Dempster Diary Update 10

The Seventh Day - The Dempster at last.

After a year of planning, thinking, printing, dreaming and hoping (yes, hoping -- it wouldn't have taken much to derail me and all my fancy plans, after all), it was difficult to sleep the night before making my crack at the Dempster: I knew it was just a road, and not too difficult, ut I had built it up into something so meaningful, that it was difficult to regard it as something prosaic as, for example, going to Edmonton might be.  It’s not, and can never be, just a blah thing.  Maybe of I were to do it every few days for a year it would fade into something ordinary, but I liked things just as they were: a man needs some magnificence, some eventfulness in his life, and for me, this was one of those.

So full of hope and glory, I set forth one misty morning….ok, sorry.  I’ll stop.  I promised.

I woke up in the dark at Dawson, and did the usual and slipped downstairs to have a decidedly mediocre breakfast (but next to Fast Eddie’s in Tok, they really would have had to excel to get me to write anything else) and checked out.  I told the girl I wasn’t sure when I would be back, in two days or three, but she assured me that there would be rooms, as the next week did not look busy.  Since I still had to photograph Dawson City itself (at least, the touristy section of it), I knew I would be back, and maybe so did she.

I poked my head out the door and groaned.  I was far to the north and even in this light, so early, I could see the clouds were low, it was drizzling, and it looked like one nasty nasty day, with no chances for decent pictures.  However, I moderated my whining: this was the reason I advanced my departure for Innuvik, so why the complaining?  I’d be back anyway.  And so off I went.

A little history: the Dempster Highway begins at Dempster Corner, about 30km east of Dawson City.  It is 732 km long, and depending on the season, it can be made in 12-16 hours by driving straight through, which was my intention, since I saw no advantage to staying overnight in Eagle Plain and had not the time to camp out and go hiking in pretty areas (although one day….).  The highway was commissioned in 1958, when the government of Canada decided to build a road through the Arctic wilderness, at a time when oil and gas exploration was coming and it looked like a pipeline could be built next to the road, offshore northern deposits were in the offing, and the whole north could be opened up.  It was officially opened twenty years later, in 1979.  The Canadian Forces engineers built bridges over the Ogilvy and Eagle rivers, and ferries handled the wider rivers at Fort MacPherson and Arctic Red River.

The highway sits on top of a gravel berm that varies between four to eight feed high, and whose purpose is to insulate the permafrost in the soil beneath, otherwise the road would sink ninto the ground.  The highway is named after RCMP Inspector William Duncan John Dempster, once known as “The Iron man” foir his legendary dogsled journeys from Dawson City to Fort MacPherson, sometimes in -40 C weather.  Nowadays, the highway roughly follows Dempster’s dogsled trail, which he himself learned of from the Gwitchen Indians in the area: it was always, historically, the main transport link between the Yukon and Peel river systems.

It is considered by many to be one of the great drives left on earth.  Now for my money, if there was one contender for the number one spot, it was Anchorage (or Innuvik, I’m not fussy) to Patagonia and then to Buenos Aires…the Pan-American highway.  But as something I could do, in less than three weeks, this was by far the prize winner.  I was not Che, with a motorcycle, no dependents and unlimited chutzpah.  This would have to do.

I filled up a thimble or two of fuel at Dempster’s Corner and took the obligatory photo-op at the sign (thank the Lord for remote controls) and there was no messing about with this baby, no gradually deteriorating road or any such nonsense: the gravel section started immediately, and you were on it from the get-go.

The sky was low and threatening, the drizzle constant and it was tough to maintain speed, but I had no complaints, because the quality of the road was excellent the first kilometers. That said, there was no mucking about by this lad, none of this “keep in your left lane” nonsense by me – I took dead centre of the road, gunned the engine, and moved. I trusted my experience on the roads this last week, and I trusted my car and I trusted my (rather expensive) tyres: and oh my Lord, did they ever perform for me.  The heavy tyres which made so much noise on the highways up to this point, now came into their own, because even at over 100km per hour, they gripped the road as firmly as a starving baby at Angelina Jolie’s…well you get the picture.  I went zen and simply drove, and drove hard.  I had 800km to make today, over rough ground, and nothing I had heard or been told suggested this would be a cakewalk to get through.

There was no point in taking any pictures the first miles.  The trees were too tall for me to see anything except a crappy gray sky.  This was the price I paid for coming at the tail end of the season, just when everything was getting iffy and the weather fickle, the conditions marginal.  But at 8:15 am, I burst through the trees and felt like a blind man suddenly given sight: the explosion of colours was so vivid, so intense even in spite of the soft drizzle that muted everything, that I just had to laugh in sheer delight.  Those deep rich reds and browns and yellows mized with greens and low white clouds….great mountains on the left and some to the right, capped with ice and snow…I had just crossed the North Fork Klondike river and was in the land between the Yukon and McKenzie systems, with full tundra in all directions.  Trees just vanished, it seemed.

And the road would up and around and up some ore until I was at the topo of the North Fork pass.  By this time the rather anaemic sun had come out, but it was strong enough to burn off some of the clouds that previously obscured my vision.  The splendour of the tundra and starkness of the mountains was so great that I kept jumping out of the car to take pictures.  I crossed the Ogilvie River at km 240, somewhere around 10:40, at which point once again the road climbed. About fifty km further n it really began to get crappy; muddy, bumpy, treacherous and I had to slow right down.  Visibility was getting all crappy again and I couldn’t be sure of seeing anything – already, on three occasions I had had to slow to about 30 and switch my lights on because I wasn’t just in fog, I was actually in the clouds themselves, and couldn’t see a damned thing ahead of me.

