Garden City

     Skagway has been termed the Garden City of Alaska.  It is located at the northern tip of the inside passage, 90 miles north east of Juneau.  The name of the town is derived from the native Tlingit dialect. Skagua means "place where the north wind blows."  Once a thriving gold rush boom town of 10,000, today Skagway is home to less than a thousand year round residents on 455 square miles of land.

     Skagway has recreated itself to look like it did at the turn of the Twentieth Century when stampeders congregated there to seek their fame and fortune heading up the Chilkoot Trail to the Dawson Gold Fields in the Yukon.  Down the street from the cruise ship docks is the Skagway Inn.  Built in 1897 it was first a brothel on Paradise Alley in the red light district and later became a boarding house.  

 

     Olivia's Restaurant located at the Inn provides meals for overnight guests and the public from a menu of locally sourced crab, salmon, halibut and game meats.  It was there one afternoon that I enjoyed a hearty bowl of halibut chowder before returning to the ferry that transported me back to the ship.