I hiked the Great Chilkoot Trail!

Hello all!

I have now completed the one adventure goal that I had for myself this summer. This last weekend I hiked the Chilkoot trail which is an old miners trail that thousands of prospectors heading to the Klondike gold fields took back in 1897 and 1898. The trail is 33 miles and starts at Skagway's old competitor- a ghost town now, called Dyea and ends up in Bennett City, British Columbia. Back in the day the miners began at Dyea and began the 500 mile trek to Dawson City, Yukon. But they first had to get over the mountains before they could get to the lakes where they could build boats and transport their goods a lot easier. The ironic thing about the whole trip is that once they did manage to make it to the many lakes in Canada, it was winter, the lakes were frozen and they were stuck!

But back to the Chilkoot. It's 33 miles long, and my friends and I hiked it in 4 days. Some extremely motivated people complete it in 1 day, but in order to get the most out of the experience we decided to take our time and enjoy ourselves.

The trip went like this. Day 1, we started out at 10:30am after an orientation at the Parks Service. We finally ended up at Sheep Camp at 7pm, after stopping for quite a few photos and snacks. This day was the most difficult in my opinion. We hiked a total of 12 miles and were struggling with our heavy packs. At Sheep Camp it began to rain and we ate dinner, despite almost burning down the food cabin and tried to get some sleep.

Day 2: We hit the trail at 8:30am, despite the Park Rangers' suggestion of hitting the trail at 6am.... oops. This day we hiked a total of 8 miles.

We hiked and could tell that the famous Golden Staircase was coming up. We gained elevation quickly and by noon we were up and over the staircase. If you haven't done research on the Chilkoot Trail, do it! The staircase is a 40 degree angle of boulders that the miners carved steps in the snow in order to get up and over it. The crazy thing is that the miners climbed the staircase an average of 40 times each!!!! We only did it once, with relatively light packs and were pretty exhausted at the summit. But the reason the miners had to do this in 1898 was because they needed to have 2,000 lbs, yes, an ENTIRE TON of goods in order to cross the border into Canada. There were no trains, no hired helpers, and no light camping stoves.

We were up and over the staircase and the summit around noon. The conditions on the staircase were absolutely horrible. But we loved every minute of it! It rained all day long- well a light drizzly really that had us drenched by the time we reached our camp for that night. Happy Camp. It's well named isn't it? Oh, and the wind blew all day long as well. Pushing us sideways as we're crawling on all fours up the boulders to the summit. We felt so hardcore for climbing in these conditions. It was so incredible to make it to the top and cross an international border on foot! So we crossed into Canada and continued on our way to camp. The trail flattened out after the summit, but with the rain refusing to stop, we were drenched. Our shoes and feet were soaked and we had to cross so many little streams to get to camp that we finally gave up trying to be dry and just walked right through them. But we finally made it and spent the next 24 hours at Happy Camp.

Happy Camp was very full that night, only 50 people are allowed on the trail at one time, and the warm up cabin was very crowded with wet, smelly people. It was like a very smelly sauna in the cabin, which is only for warming up and cooking, not sleeping. That night the rain continued to come down and we sleep like logs in the tent.

Day 3: We left Happy Camp very late, about 2:30pm because we knew we only had about 5 miles to go today. So we had breakfast, attempted to dry our clothes on the propane stoves and hit the trail once more. And then a miraculous thing happened. The sun appeared just as we were starting out. And it continued to shine the rest of the journey! We slowly made our way to Lindeman Camp and spent the night next to Long Lake. Everything has such original names up here! The camp was the first one we'd been to that had a wood burning stove in it and we had an amazing feast of backpackers food, which included chocolate cheesecake and apple cobbler for dessert..... and went to sleep in the tents one last time.

Day 4: We hit the trail around 8am to hike the final 7 miles to Bennett City. The weather was gorgeous again but we knew that we had to keep on pace because we needed to catch the train back to Skagway that afternoon. At this point in the journey we had gotten quite used to our packs, which were lighter by the day and we made it to Bennett City by about 11am. It was one of the most beautiful sights I'd ever seen. The last mile of trail was through the Carcoss Desert, considered the "smallest desert in the world" although its not technically a desert. It was quite difficult to hike through the sand in hiking boots, but we were so motivated to get to our destination that it didn't matter. Once we arrived we saw the old church at Lake Bennett and the beautiful lake itself. After 33 miles of trail, heavy packs, rain and 4 days without a shower, WE HAD MADE IT!!!! We were greeted with a cauldron of beef stew and a spectacular train ride back to Skagway. What a way to spend the weekend! If you want to see more pictures I have two albums posted to my facebook page!