Salon Wanderlust | The men who moil for gold

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R E C E N T L Y
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By Susan Hack
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(01/05/99)
Death in Antigua
By Steve Kettmann
A host family's tragedy tweaks the conscience of a traveler in Guatemala
(01/04/98)
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Where will people be traveling in 2000? Travel experts predict the destinations of choice in the new millennium
(12/24/98)
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By Zachary Karabell
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(12/23/98)
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By Bill Barich
A young writer in Florence encounters enduring lessons in art and love
(12/22/98)

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THE MEN WHO MOIL FOR GOLD | PAGE 1, 2
- - - - - - - - - -
"On your left!" The shout came from behind me, and almost before I could wheel around, a pair of skinny guys with fanny packs darted by on the path.
"How far are you headed?" I called after them.
"All the way to the end," answered one of the marathoners. "Should get there tonight."
"Yeah," agreed his partner, though he sounded somewhat less sure -- and more winded. "Wish us luck."
Hey, wish me luck, I thought. I had gone about six miles -- less than halfway to my earliest scheduled campsite -- and already I was cursing my packful of cooking utensils and century-old gold rush journals. The Chilkoot Trail, which introduces itself in a long, steep ascent through dense timber and over slippery rocks, has scant patience with dilettante hikers. Stories are common of feckless urbanites who don't get more than a few miles in before retreating to Skagway.
It's amazing that approximately 22,000 people -- most of them out of shape and excessively dressed -- struggled over this same terrain from the fall of 1897 through the spring of '99, lugging (in barely reasonable portions of 50 or 60 pounds) a ton of food and other provisions that Canada's North-West Mounted Police required them to bring into the Yukon for their own safety. With that burden, it "took the average man three months or more to shuttle his ton of goods across the pass," Canadian Pierre Berton explains in his seminal history "The Klondike Fever." Modern hikers usually complete the crossing in three to five days. I had allowed three. That would make the 33-mile trip challenging, I figured, but still leave me time to launch a few detours and enjoy views along the way.
The majority of stampeders came through these parts during the winter months, when snow hid most of the wildlife and plant species. Traveling in summer, I could see what they didn't -- myriad butterflies weaving drunkenly overhead, Stellar's jays yapping insistently from tree branches, blueberry bushes adroop with fruit and fields of fiddle ferns reeling in the breeze. Not to mention relics. Sprinkled the length of this route are rotting wagon wheels, rough-hewn logs and even shreds of boot leather -- all discarded beside the trail by gold seekers who'd deemed them superfluous or just too damn heavy to carry farther. While souvenir hunters have since filched many interesting artifacts, enough remain for the Chilkoot to have been labeled "the world's longest museum."
The most prominent ruins are at Canyon City, located across the Taiya River from the main trail and reached via a footbridge about eight miles in. This used to be a prosperous pocket-edition town with stores and saloons -- and a tramway that, in the spring of 1898, started hauling carloads of goods aerially all the way to the summit of Chilkoot Pass for a price. It was a promising innovation, but it came so late in the gold rush that it never made as much money as its backers had hoped. Left behind, and looking rather like a Victorian notion of a submarine, is a giant, rusted boiler from the tram's steam plant.
Both the American and Canadian park services have excelled in maintaining the Chilkoot pathway. Wooden steps lead up steep embankments. Footbridges leap across streams. Heritage markers stand where Klondikers once erected mini-settlements of hotels, restaurants and, of course, taverns. Those sites, now the sole spots where hikers are permitted to stay overnight, are usually identified by the presence of a crude cabin, where you can retreat from rain and the blitzkrieg campaigns of crepuscular insects.
One such site was my initial night's stop: Sheep Camp (13 miles). An early headquarters for mountain sheep hunters, in the late 1890s it grew into a real village, surrounded by tents "so thickly set," according to an old account, "as to prevent one passing between them." There I found the park service cabin already occupied by some of the 30 or so other people hiking this trail. I was forced to try to set up a fancy tent I'd borrowed in Skagway, only to realize I hadn't the faintest idea how it fit together. After I'd at least used up all the component parts, I called it done and trotted down to the Taiya for a good foot soaking. Word was that it might take 10 hours to travel from here to the next campsite, across Chilkoot Pass, so any time spent recuperating appeared worthwhile.
