Maria's Travels

Maria's musings and photos from her wanderings – for her virtual buddies

The Great Canadian 3 X 4 Road Trip – The Great Gravel Getaway (The Dempster Highway Drive)

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auntbeast99
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Almost back in the land of night. This was taken out of my hotel window at Eagle Plains at 1 am (I did not have it in me to get dressed and go outside). At this time of year they basically get a one hour sunset where the sun bounces off the horizon and goes back up. Soon it will actually set.
Furry bar staff at Eagle Plains makign the happy face after he got a bite of my roast beef.
This furry server is not asking me about the quality of the meal. That looks is “you has onion rings. I needs onion rings. Please give me onion rings as you can clearly see I am starving”. He did not get onion rings (which are poisonous to dogs) but he may have managed to talk me out of a little beef from my beef dip…. and a bit of everyone else’s dinner in the place.
Two of the several canine servers in the pub in Eagle Plains
Low tech locking system for the outhouse at the Arctic Circle. The wall is concrete and not easy to screw things into so the grab bar does double duty.
Eagle Plains Hotel… half way there (and half way back)
I love the play of the shadows made by the clouds on the mountains. You can play the same game that you do with clouds and look for the pictures. For instance I think this one looks like two T-Rex’s running away from each other on the mountains in the distance.
A field of fireweed, outside Dawson (if I remember correctly)
Richardson Mountains headed to Inuvik… most likely
More stunning scenery
Another strip of nice gravel.
The Peel River Ferry. This is a cable ferry that goes back and forth on demand. For those of us who are old, it is like the Albion Ferry was, but way less busy. I was the only car on it on the way up and one of three on the way back.
Lake at Fort MacPherson… I think
Fort MacPherson. Someone’s local public art, and the eagle supervising it.
Tsiigehtchic, a Gwitchin community at the confluence of the Mackenzie and Arctic Red River
The Mackenzie River ferry in action. In summer it stops at both sides on the Dempster and also at the local Indigenous community Tsiigichic, which is only accessible by boat in summer and the ice in winter. I would have stopped but I realized too late that there as not actually a road to it, despite it being about 100 metres from the Dempster.
Heading South to the Mackenzie River ferry
“The road goes on forever and the music never ends”… on account of I thought ahead and downloaded a whole lot of playlists, no internet and no radio here! View of the ITH from the ITH.
I meant to look these up and find out what they are. Anyone know? They are all along the sides of the highway and I was crews with heavy equipment installing some so they are not just old artifacts. Maybe staging platforms for road work equipment to keep it from sinking in the tundra? Along the side of the ITH.
Trees getting sparse heading onto the Delta on the ITH.
The tree line? Someone asked if the “tree line” was actually a line of trees. I said not really.. then I saw this On the ITH
The further North the sparser the trees
Unloading on the North side of the Mackenzie river
Big truck coming off the little Mackenzie ferry, down the ramp, bump onto the dirt and away they go
Attempted murder (of crows) but their buddies were nowhere to be seen
Pretty roadside lake
More scenery…. So vast and so gorgeous
Mackenzie River ferry crossing. Which only came back in service 2 days before I got there, having been down for 5 days
Horton Hears A Who flowers on the Beaufort Delta (my favourite arctic fluffy flowers. I really must figure out what they are).
little creek by the highway on a nice day. This was the hill that was not much fun to come down in the rain on the way back.
Scenery near the YT/NWT border
… and just after we crossed the Arctic Circle we crossed the border
We made it to the circle official crossing immediately hereafter.
View near the Arctic Circle
You know those signs that say “avalanche area no stopping”? Well on the Dempster there is “airplane area no stopping”. The straight bits serve as emergency landing strips.
Windblown tree near the Arctic Circle
Ogilvie Mountains (I think)
Dempster roadside scenery
River along the Southern part of the Dempster
The highways truck I was behind slowed to a dead crawl and pointed out his window at this little guy for us to see.
The start of our gravel oddessy
We made it back to the pavement. Nearly 2,000 km of gravel. Yay team!
Looking East from the Western edge of Canada
Selfie at the Western Most Point you can drive in Canada. Technically it si the same longitude as Beaver Creek on the Alcan highway, but I figured one was enough and did not trek up to Beaver Creek when I was in Haines Junction.
Aurora I think technically having illegally crossed the border to AK (the border station is actually in the USA but serves both countries.
View on the Top of the World Highway Canadian side
View along the Top of the World Highway on the Canadian side
Peel River cable ferry
In the Richardson mountains coming South, before the rain.
Mountains and sky that just go on forever
North of Eagle Plains I think… we could have our own version of Mt. Rushmore here. these outcroppings would be great for carvings
Cliffs North of Eagle Plains (I think)
Scenery – Suoth part of the Dempster headed South
One of these things is not like the others….. Aurora did just fine amongst the almost 100% bigger vehicles than her (at least all the ones with more than 2 wheels). The two in the background are the giant EU registered overlanding rigs that I talked about in the travelogue. People seem to ship them over and then spend a very long time wandering around the continent in them. They look pretty comfy to live in.
Ogilvie Mountains or Richardson Mountains… anyone who has spent more time there able to confirm?
Scenery – Ogilvie Mountains

