Day 13 - End of the Road

En route to Carcross, the Yukon

I planned to stay in Carcross for my last night in the Yukon. The map showed a town and online searches a hotel. After 400 miles of driving, I was tired and hungry, Eiger was restless, and it was nearly 5 pm when I drew up to a crossroads. To the left, it signed Skagway and the U.S. border, to the right Whitehorse. I turned left. There was a railroad station that said Carcross in old-fashioned type, a shut-down visitors center, half a dozen old wooden cabins, dirt alleyways that led to a frozen lake, old boats pulled up on the shore, all covered in snow.

At a fork in the road stood a three-story building, the tallest around, with large windows more elegantly styled than the rough-hewn vernacular around me. I parked the car. No one was about. I crossed the road. There was a sign on the building that read "Hotel" and another above the door that said "Restaurant". I tried the door. It was locked. I could see a single light inside. I walked under the fire escape around to the other side of the building.

Caribou Hotel, Carcross (closed for business)

Two men sat in deep conversation before a fire surrounded by tools, construction materials, tables and chairs. I knocked on the window pane. They looked up and a burly man dressed in clay-brown dungarees and a red-chequered shirt stood up and lumbered across the bare floorboards to open the door.

"Yes, ma'am?"

"I'm looking for a room for the night. Are you open?"

"Not until May, but the owners have been saying that for two years."

"Online it said .... Oh well, So, is there a motel in town?"

He laughed. "No one stays here. Tourists just come for the day. You'll have to head up to Whitehorse." I felt weary.

"Or Skagway." He signaled to my left. I looked at the mountaintops emerging through swirls of snow.

"Do you know whether White Pass is open?

"Should be. Not much snow the last two days. Border's open until 8pm. It's 30 miles to Skagway."

I thanked him and left and drove out of this no-stop-light, no-store, no-place-to-stay type of town that would barely be worth a mention on the map if the Klondike gold rush had never happened in the 1890s and the tourists over a century later didn't come here to taste the hardships of the prospector's life. I had thought this hotel was where Donald Trump's grandfather made the family fortune, serving fine food and fine women to the 100,000 stampeders who survived the brutal snowstorms of the Chilkoot and White Pass to reach Yukon gold. But I later learned it was short distance away, in Bennett Lake.

I drove west from Carcross into a harshly wonderful beauty: frozen lakes on either side of me and mountains rising all around created an amphitheater of whiteness in swirling snow. Clouds shifted and broke and patches of pale blue emerged and lit up the tall spruce trees. I walked Eiger beside a lake and started out, climbing on the two-lane road.

Heading to White Pass and US border

The trees quickly gave way as I gained elevation and banks of snow taller than my car lined White Pass. In a pull-off about five miles out of Carcross there were camper vans and Winnebagos parked for the night. I wondered if they knew more about conditions of the pass than I but figuring my options were limited -- a night in the car at 20 degrees even with two down sleeping bags did not sound to me like the best move. I pushed on.

The higher I climbed toward the pass, the more the visibility shrank. The wind snatched drifts of snow from the banks and threw it across the roadway. My car was holding the road well and I kept a steady pace even as the pavement shrank to one lane, the other lost to drifts of white. There were no other cars. I climbed steadily at 30 mph. After about twenty minutes, the Canadian border came into sight. I was waved through without stopping. The road climbed higher into snow-laden clouds and then began to descend in twists and turns. I could see a metal barrier through gaps in the high snow banks and wondered about the drop-off. I felt as if the mountains had closed in on me. All I could see was the gray tarmac ahead and one white line. I followed it slowly, descending around wide bends to the U.S. border. The agent was a flabby man, fat undulating beneath his uniform and of a physique quite unsuited to the rigors of these ghostly mountains, He asked a few desultory questions and waved me on.

I descended in wide arcs through the narrow slit of mountains until the spruce and hemlock trees began rising above me again and I got enticing glimpses of the railway line that connected the Yukon gold rush to the outside world. Finally, one-story bungalow styles houses began to line the road, which opening out into a flat valley. I was entering Skagway.

There were no motels. I had taken it for granted, after driving over 3,000 miles across America, that there would always be one chain motel on the outskirts of a reasonably sized town that merited a mark on the map. Not in Skagway. I stopped at a bar to inquire. Bearded, tatooed young men wearing beanie hats and dressed in hiking clothes were solicitous and told me where I could pitch a tent out of the wind and rain. By now it was 7 pm and the light fading.

Tired and hungry, I called the AirBnB I had booked for the following night and explained I had arrived a day early. "I have one room left, but you'll need to come immediately, Someone else has inquired," she said. The wind and the rain were beating down hard on the windshield by now. I drove a few blocks to the edge of town to The Frog Palace. It had little models of frogs all over the garden but the apartment was warm and cozy, I settled into my little room with a bunk bed that felt like a ship's cabin and slept. We were almost there.