Eventually, I hung my pack over a tree branch, safe from voracious varmints, and curled up in my sleeping bag with my grandfather's well-thumbed copy of Service's verses. I was snoring before the end of "The Spell of the Yukon."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Early the next morning, I reached the base of Chilkoot Pass. Gazing upward, I remembered black-and-white gold rush-era photos of a seemingly endless human chain trudging to the top over crude stairs hacked into the snow and ice, each encumbered miner groaning in lockstep with whomever preceded him, nobody daring to step aside and rest, for it might take hours to find another space in that chain. No images better represent the hope and hardships of the Klondike rush than those do. Now it was my turn to make the same ascent, a century later.
Almost immediately I realized why, despite threats of frostbite and avalanches, stampeders had willingly ventured this way in winter. From Sheep Camp, the trail gains almost 2,800 vertical feet in 3.6 miles. With the snow melted away, surmounting this pass promised to be less a climb than a crawl over a 45-degree slope of scree and boulders not quite as big as Kansas. I was glad to hook up with a trio of friendly strangers, two women and a man, who were also bound over this mountain, for then I might have someone to tumble into if I stumbled.
Up we went, jamming our boots into narrow rock notches and grabbing hold of rusted wires that might once have carried telegraph messages over the pass. And whenever I thought our labors were ending, fog revealed another grim, gray peak. By the time my knee went bum and a cold drizzle began, compounding my misery, I still couldn't tell where on the mountain I stood.
Klondikers inevitably described this stage of the trail in their journals. "It is about as fatiguing a climb as could well be imagined," observed Julius Price. "I must plead guilty to being nervous, and was afraid to look back for fear I would fall to the bottom," wrote Lillian Oliver, who in 1898 left her ailing husband in the Midwest to brave this trail. A like fear gripped me each time my fingers slipped, or my toes seemed wedged permanently between rocks. Veteran alpiners might consider this a moderate-level climb. But I'm no veteran -- and neither were most of the 19th century prospectors who somehow completed 30 or 40 trips over this ground with their ton of supplies. More than a few couldn't do it, so they spun around and went home. Or shot themselves in despair.
It was a great relief when I caught sight of the Canadian parks service cabin marking the summit as well as the boundary between Alaska and British Columbia. There, gold seekers had paid Mounties a customs duty on their outfits -- all the crates of evaporated apples, cans of coffee and condensed milk, winter clothing, mining equipment and everything else they were packing north. It was a busy place a century ago. No longer. Catching up to my acquaintances, I discovered we were all too weary even to cheer our triumph, although the other male member of our group did find energy enough to fire up a celebratory cigarette. The rest of us just sat for a while, respecting the quietude, breathing in the damp edges of the dissipating fog.
With half the Chilkoot Trail left to cover, and my knee complaining relentlessly, I sympathized with those Klondikers who'd decided they could go no farther. I might have been tempted to screw a pistol barrel into my ear, as well.
Instead, I told my temporary companions to take off at their own pace, while I limped far behind, feeling rather cheated. The countryside north of the summit was so striking, filled with pellucid lakes, the mammoth bleak shoulders of mountains and broad canyons licked by great tongues of snow and ice. Yet every time I started to feel joyous or just a wee bit carefree, a wave of pain threatened to slap me to the ground. I tried to think of anything except my leg. I recited as many international capitals as I could remember. I plumbed my memory for the names of the 41 U.S. presidents, followed by the names of their vice presidents. When that last task became too frustrating (who the hell was Martin Van Buren's VP, anyway, or Rutherford B. Hayes'?), I sought to dredge up the names of the Seven Wonders of the World and as many Native American tribes as I could. Hungry from all that ruminating, I downed enough cashews from my bag to constipate me onto my deathbed. I sang every TV theme song that came to mind, at one point belting out a glorious rendition of the "Gilligan's Island" tune to some bewildered deer grazing a nearby hillside. When that got old, I read aloud from my grandfather's Service collection, finding that I could relate to the author's words as I never had back home in the city:

It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,
It's the forests where silence has lease;
It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It's the stillness that fills me with peace.

