Point of Entry? The North Pacific, the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean surround the unimaginably vast and forbidding territory of Alaska on three sides. The equally vast and forbidding wilderness of Northern Canada borders it to the east. For outsiders, Alaska offered no real point of entry before the turn of the century.
Until the turn of the century that didn’t matter much because Alaska offered little to draw outsiders. Then Skookum Jim and his crew discovered gold in the Klondike: and, quite suddenly a point of entry became a very big deal.
On one of the very few routes to the Klondike, gold seekers came by ship up the inside passage, climbed off the ship onto the mud flats at the port of Valdez. From the mud flats they confronted the towering Chugach Mountains–and the Valdez Glacier. The base of the glacier, folded by time and erosion, climbed abruptly between two enormous peaks separated by a deep cut.
The first prospectors loaded themselves and their sleds and pack animals and climbed up the gigantic glacier into the interior, and a lot of them died in the attempt. The glacier featured enormous accumulations of snow, as enormous as any in the world. Deep crevasses and avalanches swallowed and smothered men and women and animals passing through it.
Another Route–Yukon River Route
But the Klondike offered gold, and by hook or by crook miners came up over the glacier and on to to the Klondike, trailing suppliers, gamblers, hookers and thieves. The Royal Canadian Mounties came to keep order on their side of the border. The United States Army came to do the same on the Alaska side.