When Eric A. Hegg rushed north to Alaska in 1897, he as a journeyman photographer, largely self-trained. He forced a sled load of photographic equipment across the coastal mountains in the dead of winter. He hiked out to the claims on Bonanza and Eldorado, and he poked his camera into the banks and bars and bordellos in Dawson. He rode a paddle-wheel steamer down the Yukon to the Bering and was on the dark sands of the beach at Home when the prospectors swirled gravel in their pans and worked their mechanical rockers. Most important, he was there, high on the Chilkoot Pass in the winter of 1897-98, as the dark-clad men climbed antlike up the frozen steps of The Scales under the burden of a year's supplies.

Photographs by: E. A. Hegg