And so, employing this desperate combination of diligence and denial, I made it past Crater Lake, where the shoreline still shows the indentations of Klondikers' wagon wheels; past Happy Camp (20.5 miles), where a fellow wayfarer, watching me change the bandages on my blistered feet, joked, "You don't really need shoes over all of that, do you?"; past Deep Lake (23 miles), where I was forced to assemble my tent in a downpour and go to bed hungry because I was too drained to do so much as boil water; past Lindemann City, once a bustling tent community of 4,000 people, now best known for its excellent Chilkoot Trail interpretive center; and last, through spruce forest and over chortling streams to the southern end of Lake Bennett. There once rose the log town of Bennett, where gold rushers built boats they hoped would carry them another 550 miles north over the wide Yukon River to Dawson City -- and prosperity. Today, Bennett offers little more than a shuttered-up White Pass & Yukon railway station and a wooden Gothic Revival church that hasn't hosted a service since 1902.
"Hey, you made it," cried the Chicago woman with whom I had scaled Chilkoot Pass the day before. "We were taking bets on how long it would be before we'd have to send out a search party."
"You really know how to boost a guy's ego," I said, trying not to sound (too) bitter as I collapsed onto the steps of the depot, wishing that Bennett still boasted at least one of the myriad bars it had opened to stampeders. At that moment, I might have sacrificed moderately essential body parts for an ice-cold ale, something I could sip while awaiting the infrequent train from Skagway to pick me up and take me south again to Fraser and my bus connection to Whitehorse, present-day capital of Yukon Territory. The next day, I was set to fly from Whitehorse to Dawson City.
Lying there in the sun, my ears pricked for the wail of a train whistle, my nose filled with the dense scent of unwashed flesh all around me, I tried to imagine what my grandfather would have thought of this northern escapade. He'd probably have told me I should have been better prepared. He undoubtedly would have confirmed that I was a crazy fool for taking on Chilkoot Pass. But he would have been one envious SOB all the same, because I had done what he never could. Knowing that made my knee hurt just a little less.
SALON | Jan. 6, 1999
J. Kingston Pierce is a Seattle writer whose work has appeared in Travel and Leisure, Historic Traveler and Seattle magazine. He's also the author of "San Francisco, You're History!" (Sasquatch Books) and "America's Historic Trails with Tom Bodett" (KQED Books).


	T A B L E_T A L K Have e-mail, will travel. Share your favorite Internet bars from around the world in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk ___________________ Making travel plans? Visit barnesandnoble.com for all kinds of great travel book bargains! ___________________ R E C E N T L Y Vive la roller blade! By Susan Hack In Paris, Friday night has an all-new rite (01/05/99) Death in Antigua By Steve Kettmann A host family's tragedy tweaks the conscience of a traveler in Guatemala (01/04/98) Hot spots of the millennium Where will people be traveling in 2000? Travel experts predict the destinations of choice in the new millennium (12/24/98) Not finding God in Rome By Zachary Karabell At Christmas in the Eternal City, a seeker of truth discovers that sometimes the answer you don't get is the one you need (12/23/98) An innocent abroad, Part Two By Bill Barich A young writer in Florence encounters enduring lessons in art and love (12/22/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		THE MEN WHO MOIL FOR GOLD \| PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - "On your left!" The shout came from behind me, and almost before I could wheel around, a pair of skinny guys with fanny packs darted by on the path. "How far are you headed?" I called after them. "All the way to the end," answered one of the marathoners. "Should get there tonight." "Yeah," agreed his partner, though he sounded somewhat less sure -- and more winded. "Wish us luck." Hey, wish me luck, I thought. I had gone about six miles -- less than halfway to my earliest scheduled campsite -- and already I was cursing my packful of cooking utensils and century-old gold rush journals. The Chilkoot Trail, which introduces itself in a long, steep ascent through dense timber and over slippery rocks, has scant patience with dilettante hikers. Stories are common of feckless urbanites who don't get more than a few miles in before retreating to Skagway. It's amazing that approximately 22,000 people -- most of them out of shape and excessively dressed -- struggled over this same terrain from the fall of 1897 through the spring of '99, lugging (in barely reasonable portions of 50 or 60 pounds) a ton of food and other provisions that Canada's North-West Mounted Police required them to bring into the Yukon for their own safety. With that burden, it "took the average man three months or more to shuttle his ton of goods across the pass," Canadian Pierre Berton explains in his seminal history "The Klondike Fever." Modern hikers usually complete the crossing in three to five days. I