Day 8, 6/28/2002, Sunrise 3:50am - Sunset 10:206pm, Temp @ Noon: 68º sunny skies
Skagway
Gateway to the Klondike Gold rush
My Yukon Jeep Adventure took me via 4-passenger Jeep over the same road which Dan biked down. There were 5 Jeeps in line with the guide in the lead Jeep communicating with us by radio (when it worked). The young lady who was driving my jeep said, “This road reminds me of the roads in West Virginia.” Of course this got MY attention. I learned she grew up in Aliquippa, PA, northeast of Pittsburgh, and took her nurses training in Steubenville, Ohio. What a small world! We “jeeped”, crossing over into Canada’s Yukon Territory, to the small village of Carcross, where we went off on an unimproved road to the summit. Here we stopped for refreshment (string cheese and crackers). We learned that the miners taking this pass to the Yukon had to take one-thousand pounds of provisions with them before they were issued a permit to look for gold there. Since they couldn’t carry one-thousand pounds at one time, they would carry what they could to the top, leave it hoping no one would steal it, and go back to the bottom to get the next load. As we viewed the surrounding wilderness, our guide read from “The Spell of the Yukon” by Robert W. Service.
I wanted the gold, and I sought it,
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy--I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it --
Came out with a fortune last fall --
Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn’t all.
No! There’s the land. (Have you seen it?)
It’s the cussedest land that I know,
from the big, dizzy mountains that screen it
To the deep, deathlike valleys below.
Some say God was tired when He made it;
Some say it’s a fine land to shun;
Maybe; but there’s some as would trade it
For no land on earth -- and I’m one.
You come to get rich (damned good reason)
You feel like an exile at first;
You hate it like hell for a season,
And then you are worse than the worst.
It grips you like some kinds of sinning;
It twists you from foe to a friend;
It seems it’s been since the beginning;
It seems it will be to the end.
There’s a land where the mountains are nameless,
And rivers all run God knows where;
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
And deaths that just hang by a hair;
There are hardships that nobody reckons;
There are valleys unpeopled and still;
There’s a land -- oh, it beckons and beckons,
And I want to go back -- and I will
Created by Anna Maxwell on ... Jul 15, 2002