Luckily few people had any reason to travel from the Port of Valdez into Alaska’s vast interior. Those who did faced a thoroughly daunting challenge. They faced subarctic weather; and, much worse, they faced range after range of virtually impassable glaciers and mountains.
But then came the gold strike on the Klondike. Luckily no longer applied.
Outsiders flooded into the Subarctic North through Skagway and up over the Chilkoot or White Pass to Canada and on to the Klondike via the Yukon River–difficult and dangerous enough. Then it occurred to steamship companies to promote the “All American Trail” (absurd on the face of it since the Klondike lay safely across the border in Canada) An increasing flood of outsiders found their way to the Port of Valdez via Prince William Sound, planning to make their way north over the Valdez Glacier.
Good luck with that.
Those who came to try that route suffered unimaginably, died in droves.
Captain W. R. Abercrombie of the United States Army had experience in Alaska; knew exactly what the Valdez Glacier Route meant; reported what he knew to his superiors. In 1899 the Army dispatched him to Valdez to construct a “Trans-Alaskan Military Road” from there north to Eagle on the Yukon River—just a few miles from the Canadian border and the Klondike. In that first year, Abercrombie’s small command scouted their route around the glacier and built 93 miles of trail out of Valdez.
The trail, suitable only for men on foot and pack animals, didn’t amount to much, but it proved vastly better than the route over the glacier and traffic flowed right behind Abercrombie’s soldiers.
Through Keystone Canyon, right out of Valdez. They build a series of switchbacks up the wall of the Canyon 700 feet above the Lowe River on the Canyon floor then followed a ‘bench’ to the end of the canyon at Thompson Pass.
Towering rock cliffs punctuated at intervals by cascading waterfalls, Bridal Veil and Horsetail, closed in on them from both sides as they cut into the cliff. Along the ‘bench’ nature helpfully provided thick brush—Alder and a tree the men called “devil’s clubs”, bristling with sharp spines. The snow bent the trees down all winter and when the snow melted, they remained bent, projecting out from the cliff wall. The men struggled for footing on crumbling dirt, hundreds of feet above the canyon floor, cutting away brush to clear a path.
Abercrombie and his men completed their trail to Eagle in 1901.
A Copy of Abercrombie’s Report