had allowed three. That would make the 33-mile trip challenging, I figured, but still leave me time to launch a few detours and enjoy views along the way. The majority of stampeders came through these parts during the winter months, when snow hid most of the wildlife and plant species. Traveling in summer, I could see what they didn't -- myriad butterflies weaving drunkenly overhead, Stellar's jays yapping insistently from tree branches, blueberry bushes adroop with fruit and fields of fiddle ferns reeling in the breeze. Not to mention relics. Sprinkled the length of this route are rotting wagon wheels, rough-hewn logs and even shreds of boot leather -- all discarded beside the trail by gold seekers who'd deemed them superfluous or just too damn heavy to carry farther. While souvenir hunters have since filched many interesting artifacts, enough remain for the Chilkoot to have been labeled "the world's longest museum." The most prominent ruins are at Canyon City, located across the Taiya River from the main trail and reached via a footbridge about eight miles in. This used to be a prosperous pocket-edition town with stores and saloons -- and a tramway that, in the spring of 1898, started hauling carloads of goods aerially all the way to the summit of Chilkoot Pass for a price. It was a promising innovation, but it came so late in the gold rush that it never made as much money as its backers had hoped. Left behind, and looking rather like a Victorian notion of a submarine, is a giant, rusted boiler from the tram's steam plant. Both the American and Canadian park services have excelled in maintaining the Chilkoot pathway. Wooden steps lead up steep embankments. Footbridges leap across streams. Heritage markers stand where Klondikers once erected mini-settlements of hotels, restaurants and, of course, taverns. Those sites, now the sole spots where hikers are permitted to stay overnight, are usually identified by the presence of a crude cabin, where you can retreat from rain and the blitzkrieg campaigns of crepuscular insects. One such site was my initial night's stop: Sheep Camp (13 miles). An early headquarters for mountain sheep hunters, in the late 1890s it grew into a real village, surrounded by tents "so thickly set," according to an old account, "as to prevent one passing between them." There I found the park service cabin already occupied by some of the 30 or so other people hiking this trail. I was forced to try to set up a fancy tent I'd borrowed in Skagway, only to realize I hadn't the faintest idea how it fit together. After I'd at least used up all the component parts, I called it done and trotted down to the Taiya for a good foot soaking. Word was that it might take 10 hours to travel from here to the next campsite, across Chilkoot Pass, so any time spent recuperating appeared worthwhile. Eventually, I hung my pack over a tree branch, safe from voracious varmints, and curled up in my sleeping bag with my grandfather's well-thumbed copy of Service's verses. I was snoring before the end of "The Spell of the Yukon." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Early the next morning, I reached the base of Chilkoot Pass. Gazing upward, I remembered black-and-white gold rush-era photos of a seemingly endless human chain trudging to the top over crude stairs hacked into the snow and ice, each encumbered miner groaning in lockstep with whomever preceded him, nobody daring to step aside and rest, for it might take hours to find another space in that chain. No images better represent the hope and hardships of the Klondike rush than those do. Now it was my turn to make the same ascent, a century later. Almost immediately I realized why, despite threats of frostbite and avalanches, stampeders had willingly ventured this way in winter. From Sheep Camp, the trail gains almost 2,800 vertical feet in 3.6 miles. With the snow melted away, surmounting this pass promised to be less a climb than a crawl over a 45-degree slope of scree and boulders not quite as big as Kansas. I was glad to hook up with a trio of friendly strangers, two women and a man, who were also bound over this mountain, for then I might have someone to tumble into if I stumbled. Up we went, jamming our boots into narrow rock notches and grabbing hold of rusted wires that might once have carried telegraph messages over the pass. And whenever I thought our labors were ending, fog revealed another grim, gray peak. By the time my knee went bum and a cold drizzle began, compounding my misery, I still couldn't tell where on the mountain I stood. Klondikers inevitably described this stage of the trail in their journals. "It is about as fatiguing a climb as could well be imagined," observed Julius Price. "I must plead guilty to being nervous, and was afraid to look back for fear I would fall to the bottom," wrote Lillian Oliver, who in 1898 left her ailing husband in the Midwest to brave this trail. A like fear gripped me each time my fingers slipped, or my toes seemed wedged permanently between rocks. Veteran alpiners might consider this a moderate-level climb. But I'm no veteran -- and neither were most of the 19th century prospectors who somehow completed 30 or 40 trips over this ground with their ton