Chilkoot Adventure

Last Spring Break we were going crazy at home and decided to leave town. We got onto the ferry with our snowmachines to find an adventure. When we got to Skagway we realized our plan to snowmachine to a local cabin in town wasn't going to work because there was not enough snow to get there. So we went to a local outdoor store to get ideas and the lady at the store suggested to follow the Chilkoot trail backwards starting in Canada and go to a cabin that is on that trail. The end of the trail would have a bunch of snow because it is in a high mountain pass. The Chilkoot trail by the way is the trail that thousands of gold rushers took to get to the yukon where the gold was. It was a rugged and dangerous trail that many died attempting back in the day. Now it is a popular 30 mile hike that many people do in the summer. Here is Ben and the boys on the trail with our snowmachines. Ben's machine in the back has a sled with all our gear. It can carry all we need to make winter camping pretty fun.

This is Bradley, Clayton and I at the end of the trail where the prospectors built a huge church. This church is at the mouth of a big river and they had to wait here many months for the ice to break up before they could continue on their journey and it was like a small city during the winter months. Now this is the only thing left for miles and miles.

The flat white snowy area behind Ben and Bradley is the frozen river.


Eventually a railroad was built to take the prospectors up through the pass. The railway is still operating and we've thought of taking it in the summer some day.


Here is Clayton driving their mini-snowmachine. It doesn't go very fast (it had a governor that lets it only go 8-9 miles and hour. It started to drive us crazy on the trail to the cabin so we tried to mess with it to make it go faster. Unfortuanately our messing with it messed it up so that it would only go 6-7 miles an hour!! Eventually more messing with it got it back up to it's original speed. This past summer Ben bought a modification kit so that now the machine will get up to a peppy 15mph!)




Here I am on my machine.

I must say that the snowmachining on this trail was pretty easy and pretty fast compared to the snowmachining that we do in Juneau which is mostly mountain climbing.