The ExploreNorth Blog

Everyone who has ever driven the South Klondike Highway has seen a few bits and pieces of various incarnations of the Venus silver mine – the mill is impossible to miss and some of the buildings higher up the mountain are easy to spot. There’s much more to see on this one face of Montana Mountain, though, and there’s one particular structure I’ve been itching to get to for the past dozen years or so.

In the early summer of 1900, Jack Pooley and Jack Stewart arrived at Caribou Crossing (now Carcross) from Dawson City. There they met Ira Petty, who had taken out an option on what he hoped was a rich vein of silver near the top of the mountain that towered over the village. To make the story short, the 3 men began working together, and in the summer of 1901, Pooley and Stewart found an even richer vein on the southeast side of the mountain, which they staked and named “Venus”. Their first priority was to build a place to live, since climbing from the lake to the site of the vein, 1,500 feet above Windy Arm, wasn’t a reasonable thing to do every day. They blasted a shelf into one of the cliffs and built a cabin, which is seen in the 1905 photo below.

That 108-year-old cabin still stands, and with a spotting scope, can be seen from the highway if you know where to look – the photo below points to the location. Though I’ve had the itch, that cabin is the only historic site on the mountain that I know about but had never visited. The reason is simple – it’s an extremely difficult, rather dangerous hike, and I’ve been unsuccessful in 2 previous attempts to find a route to it. I’m going to be hiking the Chilkoot Trail with my son next week, though, and this would be a good test of my hiking abilities, since I haven’t done much in recent years. By going straight up the face instead of the “easy” routes I’ve tried before, it’s a far more difficult hike than the Chilkoot (the infamous “Golden Staircase” on the Chilkoot is as steep as this climb but has only 2/3 the elevation gain).

I parked the car near Pooley Creek (at an elevation of 680 meters – 2,231 feet – on my GPS), spent a while trying to figure out the best route, and at 9:45 started hiking straight up the face on an avalanche chute. By 11:25, this was my view (looking south down Windy Arm):

At 12:15 I reached the cabin, which is in incredibly good condition. I tested the strength of the logs before climbing into it, and felt perfectly safe going in. The elevation here is 1,139 meters, or 3,737 feet. I was hiking alone as usual – the photos that have me in them were taken using the camera’s timer, with the camera on a tripod.

The interior of the cabin – a bed, a sawhorse, a few tin dishes and various parts of tools and boxes remain. What a view to wake up to! Pooley and Stewart lived here over the winter of 1901-1902 working their claim – tough buggers.

A tiny level spot just below the cabin made a fine place for lunch. We’re having what I think is the finest summer I’ve ever seen here, and the temperature yesterday was about 25-26°C (80-82°F). Now I had to start planning how to get out of here – the cliffs that I climbed up made that route less than desirable, so I decided to angle south towards the 1906 Venus Mine workings, though there’s one particularly bad canyon that stopped me on previous attempts to reach this cabin.

The decision to head towards the 1906 workings was quickly affirmed when I found the telephone line that connected the various workings in 1906. The trail that it follows can still be made out in many places – I’m hiking on it in the photo below, taken at 1:10 pm.

Route-finding is a challenge here – downhill even more so than uphill, as there are many cliffs completely hidden by low vegetation. A few years ago a woman was killed when she fell off a cliff in this area. At the base of one 150-foot cliff just past this point I found a woman’s shirt that had been laying there for a few years. It was/is quite disturbing to think that it’s very possible that that was where she died.

Looking down over the 1906 workings to the mill on the lakeshore, at 1:40 pm. These structures were joined by an aerial tramway. This is a particularly difficult area to navigate, as there are very few climbable routes down the cliffs.

There are signs from 80 years of mining everywhere on this mountain, from trails to simple tunnels and complex structures of various kinds. At the lower left is one of several small tunnels that surround the main 1906 adit. Most of them have caved in, but some are open to a depth far beyond what I’ll go into. Some of them are just gopher-holes, barely large enough for a man. I can’t even imagine working in them, with a rope around your feet to drag you out when you’re ready!

I ended up at the 1980 mine workings, from where a good road leads down to the highway at a point 2 km from my car. By 3:00 I was on my way home. What an incredible day – now I’m really pumped and ready for the Chilkoot! The photo below was shot on the walk back to the car – the arrow points to the main 1906 adit and tramway station.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 7:04 am and is filed under Hiking, History, Mining, Photos, Travel, Yukon-Alaska Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.