The most dramatic, certainly the most romantic, event that ever occurred in the North Country, the great stampede to the gold fields of the Klondike, came down to tens of thousands of men and women facing the timeless challenge—the incredible difficulty of traveling through the subarctic north. Like all their historical predecessors, thousands of rowdy stampeders, wound up using and improving long established prehistoric paths.
Lake Bennett offered the most obvious access via the Yukon River. Ships could carry the stampeders to the small port of Skagway which, as the crow flies, lay only a few miles from Lake Bennett. Unfortunately, stampeders weren’t crows, and travelling those few miles meant climbing from sea level to the top of the coastal mountain range that towered thousands of rugged feet above Skagway.
Two passes exist through the mountains to Lake Bennett, the White Pass and the Chilkoot. In truth they are ‘passes’ only because it was humanly possible to traverse them. Standing at their bottoms today, looking up at the towering peaks that are billed as the entrances, a traveler is mystified. That these are ‘passes’ is certainly not obvious.
The ‘easiest’, the Chilkoot posed a brutal 3,789-foot climb—straight up from Dyea to the Canadian border. And the Canadian Mounties, faced with a rising death toll, made rules. No one would be allowed to enter Canada until he or she could show the Mounties at the top of the pass a ton of supplies.
The rushers hefted 150-pound packs, grabbed a stabilizing rope and climbed, single file, 3,789 feet up to the border; did it again; and again; and again, until their pile at the top weighed 2,000 pounds.