Hiking the Chilkoot Trail: The ‘Meanest 33 Miles in History’

The whole journey, as it was

In 1897 and 1898, tens of thousands of stampeders arrived at tidewater in Dyea, Alaska, and set out on foot for the Klondike goldfields, a journey that started with roughly 53 kilometres of trail before they'd even reached open water on the other side. The North-West Mounted Police required each of them to bring close to a year's worth of supplies into Canada, something like 2,000 pounds of food, tools, and gear, which meant nobody carried their outfit over the pass in one trip. Stampeders relayed their loads instead, hiking the same stretch of trail again and again, sometimes dozens of times, to move everything they owned up and over the mountains.

The crux of the whole route was the Chilkoot Pass itself, reached by the infamous Golden Stairs, steps cut directly into the snow and ice near the summit. Photographs from the era show an unbroken line of stampeders bent under their packs, climbing single file up that staircase, an image that's become one of the defining pictures of the entire gold rush. Beyond the pass, the trail dropped down through lake country to Bennett, where stampeders built or bought boats and waited for the ice to break so they could float the rest of the way to Dawson. The trail is still littered with what people left behind or couldn't carry any further, boots, stoves, cable, rusted tools, now protected in place as part of a cross-border historic site rather than being cleaned up or hauled away.

A Yukon rite of passage

For generations of Yukoners, hiking the Chilkoot wasn't just a bucket-list trip, it was something closer to a rite of passage. School groups hiked it regularly, and plenty of local families made a point of doing it with their kids at some point growing up. Walking the actual ground the stampeders struggled over brought that history to life in a way no classroom or museum display ever could. The border closure that's kept the trail from being hiked as a whole since 2020 has left a real hole in that tradition, one that a lot of Yukoners feel, whether or not they've said so publicly.

The trail today: two halves, not one

As things currently stand, you cannot hike the Chilkoot as a single continuous route. Crossing the border on foot at Chilkoot Pass has been prohibited since 2020, first over COVID-19 and flood damage, then reaffirmed for the 2025 and 2026 seasons over border security concerns, with no announced timeline for it to change. In 2025, the US National Park Service reportedly submitted a formal proposal to Canada's border services agency to allow the crossing again, but as of this writing there's been no public decision either way. Hope for the trail reopening as a whole is real, but it's hope without anything concrete behind it yet.

What's actually open are two separate, unconnected experiences. On the US side, you can hike from Dyea to the border, roughly 26.5 km round trip, then turn around. On the Canadian side, you can hike from Bennett up toward the pass and back, a shorter, gentler route on that side of the mountains. Neither one is the real thing on its own, and neither is trying to be. Both are genuinely worth doing for what they are: real history, real scenery, real effort, just not the complete journey the trail was built around.

What the Golden Stairs are actually like

Most of what people picture when they think of the Chilkoot comes from those winter photographs, stampeders climbing a staircase cut into snow and ice. Hike it in summer, once conditions and permits allow it again, and it's a different climb entirely: no snow, no cut steps, just a genuinely daunting scramble up and over massive boulders near the summit. It's not dangerous in the way the gold rush crossing was, but it demands real care with your footing and isn't the postcard image most people expect going in.

Locally, Happy Camp, the first camp after the summit on the way down, has something of a reputation that doesn't match its name. Ask around and you'll hear the same thing more often than not: Happy Camp is rarely happy, it tends to be cold, exposed, and often rainy, a fitting enough introduction to what the rest of the descent can be like.

Permits and logistics

This is a managed wilderness route on both sides of the border, with permits required and numbers capped. Book well ahead through the relevant parks agency for whichever side you're hiking, Parks Canada for the Bennett side, the US National Park Service for the Dyea side. Since neither route currently crosses the border, you won't need to carry international entry documents for the hike itself, though getting to and from the trailheads may still involve a border crossing by road, rail, or air, so bring your passport regardless. Many hikers on the Canadian side ride the White Pass railway or a bus out from Bennett once they're done.

Preparation

Whichever side you hike, you need to be fit and self-sufficient, carrying all your gear, camping at designated sites, and prepared for cold, wet, and rapidly changing mountain weather even in summer. Good boots, a reliable pack, and layered clothing are essential. Read current trail conditions before you go, and respect the artifacts scattered along the route, look, photograph, but never take.

Why do it

Even split in two, this is still one of the most vivid, tangible pieces of gold rush history anywhere in the North, and for a lot of Yukon families, it still means something the closure hasn't managed to erase. Walking either half, you feel some real measure of the desperation and determination of the stampeders in a way no museum can convey. It's a smaller experience than it used to be, and there's real loss in that, but it's not a diminished one.