VIDEOS

View of the mountains around the Tombstone Territorial Park Interpretive Centre
View from the Dempster North of Eagle Plains. I love the cloud shadows on the mountains.
Doing the speed limit on the Dempster, on the much better NWT park, for 30 seconds, with my faux gopro.

THE PLAY BY PLAY

OK folks, we survived!  We are officially done the great gravel road leg of the trip (actually we finished it while ago but I have been busy readjusting to the pavement and heading East so this is a bit delayed).  We made it back to Dawson after our Dempster, Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk,  and Top of the World Highways  adventures. It was some of the most amazing scenery I have ever seen and some of the worst road for a provincial/territorial highway.   It is possible that the Dempster has kicked the Icefields Parkway out of top place on my favourite scenery drives ever, not an easy feat! ( However, I am much more likely to go and have a repeat drive of the Icefields Parkway than the Dempster)

We have now achieved:

  • 3 gravel highways
  • 2,000 + of gravel, broken rock and just enough mud to keep it interesting.
  • 0 chipped windshields (well, I will get the final verdict once I scrape the gigantic bug carcasses off the window, but as Trish pointed out, I should probably wait until I get home in October in case those sticky carcasses are in fact holding the windshield together.  I don’t know what sort of bug it was but something up here splats into a clear splatter pattern that does look rather like windshield chips).
  • 0 flat tires (it seems that when one goes slow one increases the chance of having whole tires when one arrives back on pavement)
  • 0 roll overs or slides into the ditch (unlike one large truck and several cars I drove by, fortunately all of which had been dealt with and marked before I arrived and none looked like anyone died).
  • Our second ocean (Arctic)
  • Our first two directions (North and West)
  • A full coating of mud on the car.  I can now take pictures of her for posting on the internet without worrying about my license plate being visible. Unfortunately it will not assist in my getaway from any bank robberies I decide to try as my red and white “ears” on the car make me really identifiable (one woman I met in Eagle Plains said “oh we saw your car in Dawson”.  Of course she was also had a pretty visible vehicle, the only motorcycle with a side car I saw on the Dempster/ITH.
  • Many small game sightings, quail, fox, eagles.  No big creatures.  They mainly stay away from the road, it is not caribou migration time and the bears are mostly in the valleys away from the highway at the moment according to the parks staff in Tombstone. So far all the bears I have seen have been cleverly disguised as culverts, trees sticking out of the bank, rocks…

I will tell you all about the towns and the things I did in them a little later.  The scenery and the roads deserve their own post… otherwise this is going to end up the length of War and Peace and have 200 photos to overwhelm you with.  

Heading North from Dawson the Dempster Highway lulls you into a false sense of hope by being pretty well maintained as far as Tombstone Mountain Territorial Park (where we camped on the way back, more on that later).  After that it fairly quickly goes to hell, potholes, washboards and large sections of broken rock sort of cemented into the road and sticking up so that they don’t move like gravel and eat the tires of fast moving vehicles.  A note on speed.  The speed limit on the Dempster is 90 km/h and I did see some people doing at least that but, interestingly, they all appeared to be driving company trucks, make of that what you will.  I had been advised by a local woman in Dawson that the best way to drive the Dempster and keep your windshield and tires was:

  • Slowly
  • Pull over and stop when a commercial truck (full on tractors with dual trailers behind them)  was coming the other way so they have most of the road and don’t have to worry about avoiding you.  Fortunately I discovered that the dust they raise means you can see them coming in most places for a mile or two, even if you can’t see them as they come over the hill to scare the daylights out of you, you can be ready for it. At one point I had pulled over when I saw the dust in the distance and was about to go up a narrow winding hill so I stopped to have a snack and wait at the bottom where it was flat and wide.  Then I thanked all the holy things that protect fools land children as 4 double trailer tanker trucks came roaring over the hill and down the curves using most of the road.  Two of them waved a thank  you for pulling over.  Polite but it really wasn’t their safety I was thinking of at that point.
  • Not pull over too far as the shoulders are soft in places and will give way, dumping you in the ditch
  • Slowly (again)

