newsminer.com

Deb Vanasse

Deb Vanasse

Deb Vanasse

Deb Vanasse

Deb Vanasse

Deb Vanasse

It’s midnight on a cool July evening, and I’m careening through Skagway’s Goldrush Cemetery, trying to find con man Soapy Smith’s grave before darkness swallows me up.

I’m a little spooked. Soapy was a real gold rush bad guy, worse by far than Fairbanks’ disreputable E.T. Barnette. I doubt his spirit rests in peace.

Weeds scraggle over Soapy’s skewed marker. At a respectful distance towers the monument to Frank Reid. They were both killed in their famous gunfight back in 1898, but with Reid’s fatal shot, a semblance of order returned to the Klondike.

Like Fairbanks, this country is brushed with the allure of easy money and sudden changes of fortune played out against the stunning backdrop of nature. I can’t imagine why it took me 20 years to make the connection — or the trip.

The trek to Klondike country isn’t tough by Alaska standards. It takes us northeast from Tok over the Top-of-the-World Highway, where purple fireweed sprawls over hills the way tulips blanket Holland — nature’s apology for fires that stung our eyes a few years back.

Three hours on the sky-skimming route, and we climb to a sweeping view of Dawson City. Cloud shadows dot the Klondike River, reminiscent of summer afternoons back home. A free ferry scoots us to downtown Dawson, where genuine historic charm trumps tourist kitsch.

We wander the boardwalks and stop by the Jack London Interpretive Centre to visit with curator and author Dick North. He’s one of my Dawson favorites. So is trekking to Discovery Claim on Bonanza Creek, exploring massive Gold Dredge No. 4, toe-tapping at Diamond Tooth Gertie’s Casino, and swigging a Sour Toe Cocktail at the Downtown Hotel. Yes, that knarly brown thing at the bottom of the glass is a real human toe.

A second Klondike. That’s how Japanese adventurer Jujiro Wada, at the bidding of E.T. Barnette, pitched Fairbanks goldfields to broke and disheartened Dawson miners back in January, 1903. Believers tramped hundreds of miles across winter snows to discover his claims were highly embellished.

Fairbanks got an influx of residents. Wada nearly got himself lynched.

From Dawson we head south to Tetcham Creek, stopping to admire a double rainbow stretching across the sky and a lynx bounding across the road. In the morning we launched from the tiny town of Minto, Yukon Territory, motoring two hours up the Yukon River to Fort Selkirk, a ghost town restored and maintained by the Canadian government and the Selkirk First Nation.

Little towns like this fell off the map all around the Interior: Vault, Chena, Cleary, Olnes, Gilmore, Chatanika. To go from church to school to store to hotel to Royal Canadian Mounted Police headquarters to cabin after cabin here, finding things pretty much as they were left, feels like a gift.

Aside from our riverboat captain and a small maintenance crew, we’re the only ones around. Perched on an old wooden wagon, we eat lunch surrounded by a profusion of wildflowers, watching the Yukon River snake past cliffs once used for target practice by bored Mounties.

After a night in Whitehorse, we’re headed south again, winding past rugged mountains and gawking at emerald-green lakes. In Alaska’s Klondike town of Skagway, dancing girls swing their legs from upstairs windows, calling us to a show that recounts the convoluted history of Soapy and his gang.

After a stop at the famed Red Onion Saloon, where doll-like replicas either prone or standing signaled the availability of various “ladies” back in Gold Rush times, we’re off to the townsite of old Dyea, launching point for the infamous Chilkoot Trail.

Nothing like the Chilkoot separated miners from their gold in the Tanana Valley. Some 30,000 prospectors made 20 to 40 trips each up and over the pass, packing the ton of supplies required by the Canadian government.

Not everyone succeeded. We walk in hushed silence past wild iris and sweet-scented clover to Slide Cemetery, where the remains of more than 70 victims of the Palm Sunday avalanche of 1898 are buried.

Leaving Skagway in the morning, just as the cruise ships nestle into the docks, we stop to watch Steam Engine 73 of the White Pass and Yukon Railroad as it chugs toward the mountains. Heading north, we linger in Carcross, a quaint town perched on the shore of Lake Bennett, where Chilkoot-weary miners happily boarded boats to Dawson City.

At the tip of Kluane Lake, we leave the highway for Silver City. Fortunes swung, and the settlement grandly named a city is now a tumble of ramshackle logs.

As storm clouds gather, we follow the meandering shores of expansive Kluane Lake. The Klondike wilderness is vast in a way that’s tough to fathom, even for a seasoned Alaskan. In the 186,272 square mile of Yukon Territory, there are only 31,100 people.

Bears have been raiding soapberries where we planned to camp, so we press on to Snag, a dot on the lend-lease route for aircraft transported to Russia via Fairbanks during World War II. Snag nudged Interior Alaska out of a North American record with a low of minus 81 degrees back in 1947. If it hadn’t been for the Russians, there wouldn’t have been anyone around to note the record.

The next morning at Buckshot Betty’s pint-sized cafe, Betty launches us toward home with hearty helpings of eggs, fried potatoes, and thick-sliced homemade bread. According to “The Ballad of Buckshot Betty,” our hostess takes on grizzly and moose while baking a mean pan of cinnamon rolls — all in a day’s work.

The Klondike’s more Betty than Soapy, I decide. For every con man lured by easy money there followed hundreds of hard-working men and women, from the Klondike to Fairbanks, who refused to let the swings of fortune keep them from the land they loved.

“The freshness, the freedom, the farness,” wrote Robert Service in “The Spell of the Yukon.” That’s what draws us to the Klondike, where the rush is long gone, but where real gold remains.