Train Rides, Dog Sledding, & Canada

Welcome back, everyone! It is day three of my posts pertaining to my trip to Alaska. I hope you have enjoyed the stories and the photographs that I have shared because I have certainly enjoyed putting this together for you. Today’s post will follow along and take you to the second port on our trip: Skagway, Alaska. Now after reading yesterday’s post I am sure you are wondering how the pictures of Alaska could get even better. Well, I am here to tell you that at each port we arrived at they just did.

As we walked onto the 7th floor deck, the cruise ship was already docked for the day. Paintings of blue and white and red were scattered across the rocks in the forest. I couldn’t quite make out what the paintings were, but later in the day I would learn these were painted by past cruise ships and captains. The Yukon Territory Train was stopped with lines of cruise ship passengers eagerly waiting to board and children handing out local papers to the tourist. We were the third cruise ship to dock in Skagway that day so you can imagine the amount of people outside the terminal. We had all-day in Skagway and decided to book a tour bus to take us through the Yukon Territory and end with a train ride back into Skagway. The train was the main attraction to this area as they had quite a few tours associated with it.

After exiting the ship, we boarded a bus and made our way through the small town of Skagway. Of the all the ports we stopped in Skagway was one of the smaller ones. They had a few shopping areas located right off the ship and had maybe three to four blocks of area to walk. Very small compared to the other ports.

We headed to Carcross for the day. To get there we entered the Yukon Territory, which had some of the prettiest scenery. It was one of the most scenic two hours I had spent on a bus ride as the area was just beautiful. We began the tour by passing streams of water as we made our way out of Skagway. Some of the water was a gray color due to the rocks and the glaciers. And other streams were blue-green with snow-covered mountains in the background. As we slowly climbed the mountains in the tour bus, we entered areas of thick forest with a few waterfalls sprinkled here and there. After we passed those areas, it was all mountain as we entered Canada. Due to the amount of wind the area received, majority of the trees only had leaves or branches on one side because of the way the wind blew. This was one of the colder areas especially as we climbed through the mountains.

Once we arrived in Carcross we headed to Caribou Crossing for lunch and decided to take a dog sledding ride there. The area had several dog sledding teams that completed three or four runs a day for tourist. As soon as you arrived in the area, you could hear the excitement from the dogs who were so eager to do the rides.  I know how excited my dog gets when I even mention the word walk. Well, it was that amount of excitement times ten coming from each of these pups. We headed to our spot in the front row of the sled as the trainers hooked the team into their spots. It was constant barking and playing until the leader started our ride. Once we began the ride, you could see that doing these rides had to be the favorite part of their days.

After lunch, we boarded the tour bus and headed back towards the city of Frasier, which was around the United States-Canada border. We stopped at a few of the smaller cities along the way, but truthfully the area mostly had train stations and scenery. I am not even sure we passed more than one gas station that day.

Once we arrived in Frasier, we boarded the train to Skagway. It was about an hour and a half train ride back to town. All the area we had driven through on the way up, we got to see from a closer perspective as the train tracks were intertwined all throughout the mountains. It was absolutely gorgeous!

After our train ride back into Skagway we chose to head back to the ship to grab dinner and rest. We wanted to be well rested for the following days scenery of icebergs and glaciers surrounding the Tracy Arm Fjord. Stay tuned!