Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled | Page 8

and men
turned aside and came to a stop in a drift to avoid a steep, smooth pitch.
The sled extricated, it was poised on the edge of the pitch and turned
loose on the hardened snow, hurtling down three or four hundred feet
until it buried itself in another drift. The dogs were necessary to drag it
from this drift, and one had to go down and bring them up. Then again
they were loosed, and from bench to bench the process was repeated
until the slope grew gentle enough to permit the regulation of the
downward progress by the foot-brake.
[Sidenote: "SUMMITS"]
The Eagle summit is one of the most difficult summits in Alaska. The
wind blows so fiercely that sometimes for days together its passage is
almost impossible. No amount of trail making could be of much help,
for the snow smothers up everything on the lee of the hill, and the end
of every storm presents a new surface and an altered route. A "summit"
in this Alaskan sense is, of course, a saddle between peaks, and in this
case there is no easier pass and no way around. The only way to avoid
the Eagle summit, without going out of the district altogether, would be
to tunnel it.
The summit passed, we found better trails and a more frequented
country, for in this district are a number of creeks that draw supplies
from Circle City, and that had been worked ten years or more.
At the time of the Klondike stampede of 1896-97, Circle City was
already established as a flourishing mining camp and boasted itself the
largest log-cabin town in the world. Before the Klondike drew away its
people as a stronger magnet draws iron filings from a lesser one, Circle
had a population of about three thousand. Take a town of three
thousand and reduce it to thirty or forty, and it is hard to resist the
melancholy impression which entrance upon it in the dusk of the
evening brings. There lay the great white Yukon in the middle distance;

beyond it the Yukon Flats, snow-covered, desolate, stretched away
enormously, hedged here at their beginning by grey, dim hills. Spread
out in the foreground were the little, squat, huddling cabins that
belonged to no one, with never a light in a window or smoke from a
chimney, the untrodden snow drifted against door and porch. It would
be hard to imagine a drearier prospect, and one had the feeling that it
was a city of the dead rather than merely a dead city.
The weather had grown steadily colder since we reached the Yukon
slope, and for two days before reaching Circle the thermometer had
stood between 40° and 50° below zero. It was all right for us to push on,
the trail was good and nearly all down-hill, and there were road-houses
every ten or twelve miles. Freighters, weather-bound, came to the doors
as we passed by with our jangle of bells and would raise a somewhat
chechaco pride in our breasts by remarking: "You don't seem to care
what weather you travel in!" The evil of it was that the perfectly safe
travelling between Eagle Creek and Circle emboldened us to push on
from Circle under totally different conditions, when travelling at such
low temperatures became highly dangerous and brought us into grave
misadventure that might easily have been fatal catastrophe.
Our original start was a week later than had been planned and we had
made no time, but rather lost it, on this first division of the journey. If
we were to reach Bettles on the Koyukuk River for Christmas, there
was no more time to lose, and I was anxious to spend the next Sunday
at Fort Yukon, three days' journey away. So we started for Fort Yukon
on Thursday, the 7th of December, the day after we reached Circle.
[Sidenote: THE YUKON FLATS]
A certain arctic traveller has said that "adventures" always imply either
incompetence or ignorance of local conditions, and there is some truth
in the saying. Our misadventure was the result of a series of mistakes,
no one of which would have been other than discreditable to men of
more experience. Our course lay for seventy-five miles through the
Yukon Flats, which begin at Circle and extend for two hundred and
fifty miles of the river's course below that point. The Flats constitute
the most difficult and dangerous part of the whole length of the Yukon

River, summer or winter, and the section between Circle City and Fort
Yukon is the most difficult and dangerous part of the Flats. Save for a
"portage" or land trail of eighteen or twenty miles out of Circle, the
trail is on the river itself, which is split up into many channels