Our summer solstice has just passed and it’s been wonderful to enjoy the long days and short nights before that turns around into shorter daylight hours again. It’s made us think of our trips hiking in the north, where the days are longer still in the summertime.
It was back in the 1990s that two groups from Sooke took advantage of those long days to hike the Chilkoot Pass. It was in 1997, when I was 65, that my group of fellow hikers set out on the great adventure. Two years later, it was a group of younger hikers, the Chilkoot Chicks, that took up the challenge, hiking from the trailhead in Dyea, Alaska, near Skagway, up the climb to Lake Bennett in the Yukon.
What a surprise it was last week to learn that it is now illegal to make the historic hike, which commemorates the Yukon gold rush of 1998. The wording of the new official Parks sign reads this way: “Chilkoot Trail National Historic Site – It is illegal to cross the international border on the Chilkoot Trail. Hikers can hike the trail on the Canadian or U.S. sides and must turn around at the border. Canada Border Services Agency.”
Our 1997 hike brought 15 of us to camp overnight at Skagway, Alaska, getting ready for the five-day climb. Many of us had practised carrying our packs for months, as everything had to go up the trail on our backs. Our group was made up of Joe and Joe Titus, Michael Piddington, Liz Johnson, Ineke van Hasselt, Phil Steele, Diane Johnson, Colin and Sherryl Corby, Margaret Frend, Margaret Baxter, and Jim and Elida Peers.
While many of our group were seniors, it was a younger and livelier bunch, the Chilkoot Chicks, who celebrated the gold rush history by doing the climb a couple of years later. Laurie Szadkowski, Janet Evans, Lynn Rutherford, Trudy Pearson, Debbie Clarkston, Darcy McClimon, Bonnie Sprinkling and Terrie Moore arrived at Skagway in great style in a limousine they’d hired in Whitehorse.
Grueling a climb as some of us found it, none of us would have missed the experience – and it’s probably safe to say we’re shocked at the new regulations.
Elida Peers is the historian with Sooke Region Museum.
