Day 96 - Skagway to Teslin Lake, YT

Back The Way We Came

As there was nothing out at Dyea, we returned to Skagway for breakfast and a bit of touring. Harry and Sally tired of the town before we did and left before us. We were both going to Teslin Lake, a campground we'd stayed in on our outbound trip.

After visiting the sites associated with the Klondike National Historic Park, we headed up White Pass, mostly paralleling the rail line. As we gained altitude it was, once again, a trip into the fog, but we went over the pass and out to sunshine. Beyond the pass was a stunning tundra valley of broken rock, lichens and stunted trees surrounding clear ponds. It was a much more rugged area than the tundra valley we drove through before descending into Haines.

We drove down to Carcross and the current end of the White Pass and Yukon Railway. There we stopped for for lunch by the SS Tutshi Memorial. The SS Tutshi was a paddlewheel steamer that was built at the beginning of the 20th Century as a cruise boat on the Southern Lakes by Carcross. After the gold rush petered out, the area became a tourist destination. Tourists would take ships to Skagway (just like today), then the railroad to Cacross and cruise on the lakes. The SS Tutshi was the queen of the fleet. It ran until the fifties then languished until the 1970s. A restoration was begun on the vessel and it was just about complete when, in 1990, it burned to the ground. They left the hulk in place and built a timber frame memorial that is an outline of the original vessel. It is basically the first thing passengers see when they arrive by train. 

The rest of downtown Carcross is for tourists with small shops and a Parks Canada Visitor Center with exhibits on the Chilkoot and White Pass gold rush trails to the Klondike.

While we were there, we also watched White Pass and Yukon scenic railway train arrive on its trip up from Skagway.

After Carcross we took the cutoff road back to Alaska highway completing our Alaska/Yukon circuit. We were now back on roads we took to Alaska. We will backtrack for about 200 miles to the Cassiar Highway just before Watson Lake. We stopped at the Teslin Lake campground for the night, catching up with Harry and Sally. 

We were spending the night here to allow Ellen and Sally to visit the Teslin Lake bird observatory and the fall bird banding operation. They did get to talk with the bird bander and stop by to look in on an attempted owl banding operation in the evening, but it was going to go on most of the night, so didn't stay long.