A 38-Mile Jaunt

A 38-Mile Jaunt

4:00AM and there I was in the darkness of the early morning standing in the rain. It was more just a drizzle now but it was enough to soak me through…
I’d always wanted to see Alaska and now I was there spending a whole summer exploring, camping and hiking in one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. Skagway is a little town of around five hundred people right on the ocean surrounded by five thousand foot mountains on its three other sides, a quick five minuet walk and you were out of town. I couldn’t get tired of climbing through the dense rain forests thick with trees and ferns and moss covered rocks up toward the icy peeks well above the tree line. I’d hiked every trail on the map except one and here I was at the trailhead at four in the morning. “It’s been done before…it’s possible,” I kept telling myself to suppress the realization that the furthest I’d ever hiked in one day was around twenty miles. We started out jogging in our heavy wet clothes to get some distance behind us as neither one of us knew how long this would really take. Most of the hikers on the Chilkoot took three to five days to finish the hike we had until 6:00 that evening to catch a ride home on some highway across the border into Canada. It was cold and the sun wouldn’t be up for around a half an hour… It was amazing to have so much light. The sun would hang in the sky nearly the full day. Toward the summer solstice it would be dusk around one in the morning and then the sun would start to rise again by three. I found I didn’t sleep much using all the daylight hours for exploring. I could get a good hike in before work just after sun up and a good one at night even when I got off late.
The first sixteen miles when by quick we only stopped for a few powerbar or picture breaks and once in the middle of a patch of fat blue berries for an unexpected snack. We were only a half a mile from the pass but it was a beast. It’s known as the golden staircase a half a mile seemingly straight up, the Chilkoot was a famous Klondike gold rush trail thus the name. We passed some Swiss hikers toward the top of the pass around nine o’clock adding them to the dozens of others we’d passed to be the first ones over the pass that day. We were feeling good but knew we weren’t half way yet. The pass was also the Canadian border. As we dropped down into Canada the weather went south. It had cleared up and we’d even dried out but now we were getting wet again and this time in the snow. We nearly walked into a lake the visibility was so bad, even with the snow we only got cold when we’d stop to eat something. After a few more miles we hiked down out of the rotten weather. The terrain was amazingly different on the other side of the pass. The thick forests were all gone and it was a rocky desert with a few trees here and there. There were amazing lichens growing all over the rocks in all sorts of colors. After about fourteen more miles the trees began to thicken up and we left the trail and followed some railroad tracks for the last eight miles of our journey. With our sore feet the railroad tracks were a pain but I couldn’t slow down knowing the end was so close. I collapsed at the end of our trip and lie there on the ground waiting for my friend to catch up. Twelve hours and forty minuets after I’d started there I was somewhere in Canada lying exhausted on the ground in a gravel parking lot waiting for a ride home. As soon as I cooled down from the hike I began to shiver but I didn’t have enough energy to move around to warm up so I just lied there and waited. Some other hikers found us and gave us some hot chocolate, which saved us. I think I was in shock. Thirty-eight miles in twelve hours, that’s definitely the most I’ve ever hiked in one day and something I’m sure I’ll try to beat one of these day’s if I get the chance. Other than my feet swelling up the next day I felt fine. I was expecting to be sore but I was good enough to do another hike that night.
~Aaron 2000