Stan...Connie & I along with Robert & Leslie left Carcross shortly after 8:00 for a day trip to Skagway (65 miles) not realizing that we would be gaining an additional hour once we entered Alaska, so we arrived shortly before 9:00 even after stopping multiple times in route for photo ops and also going thru U.S. Customs. Skagway is a wonderful small town with dock facilities to handle 4 to 5 cruise ships at a time if necessary.
Skagway is homebase for the White Pass & Yukon Route railroad and the first picture is of an earlier vintage snowplow engine used by the railroad to keep the tracks clear during the bitter winters. The White Pass Summit area (approx 20 miles out of Skagway) receives and average winter snowfall of 24 feet.
The Klondike Gold Rush only lasted 3 years (1897 - 1899) with approximately 100,000 adventurous souls coming thru Skagway seeking their fortune of gold along the Klondike River in the Dawson area (500 miles north). Many didn't survive the initial winter in their attempts to travel north up the Chilkoot Trail route or thru the White Pass route and were returned to Skagway for burial in the Gold Rush Cemetery as shown in the second picture.
Two of the cruise ships docked in Skagway are shown in the third picture taken from a vantage point on a trail across the river from the harbor area.
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