I was glad for her advice.  I did the road mostly at 60 km/h which allowed me to watch the scenery and watch the road closely enough to avoid the car eating potholes and slippery sections.  Some parts there as just no way to avoid nastiness and I did 30 km/h.  Now, I know the speed demons amongst you will say “you are the problem when you go that slow you cause the accidents” well, no actually I don’t.  I pulled over for everything I saw in my rearview so people could fly by and have their own accidents.   The only things that did not pass me were the bicycles, and one gigantic overlanding rig which was bouncing along at 40 km/h on the straight flat bits.

A bit about what is out on the Dempster for traffic. Commercial vehicles, lots of European registered huge overlanding trucks (think 5- 10 tonne size, height of a tractor trailer), trucks and trailers, campers, a few motor homes, 4X4’s with rooftop tents, zillions of motorcycles, and very few cars (mostly between Dawson and Tombstone and Fort McPherson and Inuvik.  Like I said, I was pretty visible and identifiable out there, but Aurora my TARDIS performed perfectly. 

The first stop was at the Tombstone Territorial Park Interpretive Centre.  It is set nestled in a valley in the Ogilvy mountains between the Tombstone, Cloudy and North Klondike ranges. We have a bunch of photos from that visit but I will talk more about it as we a had three nights camping there on the way back, once I was back to hauling around my heavy camping totes and setting up my tent.  I got a road update for the road North to Eagle Plains, clear dry and dusty, yay.  That’s my preference over raining and mud.  From there we continued North.  It was not really white knuckle driving but every time I whacked a pothole a bit fast I cringed and listened for the pop of my poor tires (this decreased over the kms but it never completely left me.  Just because I CAN change a tire does not mean I WANT to do it, particularly as getting at my spare means pulling everything including the deck out of my car).  Shortly after Tombstone I pulled over as I heard something rattling, tire? Axle? Bumper going to fall off? Complete mechanical failure?…. nope, tonic bottle clinking against gin bottle.  On the way I followed the advice of the woman from Dawson and pulled over A LOT, for passing trucks, fast drivers, motorcycles, and so many photos.  I got pretty good a figuring out where I could safely pull over with enough room for folks to get by me.  As the trip progressed I got a little bolder about where I pulled off, although never over the crest of a hill or on a bend.  The plan is still to get home alive and Subaru vs tractor trailer always goes in favour or the tractor trailer.

Between Dawson and Eagle Plains you drive up and through the Ogilvie Mountains.  They change from smoother granite mountains to layers and jagged limestone.  People talk about Forest Bathing.  I would call this Mountain Bathing.  Tombstone Territorial Park is at the overlap of the boreal forest, alpine and tundra regions.  So as you drive up the Dempster you move through fields of tall thin scraggly trees to fields of fireweed and flowers to the open boggy tundra where you can see for miles.

The feeling of the vastness of the arctic is hard to put in words.  Range upon range of mountains stretching to the horizon, miles of tundra punctuated only by the occasional scraggly tree, and no sign of anyone ever having been there (if you keep your eyes up and ignore the fact you are standing on a Territorial Highway).  I have about a million pictures that I took to try to capture the scale of the place but I am pretty sure I have not succeeded.    I resorted to short videos as they seem to give a better sense of size and scope.

Eagle Plains is half way from Dawson to Inuvik.  If I was camping I would have broken the Dempster trip up more with shorter driving days, but Eagle Plains is the only place on the Dempster with a motel, and fuel, and a restaurant.   The motel at Eagle Plains is a clean, comfortable, basic motel.  The young person who checked me in was also the bartender, and is also apparently working on their business degree.  Included in the welcoming committee are several motel dogs, two of whom “work the bar” with the best begging faces ever seen.  Marley and Sherwood go nothing on these pooches.  The motel guests were mostly motorcyclists and what looked like folks who work along the highway.  No one lives anywhere near there except the staff of the motel, restaurant, garage (towing, mechanic and full tire services available) and cardlock.  I stayed there on the way up and the way down.  All the staff that I talked to there were lovely.  In addition to the bartender/desk person I talked to the cleaner who was very friendly while battling the relentless dust and the mechanic who helped me get the finicky cardlock to comply with my purchase request.  I am always curious how people come to live in places like Eagle Plains.  Another group of travellers who were from Edmonton but originally from India asked the waiter, who appeared to be of South Asian heritage, how he came to be at Eagle Plains and where his family came from.  His ancestry was Indian but he was born in Brazil and had come to Eagle Plains for the job at the start of the season.  It was a permanent job and he was getting ready for his first arctic winter, a pretty solid change from Brazil.

