At the end of September each year we run up to the Pass, away from the rain, under the canopy of golden aspens when the season turns patches of tundra rusty red.
An unplanned camping weekend is a chance to wear dirty pants and drink warm beer and do whatever one damn well pleases in the treeless, expansive Canadian wilderness.
On Saturday afternoon we wandered around like lost Bedouins, meandering up a slope south of Three Guardsmen, turning west until bumping into the old road to the Maid of Erin mine and following it north back to the highway, a two-hour excursion.
The old road isn’t marked or visible from the highway. Like all worthwhile destinations, you arrive at it by random discovery or pro tip. Its bed follows alongside a stream that becomes an impressive, rock-walled gorge for a kilometer or so before spilling under the highway and heading south toward the Klehini.
After months in our deep, dark, narrow and forested valley, a hike in the Pass is like awaking in a Bavarian movie set. It’s the top of the world – or the top of ours, anyway. A goldie-locked Heidi or Julie Andrews might pop out any minute. The hills are alive with the sound of all that jazz.
Free of charge, a person can hike for miles in those soft, silent, alpine meadows not encountering another soul, turning corners to find small lakes, soft ridges and distant views of more of the same.
With night falling, we drove the truck to Million Dollar Falls, the most overlooked campground in the North. Too close to Haines Junction to attract campers leaving or approaching the village, it’s home to the few travelers immune to destination-fever. Five of us had our pick of 34 campsites.
Our riverside site offered mountain views up the Takhanne Valley and a minute’s walk to the roaring falls, plus unlimited, free, dry firewood and spotless outhouses for $20 Canadian. Down south you pay three times as much to camp in what that looks like someone’s front yard.
Sitting around our campfire, we ruminated on the wonder of it all, the endless, wildness of it, its mind-bending emptiness and the few dollars that our vagabond weekend cost us.
It didn’t take long to conclude this can’t last. Seven folks in Haines sell real estate and for every person buying a lot or a house here there are 10 or 20 or more who want to. The newcomers aren’t looking for mining jobs; they’re looking for escape, the kind that starts with a drive into Canada.
Already, dozens of residents head up the road each weekend, for skiing, for hiking or just looking at all that beautiful nothing. On Easter weekend, so many Canadians snowmachiners flock to Chilkat summit that Parks Canada puts out outhouses to maintain a modicum of sanitation.
The world is discovering Chilkat Pass because it’s attached to what’s virtually the world’s largest national park without fees, miles of open land on the south side of the Haines Highway stretching farther than a person can drive in a day.
If you’re looking to tromp around in a primal setting, not much around Haines or Alaska compares to it. One day we’ll market our town as “Gateway to Chilkat Pass” although by then the marketing people will land on some sexier name for it.
Near Chuck Creek we stopped at the Green Shack where a sign on a barricade warned us of an “aggressive bear.” Thirty-five years ago, no one would have noticed – much less fretted – an aggressive bear so far out here.
That sign is all you need to know about the future of this place.
Go play in it freely while you still can.