7/21/2000
After getting my pass to go across the summit (it cost $25 dollars Candian if I remember correctly) at Parcs Canada in downtown Skagway, I saw Dyea Dave. His business is giving people rides to and from Dyea. So I scheduled a time to go over with him (it cost $10 for the nine mile trip) and wandered around town until it was time to go (I had some shopping to do and he was waiting for some more people who needed a ride).
The trail was pretty easy today. There was a short hill at the beginning, but other then that it was pretty flat. There was a light rain falling pretty much the whole time. I though it felt nice, I was pretty warm from physical exertion and was hiking in shorts and a t-shirt which was the way I hiked almost the whole trip.
I spent the evening (my first on the trail) at Canyon City Camp. They have a warming shelter there (as they do at most camps on the trail) where people are able to cook their food and start a fire in the stove to warm up and dry off clothing and whatnot.
While sitting in the warming shelter it often seemed like it was raining quite hard outside. Usually I was merely being decieved by my ears though. With the loudness of the river nearby, occasional drops of rain on the roof were enough to make my mind think it was hearing quite a downpour.
I didn't see any wildlife bigger than a squirrel, although there were some beaver dams along the trail. There was one section where they built a long series of planks above the ground because of flooding caused by extensive beaver activity. There were a couple of people not too far behind me that saw a black bear. The bear was apparently not too concerned by their presence. The feeling was not mutual though, and they hurried back to the previous camp to give it a chance to clear out of the area before they went through it again.
There was quite a lot of vegetation I noticed on the trail. A couple of the largest bear's bread I have ever seen were growing on a stump close to the trail. There was a lot of ground cone which looked a little different than what I had seen in Juneau and Sitka; I am not sure if it is a different variety, or maybe just a different time in the season. There was an interesting type of white moss that covered a lot of the area, it looked kind of like coral or something. There were many spruce and hemlock although I didn't notice any cedar. There was also a great deal more deciduous trees than around Sitka, a lot of these were varieties that I didn't recognize.
There were a lot of people at the camp and they were mostly quite friendly. I was surprised by the variety of people. There were a couple of families with three generations on the hike, as well as couples, groups of friends and acquaintances, and a family with several children (the youngest was probably around five or six). The oldest person there that I was aware of was 72.
On this leg of the trail I passed several people who were going back to Dyea after taking a trip just part of the way up the trail. In the next legs of the trail I passed a couple of people that were hiking down from the Canadian side of the trail, but the number of people going that direction was much less.