The only thing I am not sure of is their tire gauge.  I broke mine, so I checked my tires with theirs on the way home.  I filled my tires to what theirs said was 33 psi. Then I checked with my reassembled one and it said 40.  I consulted their mechanic and he said “well ours is pretty good”.  When I got back to Dawson I checked at the gas station there and theirs said 40 too…. Oops.  It appears that I came back on overinflated tires, rather than under.  It is a thing to “air down” for gravel which apparently makes the ride smoother and protects tires, unless you do it too much then you risk your tires falling off the wheels.  I arrived at the start of the Dempster and met some overlanders from Ontario who asked if I was airing down.  Nope, I have no idea what if anything one can air down my plain old stock tires.  In any case the dodgy gauge does not appear to have left my tires coming to harm anyway.  I am glad that I did not know that on the last 11 hours of the gravel drive that they were over inflated though.

From Eagle Plains it was back on the highway to bounce my way the second 375 km (which translates to 7-8 hours if you are watching the scenery) to Inuvik.  Going North from Eagle Plains you drive up and over the Richardson Mountains.  This is a different geography again with rolling black mountains which then give way to jagged layered limestone (I think.  It was not sandstone they said), and then down into the Beaufort Delta and the tundra.  Like the first half I took about a million pictures (I promise I pared it down for this post so you don’t have to cull through 15 shots of slightly different angles/settings of the same things).

Between Eagle Plains and Inuvik it is slightly more inhabited.   There are two ferries across the Peel and Mackenzie rivers and the town of Fort McPherson is between them, South of Inuvik.  While I was in Dawson it was a little bit of a nail biter as the Mackenzie ferry went down for 5 days.  Fortunately it was back running just before I left so I knew I could get across (unless something else broke and they had to call the engineers and parts back from Edmonton).  I thanked my lucky stars that I was not stuck in the middle between them when it croaked.  Some people would have been able to go to Fort McPherson but there is not a lot of accommodations there, many had campers and things but they were not set up for an unplanned 5 day stay on the roadside.  Fortunately, local Indigenous community to the rescue…. They brought out food, some porta-potties and water and everyone survived.  When they say you need to plan for every eventuality when you travel the North they mean it!!  One entrepreneurial boat owner even managed to offer a private water taxi service with his fish boat for motorcyclists.  Apparently he was charging $800/bike to load them on his fish boat and run them across the river.  I over heard a discussion at Eagle Plains between two fellows as to whether they would or would not have been willing to risk overloading a fish boat with their very expensive motorcycle just to get on their way on time.

The ferries run in the summer and there are ice crossings in the winter.  There is no way across the rivers for a period of several weeks spring and fall while the river freezes/thaws and you can neither drive across the ice nor can the boat run.  This is part of the cycle of seasons here and people live around and with it.  Interestingly in Dawson they have a similar ferry situation where the people who live off grid in West Dawson can’t get across the river between seasons.  However, with the changes in climate it has been three years now that the river has not frozen sufficiently to make an ice bridge so they have been stuck either skiing across to town for supplies or have had to go a long way up river where apparently it has been getting solid enough to get a snow mobile across but not their trucks.  There is no other real cross river traffic in the winter as the Top Of The World Highway is closed as is the border crossing.  You can drive out there but the road is not maintained. My guess is that it would only be people going out hunting with snow machines, or maybe dogs.

When I got to the Peel ferry I was the only car on it and was chatting with the ferry operator.  He lives in Fort MacPherson.  He declared me officially “brave” going on such a road trip by myself.  I shared my opinion that, unless my companion was a mechanic with their tools on hand, or someone in a second car, really travelling with someone was really moral support and having company if you break down.   I suppose it is also someone who can call 911 for you but that is why I carry my garmin and file daily flight plans. It is also not really that isolated driving the Dempster/ITH.  It feels wonderfully remote and you can often pull over and just sit in the wilderness for a time but absolutely everything going to Inuvik/Tuk by road goes up that road and then comes down.  It is not like you are 100 km up a logging road and stick it in the mud or blow an axle.   In fact many times when I had pulled over to take a picture someone would pull up and roll down their window just to check I was OK.  I did the same when I saw folks pulled over.  So, really it is the best of both worlds, feeling like you are a million miles from anywhere, but really you are only about 40 minutes, if that, from being able to flag down someone.  The person in the visitor centre in Dawson said that it is not uncommon to see someone hitching to the next stop,  flat tire in hand and then hitching back to get on their way again… and people pick them up.

