Up the Mountain by Train

Two locomotives of the White Horse and Yukon Railway pull a string of passenger cars up a mountain, across a trestle, and into a tunnel on the way from Skagway, Alaska to White Pass. (Both photographs Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera, Panasonic 14-140  f3.5-5.6 Lumix II lens)

 

 We began our 2015 50th anniversary trip to Alaska by flying into Fairbanks, the northern-most point on our itinerary, and worked our way south via the Alaskan Railway, stopping first at Denali National Park and then at Anchorage, before going on to Seward.

At Fairbanks we took a riverboat tour. At Denali National Park we rode a tour bus that was supposed to take us to the base of Denali but was cancelled about halfway there because the mountain was covered with clouds and fog. (More about that later.)

At Anchorage we took a tour bus around the city, and at Seward, before boarding our Carnival Cruise ship to Vancouver we took a boat tour to see whales and glaciers. The glaciers were spectacular as they "calved" (great chunks of ice broke off and fell into the sea), but the whales failed to show.

The cruise ship stopped at various points along the Alaskan coast and various tours were available at all of them, but we mostly just got off the boat and walked around. However, at Skagway, we took a tour that, for me, was one of the highlights of the entire trip: the White Pass and Yukon Railway from sea level at Skagway winding through spectacular (and sometimes scary) mountain scenery to nearly 3,000 feet at White Pass. One of the scariest parts was that this is a narrow-guage railroad -- which means that the train was running along sheer cliffs on rails that are only three feet apart. (Standard rails are four feet, eight and one-half inches apart.)

 

 Even scarier: an abandoned trestle from an earlier route of the railroad.

The White Pass and Yukon Railway was begun in 1898 at the peak of the Klondike Gold Rush to connect Skagway with Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon, and facilitate access to the Klondike goldfields. It has been designated an international historic civil engineering landmark.

People close to my age may remember a radio program for kids called "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon," the adventures of a Canadian Mountie and his dog during the gold rush days in the Klondike.

Photographs and text copyright 2021, David B.Jenkins

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