Our next stop was Skagway. This was my favorite spot, aside from the obvious tourist trap that it is. Skagway is simply a beautiful town. It is on the mainland and connected to the rest of North America by a road over the mountains and into the Yukon Territory. Skagway's claim to fame is the Chilkoot Trail, a national historic trail that was established in 1898 during the Klondike Gold Rush. All the stampeders made their way at some point through Skagway, and the town exists almost solely on tourist dollars from the cruise ships. During the height of summer as many as seven ships, each with 2000 passengers, can dock here in any given day. And they all want to see is gold rush Skagway. The town is basically a living breathing museum devoted to anything gold rush, including the very famous White Pass-Yukon Railway.

We stayed in a very pleasant hostel for one night before our big trip into the mountains.

Sam enjoying the spring snowshoe conditions

We wanted to get away from people for a few days, so we decided to rent a Forest Service cabin up in the mountains, at the snout of Laughton Glacier. To get there, we took the White Pass railway about 14 miles to Glacier Station, and they let us off. We had rented snowshoes from a gear store in town. We strapped on the shoes, shouldered our massive packs, waved goodbye to all the tourists on the train, and disappeared into the Alaskan wilderness. The snowpack was still 6 to 7 feet deep in the valley, so the going was slow, and the trail was all but obliterated. We found our cabin after much wallowing, took a three hour snooze, and relaxed the rest of the long Alaskan day away.

There was a silent presence outside the cabin. This was really wilderness. A mile or two up the valley was a high mountain pass and the Canadian border, followed by endless miles of unknown nothingness. Directly up the side valley from the cabin was the start of Laughton Glacier, which was fed from snows off the unnamed mountains of the Sawtooth Mountain Range. We could feel the cold air drift down the valley from this world of ice and rock. Temperatures dropped below freezing at night, but still we were blessed with beautiful blue skies.

The Sawtooth Range at Sunset

We hiked up to see the glacier the next day. Sam had never been close to one before, and she was awestruck at the scale and primal beauty of the landscape. The crevasses on the glacier were covered with too much snow for us to hike directly onto it, so we decided to hike up a high lateral moraine almost to the base of the north face of the mountain range. Snowy ridges swept down from the heights and dark, forbidding buttresses rested underneath them. We sat all day staring at the face, watching for small slab avalanches every so often as the sun tracked its short trajectory across this cold wall. We were blasted by intense solar radiation off the glacier, and subsequently fried. Like the sunglasses, I laughed at the notion of bringing sunscreen to the Southeast, silly me.

I studied every feature of the face, trying to convince Sam, and myself, that we could make a safe ascent of the ridgeline across the valley to within tantalizingly close distance of one of the smaller summits of the range.

Laughton Glacier Cabin

This was just foolishness though, and I knew it. It was fun to think about though. We spent three days exploring this valley, enjoying the comfort of the small cabin, eating, reading, playing cards, and watching for mountain goats across the valley on the alpine hillside. We saw several of them, my first ever.