The daily blog of a tourist visiting the USA: Day 7 Skagway, Alaska

The daily blog of a tourist visiting the USA: Day 7 Skagway, Alaska

Our final port of call in Alaska was Skagway and today was a long day from 7 to 5. We were driven by our driver to the train station where we were dropped off, train tickets in hand. We took our seats on the train and after some time you heard the toot-toot and we chugged down the winding road up the mountain. We started at elevation 0ft and we in the course of three hours climbed up to 2,865 ft. The train followed this rail which was called the White Pass and Yukon Route and was called Railway of the world.

This railroad was built because of the Klondike gold rush. This was the gold rush that started when gold was first found in Alaska. Captain William Moore was one of the first to find gold over here and was hired by a Canadian survey party headed by William Ogilvie who was commissioned to map the 141 st prime meridian because the known route, Chilkoot Pass, was rough and rugged so they decided to take a different path. Their path was called the White Pass after the Canadian Minister of Interior, Sir Thomas White.  And when the gold rush started people used this white pass more than the Chilkoot Pass because it was simpler to carry all their belongings on this pass. And we were now on a train on this pass which has been in use since the early 1900’s.

On our journey to Fraser, Canada we saw a lot of trees and waterfalls and passed different points. Once the train stopped  to let some passengers of who wished to hike up the mountain. After two and a half hours we crossed the US and Canada border. When we entered Canada and  the landscape changed. The same mountains had now snow peaks. We then finally stopped and disembarked the train. Our bus driver had driven from Skagway here to pick us up. He then took us to the suspension bridge in Yukon.

The suspension bridge was built over a river and you might have guessed- it was suspended and attached only on the two sides. On the other side there were some informative places where we spent some time. We had some time so we visited the gift shop where we saw a toy train on a track on the wall going around. Since we had to get back to our ship, we climbed onto the     bus which would take us back to Skagway.

We were one of the first buses out so on the way we stopped at different places for a photo stop. We stopped at the border of the US and Canada and I literally jumped between the two countries. It was fun.

We got back to our ship by three and we had 2 hours before the ship left. After it left we started back towards Seattle.