Day 5—Skagway

Purportedly the most photographed and/or painted lighthouse.  Ok, so once more.

The train cars ranged from 1890s to a few years old.

Ah, Sunday!  Finally a day of rest!  So rough doing all of these tours, right?  Today we took the White Pass Railway from Skagway (at sea level) about 21 miles to White Pass Summit, at about 2888 feet, where we turned around and headed back.  It was a nice, relaxing ride, with some great scenery and more than a few spots of shear rock face up on one side and shear drop on the other.  Some of the scenery was a little disappointing since there are fires in many places around Alaska.  Even though the Tongas Rainforest is the largest in the world (at over 17,000,000 acres), they haven’t had rain in over 11 days.  And a lightning strike about a week ago started a fire which the rains would have snuffed out is still putting smoke in to the air. 

Absorbing inputs for today's blog...

Minimal clearance!

Raging river way down below us!

Crossing a bridge around the bend.

Random flowers and backdrop in the smoke.

The railway came into operation in the 1890s and made it much easier to cross over these mountains in search of gold in Yukon.  I remember the old Alaska license plates with the white background and the black dots of people zigzagging up the mountain.  This is where that was.  We finally crossed the border into Canada (eh?) and looped around and it was all downhill from there!

Not a good place to be in the rain!

Typical scenery!

Flags for US, Alaska, British Columbia, Northwest Territory(?), and Canada (eh?)

One of the official markers along the US--Canada Border.

A bit of the old trail from the gold seekers. 
(It's hard to see because it's not much of a trail now or then!)

The old iron bridge.  Barely safe enough to walk across!

The same bridge...hard to get started crossing!

Bridal Veil Falls.  Much better without the smoke, we guess.

St. Therese Mission Church.

After the rail, we hastened over to a little mission church where Mass started at Noon.  Got there with a minute to spare!  After church, we meandered through the town, looked through a few shops, and found our way back to the ship for lunch.  It was an easy afternoon, and we did our Mensa Quiz, and then went to the Trivia for the day.  We came in third place for the Trivia.  Bummer.  We didn’t know the subtitle for Bambi and some song from Annie, nor the author of Peter Pan.  Oh well.

For dinner, we decided to try the French restaurant.  We had reservations for 7:30, and were seated with another couple.  It was a nice dinner, and we tried a few new foods.  The evening’s entertainment was a magician/comedian, and he was pretty good.  We had some good laughs and were impressed at a few tricks.  We closed out the evening with a night cap in one of the bars.  Cognac seemed the right cap for our French dinner.