Alaska Highways

  All the days have run together to create a montage of rivers, ragged far off mountains, and rolling forest of dwarf trees. The yellow dotted line connects the points, and in places the vistas are so immense, and the air so clear, that you can almost see the next point a hundred miles away.

From Watson lake we rode, we being two new friends Steve, and Dennis, to Skagway via the small town of Carcross. At Carcross the character of the scenery changes and the light takes on a sparkle, an almost magical quality that adds to vast landscape as it changes to high alpine. We ascend for almost forty miles through a landscape of bench lakes, meadows, and small wind combed trees bent by a cold wind the knocks us around. Above us clouds swirl around huge mountains with hanging glaciers. From miles away the wind blows a short lived rain shower at us. We cross White Pass, the modern equivalent to Chilkoot Pass, which is northwest, and the site of gold mining history. Then we descend a deep, steep walled canyon with waterfalls that cascade from dark gashes in its walls and that meet a roiling river in the canyons bottom. Then, in what seems like and impossibly short distance, we reach Skagway.