About Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park
Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park is a National Park Service unit established on June 30, 1976, to preserve the trails, boomtown buildings, and stories of the 1897-98 stampede to the Yukon goldfields. The park covers 12,996 acres in four units. Three are in the Municipality of Skagway Borough: the Skagway Historic District, the former townsite of Dyea where the Chilkoot Trail begins, and the White Pass Trail corridor. The fourth is a small interpretive unit in Seattle's Pioneer Square, the port where most stampeders outfitted before sailing north. Parks Canada administers the Canadian side of the Chilkoot Trail, and the two agencies jointly staff a Trail Center in Skagway with current trail conditions.
The park's visitor center occupies the White Pass & Yukon Route Broadway Depot at Second Avenue and Broadway, completed in December 1898 as the railway's first depot. The adjoining railway Administration Building of 1900 was vacated in 1969, transferred to the park in 1976, and restored by 1984. Elsewhere in the historic district the park has restored the Moore Homestead at Fifth and Spring, the home of Skagway's first homesteading family, and Jeff. Smiths' Parlor Museum on Second Avenue, one of Alaska's oldest museums, which is devoted to the con man "Soapy" Smith and has been returned to its 1960s appearance. In 2025 the park recorded 1,489,935 visits, most of them cruise passengers, and the Chilkoot Trail has recently been designated a National Historic Trail.
Park interpretation goes beyond the prospectors. Ranger programs cover the women who joined the rush of 1897-98 and Company L of the 24th Infantry, the Buffalo Soldiers who spent three years stationed in Southeast Alaska.
Collections and Research Services
The park's museum program holds almost 300,000 objects divided into cultural and natural history collections. The cultural side has four parts, archeology, history, archives, and ethnology, and the archives include original diaries, letters, newspapers, and photographs from the gold rush era. The natural history collection exceeds six thousand specimens, the largest group being the herbarium. Park staff have also enlisted Skagway residents to identify people and places in unlabeled historic photographs.
There is no public reading room, but staff answer research questions by email at KLGO_Research@nps.gov or through the park website. The park aims to acknowledge a request within two business days; a full answer can take a few weeks depending on its scope. Family historians tracing a stampeder ancestor should also work through the general techniques in our guide to free family history research, and our article on finding old photographs explains how to locate images held by archives like this one.
Planning Your Visit
There is no entrance fee for the park, its museums, or ranger programs. Hours vary by building and by season, and the Moore House and Jeff. Smiths' Parlor close during the winter season from late September until late April; the parlor is visited on timed-entry tickets handed out free at the visitor center on the day of your visit. Both buildings are wheelchair accessible but have no restrooms. Winter operations across the park are reduced from October to April. The Dyea Campground, nine miles from Skagway on a gravel road, is open year-round when free of snow at $10 per site per night, first come, first served. Hikers on the Chilkoot Trail need permits; the park's online hiking guide explains the process. Check the daily schedule at the visitor center or on nps.gov/klgo before you go. If your trip continues to the state capital, the Alaska State Museum in Juneau holds the state's principal history and ethnographic collections.
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