White Pass and Yukon Route

All these pictures won't do justice to what you actually see while travelling by the train.

The train takes you through picturesque snow capped mountains as you go higher.

The story of the Klondike Gold Rush is embedded in the ride.
The Seattle Post said "Gold Gold Gold." The newspaper reported that "sixty eight rich men on the steamer Portland arrived in Seattle with stacks of Yellow metal"
The news spread like wildfire in the middle of the depression and the country went gold crazy.

Imagine the difficulty they faced about 100 years ago when trying to cross the Chilkoot trail.

Or the conditions in which they built this bridge.

With temperatures as low as -40 and the wind speed as high as 80 miles per hour, with precious few hours of daylight available, and hanging on this bridge by rope, they had to rotate every 45 minutes in and out of warmth to stay alive.
This bridge is part of the reason why the White Pass was designated as an international historic civil engineering landmark.
It is an honour that the White Pass shares with other engineering marvels like the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel tower and the Panama Canal.
The conductors look sharp in their smart uniform.

The tour guides kept updating us on the important points as we passed them like the black cross.
In August 1898 a blasting accident buried two railroad workers under a 500 ton granite stone. The black cross marks their resting place.

While on the train, you can see other meter gauge trains running on similar routes far away (seeing them in the video gives a better effect of motion)

The bridge which you see in the picture below was in use till 1969 and was considered the tallest cantilever bridge in the world at that time.

We had four stops while on the cruise. Had written about Endicott Arm in the previous blog