Travel Blog

Sue:

Since it's our third summer in Skagway, Phil and I decided to take an official tour today. Well, official in that we had an actual tour guide leading the way. Our guide was Pete Luchetti, who is the husband of Mickie, our Operations Manager. Pete's an artist, photographer and fellow Penn Stater. He and Mickie also have a kid with the longest name ever - Leonardo Giovanni Spartacus Luchetti. (But that's not the oddest name for a kid is Skagway...we overheard a parent calling their toddler Linen in the hardware store the other day). But anyway, Pete is the guy with the orange ball cap:

We started the tour way down on 1st Avenue, down by the docks, where Pete filled us in on the geography of Skagway that makes it a one-of-a-kind spot. I didn't have a notebook with me, so I can't remember exactly what he said, but I'm sure you can look up Skagway geography online if that's what floats your kayak. But to name just a few cool features, you have deep (1500 feet right off the dock) ocean water on one side, a large freshwater river (the Yukon) not 30 miles away, glaciers, fijords, mountains, etc. all around. It's really just extraordinary, geographically speaking.

Right across from where we're standing in the picture above, you find the old train depot from the early 1900s. The train tracks used to run right down the middle of Broadway (the road we're standing nearby), so the location of this building really made sense back then.

This building was slated for demolition in the 1960s or thereabouts, but the National Park Service purchased it for one dollar and renovated it. It is now the NPS Visitor's Center, where you can go and learn all about the Gold Rush of 1898.

We turned left onto 2nd Avenue to go see Jefferson "Soapy" Smith's Parlor:

This is his actual parlor from 1898, but it was moved from its original location somewhere around 5th Avenue. This building, as you can probably tell, has not been renovated recently and is not open to the public. But there are some talk about its future in the tourism trade. A fellow named Martin Itjen (who owned the Skagway Streetcars and who invited Mae West to "come up and see him sometime...and she did!) owned this building back in the 1920s or so, and was apparently a mechanical genius who liked to build robots. Pete says he built an animated Soapy, who, when you came through the door of the parlor, turned around and shot you. Supposedly, that's inside this building right now! So there's plans to maybe get something going with that. We told Mickie to let us know when that happens. That may just warrant another trip up to Skagway.

When you turn around from the parlor, you see the Red Onion Saloon, the most exclusive bordello in Skagway back in 1898. It's also not in its original location, and when they moved it (around 1908) from one part of town to where it is now (to be closer to the railway), they couldn't turn it around in the road, so they just put it in backwards and built a new front to it. So it's a backwards bordello. Hmmmmm.

After the Red Onion, we moseyed over to this structure:

These buildings used to be part of the military barracks that were here before they moved over to Haines. So new owners (or squatters) chopped them up and moved them down to 3rd Avenue and put false fronts on them and opened for business. Today there are shops in the front, and I think people live back where we are in this picture.

Turning to our right, we found Kirmse's Curious:

Kirmse was a jeweler who brought his own gold with him to the Klondike. He barged in cantelopes and sold them to scurvey-ridden, but newly wealthy, stampeders for $50 a lope (he got $25 for the rotten ones). We were told to keep in mind this was at a time when a fancy meal in San Francisco ran you about a quarter, so that was a good move on Kirmse's part, wouldn't you say? He used his new wealth to open up shop in Skagway. Pete told us he was actually a very skilled artisan and jeweler, but you won't find any of his award-winning work because he favored a symbol in his art that unfortunately was adopted by the Nazi party in the 1940s.

Our last stop was William Moore's log cabin:

In June of 1887, Skookum Jim, a Tlingit packer from Dyea and Tagish (on a side note, I met a descendant of Jim's on Monday when she came into the Ivory shop), led Capt. William Moore, a member of Canada's Ogilvie survey party, to Skagway. In October, William comes back with his son, Ben, and they staked their claim to 160 acres (basically, all of Skagway) and call it Mooresville. Moore had the foresight to know that there was gold in them thar hills, and he knew that Skagway would be an intregal part when gold was discovered nearby. He had to wait several years, but he was right. Unfortunately, when all the folks swarmed into Skagway, they made their own laws, ignored Moore's claim, and sold his land to others. Eventually Moore settled with the town and got a buttload of money.

And that was where Pete said goodbye, and Mickie took us to the Golden North Hotel for a tour with the owner, and my boss, Nancy Corrington. I think I'll continue with that tomorrow.