On Monday morning, we got up at 4:15 AM and were at the ferry terminal at shortly after five, and we were the second RV in line. We had time to get breakfast in our camper before we had to board, which was again done very efficiently. The ferry ride was uneventful, although between slightly better weather and daylight, we saw a lot more scenery than we did on the way from Haines to Juneau. For the return trip, we stopped in Haines, but then proceeded on to Skagway. We had been told we could get the dogs out of the camper and walk them in Haines, but with the efficiency of the parking on the car deck, we didn’t have room to squeeze between the camper and the semi trailer next to it to get the dogs out, so they had to cross their legs and wait for Skagway. That turned out to be a good thing for us, because instead of walking the dogs we watched the loading process in Haines, and saw another traveller named Andrew who we had been meeting up with periodically through Alaska getting on the ferry. We waited for him to get to the upper deck, and then had time during the hour sail from Haines to Skagway to catch up with him and find out what he’d been doing since the last time we’d seen him.
In Skagway, we exited the ferry and drove to the more inland of the two RV campgrounds in Skagway, which was an easy decision for us since the other was very near the cruise ship docks. Tom had to do a little work, and we had laundry to catch up, so we booked two nights at $10/night for a spot with no hook ups. We took the dogs for a walk and then went out for a delicious king crab dinner with beer at Woades, which, despite Skagway also being a cruise ship town, wasn’t quite as crazy expensive as it would have been in Juneau.
We spent Tuesday morning with Tom working online while I did laundry and worked on the blog. In the afternoon we took the dogs for a walk around Lower Dewey Lake, which we expected to be a made for cruise ship tourists perambulating path, but which was in fact a fairly strenuous hike up a mountain with over 800’ of elevation gain through dense pine forest and around an undeveloped lake. Because Tom wasn’t done his project, we booked a third night in Skagway, and when I told the campground host how much we enjoyed the Lower Dewey Lake hike, she suggested some more hiking trails on the other side of the docks, which we did the next day and found equally enjoyable and deserted. Skagway gets definite points for resisting the cruise ship mentality, since you barely need to be off the sidewalk before you’re in the wilderness. We can’t really imagine what it must be like to live in that very small town in the winter when the cruise ships aren’t docking, when the population of the town definitely can’t support all of the businesses, but at the end of the tourist season, they manage to keep the frontier town feel despite the influx of tourists.
We left Skagway in the pouring rain on Thursday morning and tried to make a stop at the Dyea village in the Klondike National Historic Site, but we got to an 11’2” bridge so we would have had to walk the last two miles in the rain. We decided that seeing lots of eagles on the way in qualified us to claim a park visit, as well as walking by all the Klondike National Historic Site buildings in Skagway, so we called it good and got on the road to Whitehorse.
