Chilkoot Pass

A pass crossed by 100 000 stampeders

In August 1896, three prospectors — George Carmack, his Tagish wife Kate, and her brother Skookum Jim — found gold in a small tributary creek of the Klondike river in the Yukon territory.

The news did not reach the outside world for almost a year, because the Yukon was sealed by winter ice from October to June. On 17 July 1897, the steamship Portland docked in Seattle with a press release that 68 returning prospectors carried a "ton of gold" in their luggage.

Within two weeks the Klondike Gold Rush had begun.

Over the next two years roughly 100 000 people set out for the goldfields. About 30 000 reached them.

The one-ton requirement

The most popular route to the Klondike crossed the coastal mountains via either the Chilkoot Pass or the slightly easier but longer White Pass. Both routes ended at Lake Bennett, where the stampeders built rafts to float down the Yukon River.

In February 1898, after a winter in which an estimated 3 000 horses died of exhaustion on the trails — the White Pass became known as the "Dead Horse Trail" — the Canadian government imposed a new rule.

Every prospector entering Canada via either pass was required to carry enough supplies for one year. About 1 000 kilograms total.

The rule was enforced by the North-West Mounted Police at the summit.

Climbed in single file

The Chilkoot Pass was too steep for pack animals on its upper section.

The final 600 metres up to the 1 067-metre pass was a slope of 35 degrees that had to be climbed on foot, with each man carrying perhaps 30 to 40 kilograms on his back. The full ton of supplies had to be carried in about 30 trips.

The photographer Eric A. Hegg captured the most famous image of the rush: a single unbroken line of dark figures climbing the Golden Stairs, the steps cut into the snow that had to be re-cut every morning. The line in the photograph contains perhaps 1 500 men climbing in single file at the same moment.

The town that vanished

At the foot of the Chilkoot Pass, on a small flat where the trail began, a town called Dyea sprang up from nothing in 1897 to perhaps 8 000 residents by 1898.

It had hotels, restaurants, saloons, a newspaper, a dentist, and three banks.

The Skagway railroad, completed in 1899, made the parallel White Pass route much easier. Almost overnight, the Chilkoot route stopped being used. Dyea began to lose population within months of the railroad's opening. By 1903 it was under 50 residents. By 1916 it was a ghost town, the buildings dismantled and shipped to other goldfields.

Today the town site is a small US Park Service interpretive area, the former Main Street barely visible as a clearing in the spruce forest.