway is now a popular cruise ship port, its busy streets lined with historic gold rush-era buildings housing shops, museums, and restaurants. The 1888 Moore Cabin is the town’s oldest building; the Corrington Museum showcases ivory, whaling artifacts, and a mammoth tusk; and the Skagway Museum’s gold rush exhibit highlight the town’s notorious saloon owner and underworld boss “Soapy” Smith. The Red Onion Saloon, now a popular restaurant, still has the original floors, wallpaper, and some furniture in what was once an upstairs brothel. “A typical Saturday night in Skagway would have included a few gunfights, entertainers from all over the world, and a lot of men having a good time upstairs,” says Kelly Derrick, dressed as one Madame Ida Dunham while leading Red Onion’s brothel tour. “There was a lot of criminal activity— it was the last holdout of the Wild West.”
These deep cavernous holes in the ice are called moulins.
different view where it seems I’m walking on a frozen moonscape with the age old ice crunching under my studded boots. “We’re standing on 900 feet of ice,” says tour guide David Kramer as we grip pointed walking sticks to gain traction on the glacier. “It takes 100 feet of snowfall to create one foot of the ice that’s underneath us.” Kramer also shows us moulins—enormous holes reflecting an icy neon-blue-like tint fed by draining meltwater streams. “The water hits a crevasse creating a moulin that’s ripping down into the ice maybe a few hundred feet.” Rooted from the French word for mill, moulins can be enormous, reaching up to 30 feet wide and sometimes forming tunnels and caves.
18 COAST TO COAST SPRING 2016
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