How to Get There

Overview

The Municipality and Borough of Skagway is a borough in Alaska on the Alaska Panhandle. The port of Skagway is a popular stop for cruise ships, and the tourist trade is a big part of the business of Skagway. The White Pass and Yukon Route narrow gauge railroad, part of the area's mining past, runs throughout the summer months. Skagway is also part of the setting for Jack London's book The Call of the Wild.

The name Skagway is derived from sha-ka-ԍéi, a Tlingit idiom which figuratively refers to rough seas in the Taiya Inlet, which are caused by strong north winds.

Geography

Skagway is located in a narrow glaciated valley at the head of the Taiya Inlet, the north end of the Lynn Canal, which is the most northern fjord on the Inside Passage on the south coast of Alaska. It is in the Alaska panhandle 90 miles northwest of Juneau, Alaska's capital city.

Tourism

Popular sites include the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park and White Pass and Chilkoot Trails. Skagway has a historical district of about 100 buildings from the gold rush era. Most tourist come on cruise ships. The White Pass and Yukon Route operates its narrow-gauge train around Skagway during the summer months.

Transportation

Skagway is one of three Southeast Alaskan communities that are connected to the road system; Skagway's connection is via the Klondike Highway, completed in 1978. This allows access to the lower 48, Whitehorse, Yukon, northern British Columbia, and the Alaska Highway. This also makes Skagway an important port-of-call for the Alaska Marine Highway — Alaska's ferry system — and serves as the northern terminus of the important and heavily used Lynn Canal corridor. (The other Southeast Alaskan communities with road access are Haines and Hyder.)

The White Pass and Yukon Route is a railway that formerly linked Whitehorse, Yukon in Canada to Skagway, the railway's southernmost terminus. Trains travel several times a week from May through September from Skagway to the small community of Carcross, approximately 45 miles south/southwest of Whitehorse. There, passengers can make connections via bus to Whitehorse.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Skagway, Alaska", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0