December 24, 2022
I looked in horror to see Kathy sink in the snow, walking twenty feet in front of me. She was down to her waist before she stopped sinking. I lurched forward and flattened myself on the snow-covered field reaching towards her with my outstretched walking pole. With effort by both of us, she crawled out of the snow with a disbelieving smile on her face.
Deeply etched in my mind, this memory came back to me when reading someone on Quora – a question-and-answer website – that his most memorable adventure, after traveling in eighty countries, was skating on the Rideau Canal in Ottawa: the 3-mile-long canal frozen during the winter months. I have skated on the canal many times without getting excited over it.
In contrast, hiking the Chilkoot Trail stood out in my memory for its physical challenges, natural beauty, and dangers.
As soon as we decided on our hike, our daughter, Megan, and her husband Jerome from Baton Rouge, LA, and son David and his girlfriend Erica, Chapel Hill, NC, decided to join us. Our camping group increased in size when my friend Lloyd also joined us with his son Neil and Neil’s new bride, Alison. Neil offered the trip to Alison as a honeymoon and presented it like a walk in the park. Well, that was not to be, Alison was not in shape for heavy-duty hiking and did not have proper hiking boots.
We hiked the thirty-three miles long (fifty-three kilometers) Chilkoot Trail from Skagway, Alaska, to Bennett Lake in the Yukon in 2001. (The trail is famous for the Klondike gold rush when over a hundred thousand prospectors panned for gold between 1896 and 1899.) It took us five days of hiking and four days of wilderness camping to complete the trail, enjoying unparalleled scenery, from the coastal rain forest to alpine lakes to above the tree line.
At the trailhead, the park rangers gave us a lecture about grizzly bears and how to distinguish between predators and other bears, a fascinating subject to ponder on embarking on the trail; were the park rangers trying to scare us or merely educate us?
Although the rangers advised us not to use hiking poles because of the fragile ground conditions of the north, we brought along one pole each; a useful additional support on uneven terrain.
From the trailhead, we started on a gentle hill with a path not very well marked or visible, but full of roots and rocks. I found the ascent difficult with a heavy backpack on our back carrying our food for five days and camping gear.
Although most of us started to hike early in the mornings after a quick oatmeal breakfast, Lloyd slept in, and Jerome got off early with nary a breakfast and was always the first to arrive at our destination at night; he reserved the best sites at the camp for our group of nine.
We brought along large chunks of cheese for lunch that did not require refrigeration and had trail mix and chocolate bars for snacks. Our “happy” hour was when we arrived at the designated campsite and set up our tents. The freeze-dried food tasted delicious at dinner time after a hard day of hiking.
Since we had to fill up our large water bottles every day, I made a deal with Neil. He did not have a water filter and borrowed mine. In return, after filling up his and Alison’s water bottles, he filled up mine and Kathy’s.
Being in bear country, the rangers advised us to wash our dishes and utensils carefully after dinner. For the night, we packed up all the food and hung it in our backpacks from a rope strung high between two trees, away from our tents, to make sure that bears could not get to it.
On the third day of hiking, we arrived at the famous “stairs.” I thought there would be stairs cut into the rocky ascent. It was not. I read that during the winters, the stampeders cut fifteen hundred stairs in the ice to make it easier to climb up the slopes. We arrived at the “stairs” in September when there was no ice and the “stairs” were huge rocks, some over ten feet high, that we had to climb. We climbed for hours in a fog so we could not see where the top was. We just kept on climbing. When we arrived at the top, we were euphorious about accomplishing what we thought was a real feat.
Descending from the highest point in our trek on a glacier, Kathy suddenly sunk to her waist in the snow-covered mountain side. It seemed surreal to see her sinking, so I hurried over and lay down on the snow to get traction to reach and pull her out. She was soaked, and we hurried up to warm up. Walking over rocky terrain was a unique challenge; there was melting water among the rocks, and we jumped from rock to rock to avoid the water.
On the fourth day of hiking, we heard loud talking and singing behind us. David, Megan, and Erica were trying to make a lot of noise when they got between a mother bear and her two babies. The mother bear false-charged them. Megan and Erica backed away and David flailed his arms to make him look bigger until the bear moved away. Kathy and I hiked with bear bells clanging, and the rest of our party wore them as well after meeting the bears.
We returned to Skagway in the last car of the White Pass and Yukon Railway, free for the smelly hikers, to avoid mixing with the tourists from the luxury cruise liners docked at Skagway. On arrival we went to a pub to have a cold beer.
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