Hitting the Pavement: Skagway, Alaska

The road down to Skagway had us feeling pretty burnt out so we decided to not do anything too significant. We stopped at the visitor center on the main tourist stretch, just to get our bearings. We found a place to shower, a place to do laundry and finally where we would be sleeping for the night. It was quite refreshing to get cleaned up and have a bag full of clean laundry (very smelly in the car).


View of the marina

Our campsite for the next two nights was the site of the historic Dyea township that was abandoned shortly after its boom during the gold rush. It is not that far away as the crow flies from Skagway but you have snake along the bay on a treacherous dirt road to get there. We set up camp quickly had some dinner, than off to sleep for both of us.

We woke up with plenty of things that we wanted to do. First stop was to the library where we set up an excel sheet to help with the American exchange and expenses for the rest of the trip. Than it was off to an early bird supper at Skagway Fish Co. Amy had some fish and chips, I had some breaded jumbo shrimp.
The rest of the day was spent in Skagway visiting the museum, eating some delicious fudge and having some sample beers at the Skagway Brewing company.

The visitor center at Skagway

Fisherman Amy

Restored gold rush bar/museum

There was four cruise ships in port while we were there. The foot traffic was pretty bad at times on the main tourist stretch. Sadly the weather gods were not on our side the whole time it was drizzly and the fog was too low to go on any of the hikes up into the mountains around town. So we decided to go back to Dyea and walk the trails around old Dyea Township. The graveyards was straight out of a horror movies with all the crooked markers and overgrown trees. The actual walk through the old town was just a walk through the woods. There isn't much for signs that a bustling town stood there.