of supplies. More than a few couldn't do it, so they spun around and went home. Or shot themselves in despair. It was a great relief when I caught sight of the Canadian parks service cabin marking the summit as well as the boundary between Alaska and British Columbia. There, gold seekers had paid Mounties a customs duty on their outfits -- all the crates of evaporated apples, cans of coffee and condensed milk, winter clothing, mining equipment and everything else they were packing north. It was a busy place a century ago. No longer. Catching up to my acquaintances, I discovered we were all too weary even to cheer our triumph, although the other male member of our group did find energy enough to fire up a celebratory cigarette. The rest of us just sat for a while, respecting the quietude, breathing in the damp edges of the dissipating fog. With half the Chilkoot Trail left to cover, and my knee complaining relentlessly, I sympathized with those Klondikers who'd decided they could go no farther. I might have been tempted to screw a pistol barrel into my ear, as well. Instead, I told my temporary companions to take off at their own pace, while I limped far behind, feeling rather cheated. The countryside north of the summit was so striking, filled with pellucid lakes, the mammoth bleak shoulders of mountains and broad canyons licked by great tongues of snow and ice. Yet every time I started to feel joyous or just a wee bit carefree, a wave of pain threatened to slap me to the ground. I tried to think of anything except my leg. I recited as many international capitals as I could remember. I plumbed my memory for the names of the 41 U.S. presidents, followed by the names of their vice presidents. When that last task became too frustrating (who the hell was Martin Van Buren's VP, anyway, or Rutherford B. Hayes'?), I sought to dredge up the names of the Seven Wonders of the World and as many Native American tribes as I could. Hungry from all that ruminating, I downed enough cashews from my bag to constipate me onto my deathbed. I sang every TV theme song that came to mind, at one point belting out a glorious rendition of the "Gilligan's Island" tune to some bewildered deer grazing a nearby hillside. When that got old, I read aloud from my grandfather's Service collection, finding that I could relate to the author's words as I never had back home in the city: It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder, It's the forests where silence has lease; It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder, It's the stillness that fills me with peace. And so, employing this desperate combination of diligence and denial, I made it past Crater Lake, where the shoreline still shows the indentations of Klondikers' wagon wheels; past Happy Camp (20.5 miles), where a fellow wayfarer, watching me change the bandages on my blistered feet, joked, "You don't really need shoes over all of that, do you?"; past Deep Lake (23 miles), where I was forced to assemble my tent in a downpour and go to bed hungry because I was too drained to do so much as boil water; past Lindemann City, once a bustling tent community of 4,000 people, now best known for its excellent Chilkoot Trail interpretive center; and last, through spruce forest and over chortling streams to the southern end of Lake Bennett. There once rose the log town of Bennett, where gold rushers built boats they hoped would carry them another 550 miles north over the wide Yukon River to Dawson City -- and prosperity. Today, Bennett offers little more than a shuttered-up White Pass & Yukon railway station and a wooden Gothic Revival church that hasn't hosted a service since 1902. "Hey, you made it," cried the Chicago woman with whom I had scaled Chilkoot Pass the day before. "We were taking bets on how long it would be before we'd have to send out a search party." "You really know how to boost a guy's ego," I said, trying not to sound (too) bitter as I collapsed onto the steps of the depot, wishing that Bennett still boasted at least one of the myriad bars it had opened to stampeders. At that moment, I might have sacrificed moderately essential body parts for an ice-cold ale, something I could sip while awaiting the infrequent train from Skagway to pick me up and take me south again to Fraser and my bus connection to Whitehorse, present-day capital of Yukon Territory. The next day, I was set to fly from Whitehorse to Dawson City. Lying there in the sun, my ears pricked for the wail of a train whistle, my nose filled with the dense scent of unwashed flesh all around me, I tried to imagine what my grandfather would have thought of this northern escapade. He'd probably have told me I should have been better prepared. He undoubtedly would have confirmed that I was a crazy fool for taking on Chilkoot Pass. But he would have been one envious SOB all the same, because I had done what he never could. Knowing that made my knee hurt just a little less. SALON \| Jan. 6, 1999 J. Kingston Pierce is a Seattle writer whose work has appeared in Travel and Leisure, Historic Traveler and Seattle magazine. He's also the author of "San Francisco, You're History!" (Sasquatch Books) and "America's Historic Trails with Tom Bodett" (KQED Books).