Skagway Is a small town on a fjord called the Lynn Canal.

In the winter it gets down to less than a thousand people. In the summer the population swells to 2,500 working in the town and, when there are three or four cruise ships in, to ten thousand more. Tourism, and the cruise ships, are big business.

The only highway from the Panhandle over the mountains and into the rest of the continent is highway 98, which runs between Skagway and Whitehorse, in the Yukon. It traverses White Pass, one of the two routes from the Panhandle to the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s. These days it is faster and cheaper to transport goods from Vancouver to Whitehorse by shipping them to Skagway by barge, then over the White Pass by truck. Skagway is just a distribution center. The residents drive to Whitehorse to shop, dine out, go to a movie and just be in the big city. It’s a five hour round trip, and to get to Whitehorse they have to cross the border into Canada. To come back, they have to go through customs as they return. At one point both Canadian and US Customs were open 24 hours, so returning from a night out was easy. Then Canada closed their customs point at 11 pm. US Customs followed suit. As there is a 1 hour time difference between Alaska and Canada the US border crossing now closes at 12 midnight.

Tourism to Skagway also comes along Highway 98. While the tourists who arrive by car are not as large in number as those who come by cruise ship, they contribute to Skagway’s over all economy.

Our day in Skagway included an excursion up to the White Pass along Highway 98, then back to Skagway for lunch, followed a wander through the historic district, designated a National Historic Site. There the old wooden gold rush buildings have been restored to their 1898 appearance. Though the buildings are old, Skagway is a modern town and the insides of most of the historic structures have been adapted to modern use.

The weather, which had been blue skies when we were driving up to the White Pass and back, turned dark and the wind picked up while we were lunching. By the time we’d finished wandering through town, the wind was quite strong and black clouds shrouded the mountains. Not an auspicious sign for our next stop: Glacier Bay.