The Chilkoot Trail

Thirty-three miles to the Klondike, made obsolete overnight in 1899

The Chilkoot Trail runs 33 miles through the Coast Mountains from Dyea, Alaska, to Bennett, British Columbia. Long before the gold rush it was a Tlingit trade route into the interior, and its name is a partial translation of the Tlingit Chilkoot Dei•yi, the Chilkoot-owned trail; the English name drops the ownership. As American settlers and the Hudson's Bay Company weakened the Tlingit trading system, explorers and prospectors began to use it.

The Klondike Gold Rush made it a highway. From 1897 to 1898 thousands of men, women and children made the journey from Dyea to Lake Bennett, the shortest, cheapest and hardest way to the headwaters of the Yukon; the rival White Pass from Skagway was longer but less steep. Because so many were plainly not going to survive the terrain and the weather, Canada's North-West Mounted Police let prospectors into the country only with at least a ton of gear, a year's supply. They moved it in relays from camp to camp, many paid Tlingit packers by the pound, and by the end five aerial tramways were hauling freight over their heads.

At The Scales, a weigh station with a tent city of six restaurants, two hotels and a saloon, freight was reweighed before the last climb. The Golden Stairs above took their name from the steps prospectors cut into the snow and ice to reach the pass, which marks the border. Many turned around at the sight of them and left their ton behind, and in the cold the snow has preserved it: wooden structures, a cache of prefabricated canvas and wood boats near the pass, and hundreds of other artifacts along the route.

The trail was obsolete by 1899, when a railway was built from Skagway along the White Pass, and Dyea was abandoned; by 1905 most of its buildings were gone. Bennett's St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church is the only gold rush building still standing along the way. The US half became part of Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park in 1976, the Canadian half a National Historic Site in 1987, and in 1998, the centennial, the two were joined as an international historical park. Today more than 15,000 people a year day hike, backpack or run it, the National Park Service and Parks Canada let no more than 50 backpackers start each day, and the trip usually takes three to five days.