I have gotten ahead of myself.  Just out of Eagle Plains you cross the Arctic Circle and then the NWT border.  I stopped for a selfie at the Circle and to take some photos.  I also said good morning to some folks who were travelling with their camper who had set up their breakfast and morning coffee at a picnic table just off the rest stop.  I am not sure if they had camped there for the night.  There is no sign saying one can’t camp there and there is an outhouse, so really about the same as most of the campsites up and down the highway, just without the bear caches, but they had a camper which really functions as one big bear cache.

Just past the Peel Ferry I stopped at a campground and visitor Centre for the Nataiinlaii Territorial Park.  I originally stopped to use the bathroom (cleanest outhouse on the highway as it turns out), then stopped to chat with the person who was running the visitor centre and the campground.  Like the fellow on the ferry he was curious that I was there doing this road trip solo.  It appears that the locals don’t necessarily have too much wanderlust other than for the local area where a lot of them fish, hunt, trap and partially live traditionally off the land.   The host told me a bit about the local area and invited me to have a look at the campground in case I was camping on the way back.  It was a lovely campground surrounded by birch trees.  There was a also a group site with wall tents that he said I could use one of it I wanted to so I did not have to set my gear up.  He also asked if I had my “crossing the circle” certificate.  I asked what they was and he brought one out.  It is a certificate that says I have driven across the Arctic Circle.  He signed it as the official witness and I signed it, and it was all official.   I also got one at Eagle Plains on the way back, seeing as I drove across it twice I figured I should have two certificates.  One from the NWT and one from The Yukon. I am going to try to get them home in one piece.  Not that I am likely to frame them but I will try to figure out something to do wit them.

Shortly after crossing the territorial border into the NWT the road gets much better, as the motorcyclists in Eagle Plains had told me.   I am not sure if it is the difference in geography or the type of road building or what but I choose to believe that it is something slightly more complicated than the NWT is better at road maintenance.  It is a constant battle in the North no matter which side of the border you are on.   It is wider, smoother, more gravel than broken rock/washboards/potholes.  So, I decided that I should at least once do the speed limit on the Dempster, so I chose a nice long, flat, wide stretch with not too much loose gravel and slowly crept up to 90 km/hr I even went to 95, just to pretend to drive like a local.  About 1 minute later that was enough of that, I apologized to the fates and slowed by down to my scenery watching speed, which on the NWT side was still about 70.

The history of the Dempster Highway is well documented and is worth having a google of.  I won’t recount a lot of it here.  It was built on the basis of old trapping routes and trails and, interestingly they basically asked Joe Henry, local Indigenous trapper, to head to Inuvik and the folks with the big machines would follow along.  It was a testament to both ingenuity and technology that the Dempster managed to get built and open, changing the life along it forever, both for good and ill.  Tourism opened up, local folks could travel without flying, but it has also impacted local wildlife.  Even some unlikely things need to be considered.  For instance there was one study that looked at the impact of the dust from the Dempster on waterfleas in the local lakes. Now, we and the fur children may not like fleas but they are an important source of food for the local fish, which are in turn a source of food for many creatures, some of them human.  In the study I saw, it turns out that the dust does not appear to be destroying the fleas… but it is just an example of the types of things we impact when we do things like punch a highway through 1000 km of wilderness.

