Aug 14 – Hiking around Skagway

We awoke to the sound of train whistles for the early morning tours.

It was a beautiful day. With a high around 25C, it made the hiking a bit hot but we weren’t going to waste a day like this.

Four big guys in town today. Two Princess ships.

and a Celebrity and Holland America.

It was a lot more crowded in town. How many T shirts and cheap jewelry can people buy?

In the morning we did a short hike around the point north of town to Smuggler’s Cove. We are so used to having trails to ourselves but I guess with 8000 or so extra people in town that is too much to expect.

We drove over and park by the airport and took the bridge over the river.

The view over the airport, up the valley, to the White Pass.

Jennie did some more rock collecting while I climbed on the rocks at the point.

And sat and stared out into the inlet for a while.

The only disturbance to the peace and quiet was the helicopter tours going by every half hour or so. There have been going all day and into the evening.

We had lunch and headed back to the RV to get reset for the next hike.

This one went up the mountain south of town. About 500 vertical feet up is a wide ledge or bench with a lake that you can hike around. Once you are up there is also a trail that goes over to the upper part of the falls that we were trying to get at the other day.

There are two ways up. You could take a “road” that headed east up towards the falls or a trail that headed directly up towards Lower Dewey Lake. The trail that went along at the top joined them both. We decided to go up the road, see how we felt and decide which way to go.

It is a bit more than a mile to get to the top but it was unrelentingly steep and hot.

Once we got up to the trail junction we were pretty tired. The trail to the falls continued to steeply climb, the end was still about 2 miles away and there was no exit so you had to come back. The trail to Dewey Lake looked flat. Guess which way we went.

After a short while we came to a Y in the trail. I got confused about where we were and we took a right. It turned out this trail was not actually on the map and all it did was go out to a viewpoint on the edge of the cliff. I am really glad we made this mistake because it gave us the best view of the day.

The cliff here dropped 2 or 300 feet straight down. Jennie wouldn’t even come close to it. I drew a little yellow box around our RV below.

We sat on this bench, had a snack and rested for a while.

Afterwards we backtracked to the main trail, continued on and eventually found the lake.

We headed back down the main trail. The description said that there was a viewpoint of the town part way up. This is the best we could find.

We would have been very disappointed it we had gone up and down and this was the best view.

Afterwards we headed into town to try and find some ice cream as a reward. We actually could not find a place selling snacks amongst all the shirt and jewelry stores. We had go to the IGA, get a carton of ice cream and bring it back to the RV.

Here is a shot from town marking our lookout. It doesn’t look that high but it sure felt it. It was nap time after we had the ice cream.

It’s kind of early but they say when the tops of the fireweed start to fluff up, then fall is coming.

Time to leave.