Saturday 22 June 2013 Skagway, Alaska

No sleeping in today! We had a wake-up call for 7 am in preparation for an 8:30 departure of our excursion from Skagway. Our bus driver told us that the schedule for this year includes 27 cruise ships with 391 total visits. The first leg was a bus ride up past the White Pass summit (Canadian border), through a short stretch of BC, and into the Yukon.

His interesting commentary about points of interest, climate, glaciation, and gold rush history made the time fly by. We traveled at a leisurely pace and made a few stops for pictures and one at customs.  We arrived at Caribou Crossing tourist venue for a nice barbecued chicken lunch at about 11 am. The place began as a taxidermy museum started by a renowned taxidermist. The museum really was quite spectacular. Over the years, it grew to include many other attractions, including a gift shop (of course), helicopter rides, a petting zoo, a sled dog training facility that offers rides on four-wheeled carts, etc.

The weather in Skagway was overcast and cool. As we neared the Pass summit at 2888 feet, we entered the cloud and drove in fog for some time. Soon after passing Canadian customs the weather began to clear, becoming mostly sunny with high scattered to broken cloud with mild temperature. The vegetation near the summit was very stunted. Between the rocky terrain and the severe winters, it is a real struggle to survive. The snow whipped about by the strong winter winds acts like a sandblaster on the exposed tree branches leaving their tops misshapen and forlorn looking.

 

 

After an hour and a half at Caribou Crossing, we drove on to Emerald Lake, named for its bright green colour, although I did not find it all that green and certainly less so than lakes I have seen in the Rockies. We then turned back past the Caribou Crossing site to the nearby town of Carcross. The town was also once known as Caribou Crossing, but they shortened the name for convenience. We explored a display about paddle wheeled boats, but, due to a timing error on my part, we ran out of time for Celeste to visit the Sourdough Bakery.

At 1:30 it was back on the bus for the one hour trip back to the Canada Customs facility where we caught the famous White Pass and Yukon Railway for the trip back to Skagway. The two hour train ride was very scenic and interesting, again filled with commentary.

 

On our return to Skagway we did a little bit of souvenir shopping, returned to the ship, and made it to the dining room by 5:30. We sat with couples from North Vancouver and Florida. The Vancouver couple were about 80 years old and have been on about 25 cruises. They watch the cruise ships from their balcony. The Florida couple were probably in their 70s and were celebrating their 50^th anniversary, leading to extra dessert for our table. They didn’t even know they were going on a cruise until a week ago. They were trailering across the US to the northwest and were considering driving to Alaska. When they looked at a map of BC and saw the driving options, they decided to look into cruising and a few days later were on our ship.

After dinner, comedian Julie Barr performed in the live theatre. She was very funny. Her best bit was when she picked a 12-year-old boy out of the audience and told him all about how tough life was when we were growing up. We then popped up to the Crow’s Nest for a drink, followed by a return to our room to blog and download pictures.

Today was our longest day with sunrise at 4 am and sunset at 10:30 pm.

Weather: Skagway – overcast, temperature in the mid-teens. Inland – mostly sunny with high scattered and broken cloud, temperature around 20 degrees C, becoming windy and more cloudy later in the afternoon.