Skagway

Our cruise ship peers up the main street of Skagway.Our visit to Skagway began with a tour of the Jewell farm, which made its reputation in growing vegetables—particularly rhubarb—for the “stampeders.” The stampeders were hopeful but unprepared would-be gold miners of the Yukon gold rush in the late 1890s.

The owners of the farm have created a lovely garden, including this little area which is a nod to the “ladies of negotiable affection” in gold rush Skagway.

Up close through the doorway of “Lilly’s and Daisy’s” façade: Note the cleverness with which the nasturtiums have crawled into their bed and the boots have filled up with forget-me-nots, the Alaska state flower.

Many of the flowers in the Jewell gardens are edible including the begonia petals, which tasted rather citrus-y.

The zucchini cake, served with a berry sauce in the greenhouse café, was decorated with yellow petals from these sunny-faced posies.

Here’s the largest wildlife we saw in Alaska so far, with the exception of seagulls and some distant mountain goats. Every flower we photographed seemed to have a fly or mosquito crawling in it.

The gardeners have a clever eye for design. The garden is planted so that it resembles a very large set of flowers when seen from the air. And as you can see, these vegetables are planted on the diagonal.

Behind the gift shop is a glass blowing workshop. How this was determined to fit with the farm I don’t know, but it makes for a very pleasant and educational visit. That glass bowl sells for about $225.

The latter half of our day was spent on a White Pass railway trip up the route taken by the stampeders.

The railway climbs up steep mountainsides where many men and horses sacrificed their lives in a greedy rush for gold. If you click on the picture and look carefully, you can see a cruise ship parked down in the harbor.

It’s hard to tell what the scale is from the following photo, but the narrow trail looks like it would barely fit my two feet side by side. Men traveled this trail 15-20 times round trip in order to transport the supplies they needed to the top of the pass, and from there via boats down to Dawson Creek in the Yukon.

Here’s our train traversing the White Pass area. The elevations is only 2865 feet at the summit, but the snow drifts were over 50 feet deep during those gold rush winters, the worst winters ever, as remembered by the native peoples.

At Fraser, British Columbia we hopped off the train, boarded a bus, and headed down the Klondike highway back to Skagway.

Back in Skagway, where two out of every three shops is a jewelry store (for some mysterious reason which never became apparent to me), we walked around and—unlike the stampeders both lucky and unlucky—left as rich as we came.