I stopped at Eagle Plain, just around the halfway mark (km 370) where there is a garage, gas station and hotel.  Since it was only 12:20, I shrugged, filled up, bummed a smoke from the attendant (what can I say?  The journey was stressful and I was drinking too much coffee to stay alert).  The road continued to stay bad for the next miles (actually, it deteriorated even further), and rain started and stopped without rhyme or reason.  Not a good way to do this, I thought.  By the time I got to the Arctic Circle at 13:00 and stopped to try and take another picture – this was not one to miss, I judged – the temperatures were below freezing, it was sleeting, and the wind was a bitter nasty slicer that cut through clothes.

Ahead I could see the flats leading up to the Richardson Mountains, all snow capped and looking good, which acted as the boundary between the Yukon and the NWT.  Once I got there and through the passes, I would be out of the Yukon and into the MacKenzie river delta system.  What I didn’t expect was how bloody cold it would get, how snow would start to fall, and yet, how utterly magnificent it all was. 

I was alone in a performing car mounted on tyres that could rape a Honda Civic, that stank of gas in the back and with (at best) meager trail rations for sustenance, driving hell for leather with total concentration in the extreme remote north of Canada while winds howled and sleet swirled all ‘round, and yet, this could not take away from my appreciation of the scenery or the occasion.  It was wild, beautiful, colourful, harsh and primeval landscape.  Man had barely visited here.  The Dempster Highway looked like an insignificant, barely visible line drawn childishly across an enormous canvas.  Was it worth it, to drive a week to see this?

Hell yes.  It was worth every penny, every minute.

I kept climbing to get to George’s Gap, and to my absolute delight, saw a small herd of caribou.  I screamed to a stop, switched out lenses to the bazooka, and I shot as much as I could before they disappeared into the snow on the next rise over.  No bear this time, maybe, but this was good enough for me.

I then came out of the Whiley Pass and saw the NWT “border”.  And to my amazement, on that side of the mountains, it was all sunlight and blue skies and puffy white clouds. I mean, my jaw just dropped open.  I was delighted, and drove right into it, but my elation was short lived, as a few miles further on, construction and repair work was going on, which meant that the going was tough and nasty and rough and very very dirty.  I soon could not see out of the back window at all. But after a further twenty km or so, this became better and I was able to make better time.

I reached the first of the two ferries, the Peel River crossing, at about three, and my luck was in because the ferry was right there, so Just drove on and was over in fifteen minutes.  I bypassed Fort MacPherson as I didn’t need gas (I had more than half a tank and less than 200 km to go).  Here the road was more of a clay mixture instead of gravel, and of excellent quality, if occasionally bumpy – the shocks got more than one surprise today, that’s for sure – and I climbed back out to 120 km/hr as I boomed north to the Tsiigehnjik  River crossing (otherwise known as the Arctic Red River) and the second ferry.  I got there an hour later and had to wait about twenty minutes.  I spent my time bumming yet another smoke and trading stories with a native guy who had just cadged a lift with the car behind me: he was going to Innuvik to see his “old lady” who was studying business admin in the University.

I didn’t know and didn’t ask his name 9and he didn’t ask me mine) but it was around here I stopped seeing the Dempster in my own one-dimensional view and saw it as more of a commercial highway.  To whit, I had considered it ore of a touristy thing than anything serving any kind of serious purpose (which of course is wrong), but north of Peel, the traffic on the road was almost 100% local, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the vagrants like me who were just passing through.  Miners, trappers, hunters, professionals, all of whom lived in these small communities, were all linked by this one road into the small villages where they lived their lives.  Odd that it had never struck me like this before.

Once the ferry got me over, I gunned the engine and really started making tracks.  It was 4:30 om and I had 130 km to go, and the road was clay and smooth and had no problems.  I touched 150km/hr once before calling myself back to reason, but it felt good to not have to be careful of every turn and bend.  The road ran straight as an arrow for miles, turned slightly, and then just as straight for another set of miles.  I was happy.  Need I say that the sun was out and shining brightly, and the temperature was a balmy fifteen or so?  My decision to come had been vindicated, in spades, though I must say I wondered what the weather on te other side of the mountains was just now.

I pulled into Innuvik around 5:30 Yukon time, which was 6:30 local in the NWT, and knew it was too late to go looking for the air company which I wanted to see if they had spots for tomorrow’s flight to “Tuk”.  I went straight into the MacKenzie hotel, checked in, and went to my room.  Then I got the internet together, started loading files and pictures, and went for dinner.  It had been a long day.

I had travelled for twelve straight hours with no rest longer than three minutes (except for self portraits, ha ha), covered 500 miles (800km), and I was bushed.  I spoke to Kym and covered the basics, and told her I was unsure of how long I would be, as it all depended on whether I could get a flight out to Tuk tomorrow.

Thus far, it’s been a great trip.  The images and the memories and these words, bear testament to the experience.  Will it end tomorrow with no flight and me going back south to Dawson?  Or will I be able to make it one leg closer to the farthest point north I can expect to go?

I guess I’ll see.