348 



Sierra Club Bulletin 



over the old trail of '98, but were so discouraged by reports that bridges 

 were out and the trail obliterated, that we gave up the idea. Much to 

 our disgust, we found too late that this was only the usual wet-blanket- 

 ing that every traveler suffers who attempts to set foot off the beaten 

 track. From the car window we could follow the trail almost every 

 step of the way, and though slides had occurred and a bridge was gone, 

 in August, at least, neither stream crossing nor trail presented any real 

 difficulty to any one accustomed to trail travel. 



At Skaguay I parted with my traveling companions and took an Amer- 

 ican boat down to Wrangell. Five years ago, when Mr. Muir began 

 work on "Travels in Alaska," my aspirations were turned toward the 

 Stikine River, and I determined to take the first opportunity to follow 

 his old trail. Opportunity came this year when I met Mrs. Winifred 

 Hyland, trader, fox-farmer, outfitter for big-game hunters, and adviser 

 and court of appeal to at least a hundred Indians. On her invitation I 

 promptly abandoned family and friends and started trustfully alone on 

 the hundred-and-fifty-mile journey up the wild and lonely Stikine. A 

 boat runs up once a week during the scant five months of the year when 

 the river is open. Mine was a tunnel boat about forty feet long, with a 

 powerful gasoline engine which forced her slowly but surely up against 

 the powerful current. It took us from Tuesday morning at ten until 

 Thursday morning at nine to go up, though we made the return journey 

 in ten hours. Travel is not heavy on the Stikine now. Forty years ago, 

 Mr. Muir says, nearly two thousand miners went up the river in a single 

 summer. This year I doubt whether there were more than fifty people 

 in all. Despite the war, eleven big-game hunters went ; one family from 

 Oregon settled up river; one mine was in operation with six men from 

 "outside" ; two or three soldiers came back from the war ; a new school- 

 master and a new doctor arrived. I myself represented the whole bulk 

 of tourist travel — considerably less than a hundred and fifty pounds I 

 hasten to say. 



The river trip is marvelously beautiful. Mountains, all of them snowy 

 and glacier-hung, tower from four to eight thousand feet above the river. 

 The shores are densely forested, for the most part with hemlock and 

 tideland spruce. The most remarkable of the glaciers, the Great Gla- 

 cier, breaks off at the river brink in a colossal wall three miles in width. 

 Telegraph Creek, trading post and center of population for a district of 

 some fifty thousand square miles, I made my headquarters. The whole 

 district at present numbers only about thirty whites — it has sent twenty- 

 nine men to the front. During the first part of my stay here I made 

 day trips in all directions and two short camping trips — one across the 

 Stikine, the other thirty-five miles downstream, near the Jackson cabin. 

 Captain Conover, a neighbor on the Clearwater, seven miles away, who 

 has lived on the river for twenty years, offered himself as guide, and 

 with him I went canoeing through rapids, mountain climbing, and big- 

 game hunting with a kodak. We saw six bears and eleven goats, but 

 unfortunately secured no pictures. 



