Skagway is the smallest borough in Alaska, located in the narrow valley of the Taiya Inlet. It consists of a main street where the ship towers over the port at one end and the green mountain dominates the opposite end. I snapped this picture midway up another mountain that overlooked the town.
Skagway was created during the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898 and reminded me of what a saloon town might have looked like with wooden clap-board buildings painted in bright blues, greens, yellows and reds. You can walk the town in ten minutes, but we took a tour in a bright yellow bus.
Martin Itjen came to Skagway during the Gold Rush and served as the undertaker, Ford dealer and coal delivery man after the miners moved on. Using one of his coal trucks, he provided a tour of the town for Warren G. Harding in 1923, and as a result, became the local storyteller, using his truck as a “streetcar.” The three bright yellow buses of today are original from the 1920’s and driven by women dressed in costumes of the mining era. Each offered dramatic commentaries on the secluded location and difficulty to travel to other towns, history of the gold mining and folk lore of the town’s famous “Soapy” Smith, the local crime boss and con man – subject of my next blog.
Skagway is also the home town of Sarah Palin. Her father moved the family from Idaho to Skagway where he worked as a teacher. We rode past her small house on one of the narrow side streets.
We were only in Skagway for a short time but the thing that impressed me the most was the remoteness and crisp, bright colors of the buildings, even the tour bus. The population is less than 1000 people and travel to the next town, ten miles away involved driving over one hundred miles up and down the mountains for supplies. So, when the winter comes, many visit families in Florida or hibernate with wine, books and DVD’s.