T A B L E_T A L K Have e-mail, will travel. Share your favorite Internet bars from around the world in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk ___________________ Making travel plans? Visit barnesandnoble.com for all kinds of great travel book bargains! ___________________   R E C E N T L Y Vive la roller blade! By Susan Hack In Paris, Friday night has an all-new rite (01/05/99) Death in Antigua By Steve Kettmann A host family's tragedy tweaks the conscience of a traveler in Guatemala (01/04/98) Hot spots of the millennium Where will people be traveling in 2000? Travel experts predict the destinations of choice in the new millennium (12/24/98) Not finding God in Rome By Zachary Karabell At Christmas in the Eternal City, a seeker of truth discovers that sometimes the answer you don't get is the one you need (12/23/98) An innocent abroad, Part Two By Bill Barich A young writer in Florence encounters enduring lessons in art and love (12/22/98)   Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives     Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		----------------------A century after the race for the Klondike gold fields, ----------------------a hiker traces the argonauts' northward course. BY J. KINGSTON PIERCE | So there I was, dangling Harold Lloyd-like from a boulder about 2,000 feet up Chilkoot Pass, with my backpack doing everything it could to pull me off balance and my breath ragged in the depleted oxygen of that advanced altitude, when suddenly my left knee -- which I injured during a schoolyard brawl many years ago -- decided to lock up. This had happened before, but never while I was climbing a windy rock face separating Alaska from British Columbia and the Yukon Territory, the same geological obstruction that defied prospectors bound for Canada's Klondike gold fields a century ago. "You OK?" inquired a woman from Chicago, whom I had encountered at the base of this ascent and who was now several yards above me, still looking fresh, as if she'd merely been sashaying down a beach rather than scaling a mountain. "Sure, no problemo," I called back, trying to sound more plucky than pained, my brain meanwhile reeling with thoughts of having to complete this famous northward path on a stretcher. "You go on ahead. I'll catch up in a moment." But as I watched her head, then her back, then finally the woman's slender bare legs vanish into the dusky brume that concealed the crest of the pass, I could only wait behind, panting and feeling pretty darn pathetic. Amid the frenzied gold rush of 1897-99, I knew, argonauts with much heftier burdens than mine had conquered this course. A piano, a portable bowling alley and even a pot-bellied stove on a sled -- well-stoked by its owner, a middle-aged woman who kept her hands toasty at the fire -- all went through this rare glacier-free corridor in southeast Alaska's Coast Mountains. My consolation was in recalling that numerous gold seekers shared my second thoughts about this experience. As Frank Thomas of Plymouth, Ind., remarked in an 1897 letter home: "I am undoubtedly a crazy fool for being here in this God-forsaken country." Hiking the Chilkoot Trail had seemed like such a fine, romantic endeavor, back when I was contemplating it from my living room sofa. It would help me to better understand those 100,000 men, women and children who, after news broke that tons of riches from northwestern Canada had been shipped to San Francisco and Seattle in July 1897, promptly quit their mundane, sedentary lives for a shot at millions of dollars in easy money said to be awaiting anyone who could reach the Klondike River tributaries near Dawson City, then the Yukon's boomtown capital. I would be taking a walk back into history. Never did it occur to me that I would also rediscover why this path used to be known as "the meanest 33 miles on Earth." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The first I ever heard of Chilkoot Pass or the Klondike or "the men who moil for gold" was from my maternal grandfather. A short but scrappy Canadian named Ewart Sprinkling, he'd lied about his age when he was 15 and been shipped to the European front during World War I, only to return home terribly saddened by the death of friends and determined from then on to find his excitement in books, instead. Among his favorites were those by Robert Service, the banker-turned-bard who -- despite the fact that he didn't reach the Yukon until 1904, well after the excitement had waned -- managed better than any other wordsmith to capture the spirit of that area's gold rush days. I can picture my grandfather recounting Service's tales of Sam McGee, Dangerous Dan McGrew and "the lady that's known as Lou." So dramatic were his recitations that I always assumed he'd actually seen the mountains the "Klondikers" crossed, had mucked through the silt and mire of gold-bearing streams and had committed Service's rhymes to memory simply as the best way to retain a vivid sense of those places. Not until his funeral more than a decade ago did I learn Ewart Sprinkling had never gone within 800 miles of Dawson. That realization struck me again as my prop plane banked over southeast Alaska's mountain-shaded Lynn Canal and descended toward the town of Skagway, jumping-off point to the Chilkoot Trail. I was beginning, in fact, the trek that my grandfather had so often made in his imagination. Had I undertaken this journey 100 years ago, I'd have arrived at Skagway not by air, but probably aboard a steamship from Seattle or Vancouver, British Columbia. With me would have been barbers, tailors, reporters, policemen and maybe even a few British lords and Maori tribesmen -- all bound for one of two trails that led to the headwaters of the Yukon River and thence to Klondike country: the White Pass route, from Skagway, a 45-mile series of switchbacks and fathomless mudholes that proved perilous to overburdened pack horses; or the steeper but more frequented Chilkoot Trail, which in those days started at a raw hamlet called Dyea. Especially in the opening months of the Klondike stampede, demand for transport up Canada's west coast to these trail heads was so high that ships were often double- and triple-booked at top dollar, pushing their ticket holders to the brink of homicide. Yet that didn't deter many people from going north. "The man who had a family to support who could not go was looked on with a sort of pity," wrote J.E. Fraser, a miner from San Francisco. "The man who didn't care to leave his business or for other trivial reasons, was looked on with contempt as a man without ambition who did not know enough to take advantage of a good thing when placed in his reach." During its gold rush heyday, Skagway was attuned to the discordant rhythms of saws, honky-tonk music and gunshots. Its short main street, Broadway, was bordered by campsites, blacksmiths' shops and restaurants so fly-by-night that one advertised its existence with a pair of pants hung from a line and "Meals" painted on the seat. There were up to 80 local saloons where a cheechako (Alaska newcomer) could gargle down strong spirits before embarking for Dawson. And among the sidewalk throngs could be counted bogus preachers, circus performers and enough card sharps, con men and harlots to lend the settlement a distinctly anarchical repute. As one visitor put it, Skagway was "little better than hell on earth." No wonder most folks who passed through seemed to do so as quickly as possible. Even today, the town caters to more transients than residents. From late spring through early fall (the usual Alaskan tourist months), as many as five Brobdingnagian cruise ships may tie up every day at Skagway's docks, disgorging 8,000 or so travelers to flood the gift shops along Broadway, sample brews and burgers at the raucous Red Onion Saloon (once a prominent bordello) and point their video cameras in wonder at the restored landmarks that crowd Broadway just as they did back in the Gilded Age. Furthering the illusion that time has failed to elapse here are the hikers, like me, who on any given summer morning can be spotted tromping through town on our way over the Coast Mountains, just as the Klondikers did. The difference is, in the late 1890s, we'd have taken the White Pass Trail. That has since been substantially buried beneath the narrow-gauge tracks of the White Pass & Yukon Route scenic railway, and people are discouraged from using what remains of it. Instead, they walk or hitch a ride nine miles west to the abandoned town site of Dyea and the foot of the Chilkoot Trail. N E X T+P A G E | The Chilkoot Trail: The "world's longest museum"   PHOTO © UPI/CORBIS-BETTMANN