Despite Canada-U.S. tensions, this West Coast route as old as the gold rush endures

In a habit as old as the Klondike Gold Rush, residents of tiny Skagway, in the crook of the Alaska Panhandle, know when the ships are coming in.

During the summer, that includes the mammoth cruise ships that deliver more than a million passengers a season (1.36 million in 2025) to Skagway’s historic main street, the anchor of the region’s tourism economy.

For the whole year, however, besides the ferries of the Alaska Marine Highway system, barge freight services are the community’s lifeline, and remain an essential cross-border link through the “Gateway to the Klondike,” which endures regardless of diplomatic and trade tensions between Canada and the U.S.

Construction materials, heavy equipment, fuel and heating oil all arrive by barge. The twice-weekly arrival of Alaska Marine Lines’s delivery of consumer goods are events many locals look forward to.

“Pretty much the entire town waits for the barge that comes Monday night,” said Skagway Mayor Orion Hanson. “Then, they go to the grocery store first, they go to the liquor store second, and everybody else falls in line.”

Alaska Marine Lines is in the process of renewing its flag waivers — which permit foreign commercial vessels to sail through Canadian waters — with the Canadian Transportation Agency. It relies on those waivers to serve Canadian destinations on a route where there isn’t an equivalent domestic service.

Its parent company, Lynden Inc., declined to comment, but an application filed by its customs broker, J.B. Ellis & Co., describes the route as mainly a weekly “water bridge service” between Seattle and towns on Alaska’s panhandle that can only be reached by water or air, such as Wrangell, state capital Juneau, Haines and Skagway.

Groceries, material for Skagway’s lumber yard, food orders for restaurants, and “anything in bulk” rolls off the Alaska Marine Lines barges, with a fair amount trucked another 150 kilometres through B.C. on the South Klondike Highway to Whitehorse.

On the Yukon side, “the Port of Skagway is essential to the Yukon mining industry in particular,” said Jonas Smith, executive director of the Yukon Chamber of Mines.

Skagway is “the closest tidewater to the territory, so it’s used extensively by the mining industry for anything that is transported by sea that comes up through Skagway and then over the pass into Yukon,” Smith said.

Heavy materials, such as cement, that would be too expensive to truck thousands of kilometres from larger Canadian cities, and sized-steel components for mining equipment have often come to Yukon via Skagway in the past, Smith said.

New mines are also close to final permitting to reach their construction phases, “so it’s very likely that a significant amount of those construction materials will come up (via Skagway),” Smith said.

“Also, heavy equipment,” he added. “They’re just too big to transfer all the way on the highway from the Lower Mainland. So they get barged up, and then you only have to close down the Yukon Highway for a little while as they creep up.”

The closest Canadian option would be the Port of Stewart, B.C., 1,000 kilometres by road from Whitehorse.