Once I got o Inuvik I took a well deserved rest.  I will talk about that visit in another post as this one is about the road part of the road trip.  While in Inuvik I made my plan to go and spend 2 nights in Tuktoyaktuk, driving the Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk Highway (the ITH as it is called) and getting to the most Northern road in Canada and the Arctic Ocean.  Screeeeech, halt.   The weather was predicting a whole bunch of rain.  The motorcyclists said that parts of the ITH were about 4 inch deep gravel with clay under it so, basically a giant mud wallow if it gets wet.  There are also some horror stories on line about people getting stuck in jeeps and dozens of motorcycles sitting waiting for tows (OK, double checked and that was the first season it was open so I took those with a grain of salt).  I tried to find a tour to go up there as there is a local guide who runs van tours to Tuk, rationalizing that even if someone else was driving I would still have road tripped it.  Unfortunately, she did not have one going for a few days and I did not have time to stay an extra week.  So, up the courage got screwed, I chanted my motto “money and time can fix almost anything” and away I went.  I had a dry road all the way up and, as it turns out 4’ of gravel is not a giant issue for a Subaru if you go slow and don’t try to drift it around the corners… and pull over for everyone. I got to Tuk, checked into my lovely BnB, did my photo ops and turned in.  The next day the weather guessers were calling for 15-20mm or rain for Inuvik the following day, when I was supposed to be driving back.  Yikes.  So, when travelling one needs to stay flexible (more on that later with my vehicular woes back on the pavement) and I decided that I would head back a day early to miss the mud.  Tuktoyaktuk is a really tiny place and it is only 3 hours back to Inuvik, so I had the morning of the second day to wander around town in the sun, get a bunch more pictures and I don’t feel like I missed a lot.  As it turned out the rain did not materialise in a much volume as the weather guessers guessed, but that’s OK I had a much more pleasant drive back to Inuvik without worrying about the weather, and the sun made for nicer pictures.  The ITH is quite different from the Dempster as it is out through the Beaufort Delta and there are rivers and lakes galore.   Also along the roads are snow mobiles galore, apparently simply left there to be picked next winter when it snows again.  There were a couple of what looked like higgedly-piggledy parking lots of them.

Back to Inuvik and then back South on the Dempster.  A huge eagle soared over Aurora and I as we left Inuvik.  Hopefully that is a good omen for the trip South.  The Scenery was surprisingly different on the way back, with a change in light.  I continue to be stunned by watching the play of the shadows on the mountainsides created by clouds.  Then, coming down the Richardson Mountains to Eagle Plains, the dreaded rain.   It would not have been a real Dempster Road trip without some mud.  The black dust became mud as slick as oil and I was really glad for those “faux standard” paddle shifters on my car that allow me to force it to gear down rather than leaving it in automatic.   Once again I “go slow’d” and did fine but I was eternally grateful that I did not have to do 375 km of that.  For one thing it would have taken me 3 days to get to Eagle Plains.  Along the way going South I stopped for my first camping of the trip, 6 weeks post gallbladder surgery and allowed to lift things like my camping totes.  YAY.  The weather cooperated entirely.  I will make a separate post about the camping there. 

Once I left Tombstone I decided that I would go and bag our Western point in the morning before retiring to Dawson and the pavement.  I headed down the Dempster, through Dawson and popped myself in the ferry line to West Dawson.  From there one can access the Top of The World Highway which goes out to the US border and then on through Chicken AK and then becomes the Taylor Highway in AK.   I will go back some time and do the rest of that road, but this trip is about Canada so I just went to the edge of Canada.   I technically went a little past Canada as the border station is located a tiny distance into the US.  It is apparently the only or one of a very few US/Canada border stations that shares one building.   The Top of the World Highway is definitely in better shape than the Dempster.  I am not sure if it is that it is shorter, more Southern, or what, but it appears to have been more frequently graded (I passed a couple of graders) and only had a few slidy loose gravel corners.   However, the difference is that it follows the top of a ridge rather than the bottom of a valley so there are both impressive vistas and impressive cliffs to fall off if you decide to “Duke Of Hazard” drift it around a corner too ambitiously.  I did take a bunch of pictures but it was hard to get any good ones both due to the scope of the subject matter and the haze from forest fire smoke.  I got to the border station, turned around in the parking space that said staff only, then realised that there are all sorts of cameras on the building and I wondered what they thought I was doing.  Then I parked in the no parking area to take a selfie with the Welcome to the Yukon sign, a photo of their building and went on my way east again.  I was a little surprised that they did not come running out to tell me to produce my passport, on the other hand they may be used to “crazy tourists and their photo ops”. 

From there it was back to Dawson, check back into the bunkhouse, shower and out for a nice dinner a good glass of wine, and the dessert I promised myself if Aurora and I made it back in one piece….. Maple whisky bacon sundae. 

So, there you have it.  Two directions and an ocean in the bag and an adventure not a lot of people do, but I highly recommend it if have a hankering for some really spectacular scenery to get you enthused about just how beautiful this country is and give pause as to what we need to do to keep it that way.