We finally get to step foot on dry ground today. I love the boat, but I have to admit it will be good to walk on some good old fashion dirt. Shortly after breakfast, we join our group in the forward section of the third deck and are quickly put on a bus and taken out of town to a place called Carcross (short for caribou crossing). It is our tour guide’s final trip of the season and he was great. Turns out he is reporting to the Air Force in a couple of weeks for flight training in Texas and is leaving. His wife is also here with him and is driving another bus with the rest of our group.
We make several stops along the only highway (road) out of town. Lots of glaciers, mountains and lakes as we follow the old Dawson trail out of Skagway. Thousands of would be prospectors took this very path on their way to the gold fields hundreds of miles away. We entered the Yukon by bus and continued on to lunch at a small little tourist stop just outside Carcross. It had dog sled teams pulling buggies with tourist around and a small petting zoo. It also had some great ice-cream.
We watch a train come in to town to get turned around and we get our passports stamped (we are in BC at this point), but before we leave, our driver starts to tell us of the Carcross dolphins. Almost all of us are skeptical, but he and his wife both get out of the bus and start walking towards the water and clapping to call the dolphins. They get to the waters edge and then both jump in fully clothed and start jumping around in the water like… well, you know, dolphins!. We are all a bit shocked, but it is their last tour and this is Alaska, so it’s as good as a way of celebrating as any. They both come back to the buses and dry off a bit before driving us off to catch our train.
After about an hour, we pull up to a train station to catch our ride back to Skagway. The White Horse pass train is a narrow gage railway that served the minors in the years after the big gold rush. I was surprised at how many actual trains and cars there are as it is very busy and you see trains going back and forth all over the place. Most are restored to back to almost new condition and are a lot of fun to ride in and offer a fantastic view. The ride last about an hour and a half, with a couple of stops along the way to pick up some hikers. We pass back through US customs and take a quick walk through town before heading back to the ship.
Honestly, you can probably see all you want of Skagway in a hour or two as long as you don’t need to spend any time in the jewelry stores that are everywhere. The town has about 500 full time residences, but swells up to several thousand with workers for the tourist season. Add on top of that the three to five cruise ships that stop multiple times per week with several thousand people each on board and you start to see what drives the economy in this town. But in another month the snow will start to fall and this place will return to being a tiny little remote village.
Dinner tonight was in the Animators Palate and was pretty cool. After the meal, the entire wait staff put on a short show along with Fantasia Micky. The whole place went from black and white to color over the course of dinner. We were thinking about seeing a movie, but all of us are too tired and we retire early.
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