Italics tour description. Strikeouts never happened.
We’ll get an early start today and travel to the Dempster Highway. The Dempster is one of the truly great Canadian roadways. Completed only in the late 1970’s, the Dempster is still the only fully public road in North America to cross the Arctic Circle. Today’s drive is considered most scenic; Tombstone Territorial Park encompasses the jagged peaks to the West that give the park its name and further along, the Ogilvie Mountains offer superb scenery and stunning vistas. Wildlife is often spotted along the roadsides, so keep a good watch for foxes, the occasional wolf and caribou. We’ll stop for a picnic lunch at a creek-side campground, where gray-jay’s, or ‘camp-robbers’ as they’re known locally will keep us company always happy to help with leftovers. As we arrive at Eagle Plains in the late afternoon/early evening, the modest hotel, fuel station, and highway maintenance station – the only civilization for approximately 300km in either direction - feels like an oasis! Accommodation: Eagle Plains
Departure 8 AM Arrival 5:45 Duration 9 hr 45 min A LONG DAY
Weather cloudy
John went out for coffee at 7, a little chilly.
The Dempster Highway to Inuvik was completed in 1975 as a transportation route. The surface of the Dempster Highway is all gravel; 2.4 m thick in some places to protect the permafrost, on which the road sits on. The road is like a raised bridge with no sides. If the permafrost would melt, the road would sink.
For most of its length, the Dempster Highway crosses land and territories with no sign of human presence; no side roads, no houses and no power lines.
The Dempster Highway is a 740 KM (460 miles) hard packed, but well maintained, gravel road that winds its way through two mountain ranges, the Ogilvie and the Richardson; crosses the continental divide three times, traverses the Arctic Circle and loosely follows the old dog team routes on its way to Inuvik and the Mackenzie Delta where access to the Arctic Ocean is available.
UNTIL YOU HAVE DRIVEN THE DEMPSTER HIGHWAY IN A NOISY VAN WITH DODGY SUSPENSION and BENCH SEATING YOU HAVE NOT IDEA WHAT IT WAS LIKE FOR 700 KM!!!
One passenger declared it was like riding in a rickety tin can!!
Here is a quick video I took another day.
Tombstone Territorial Park's 2,200 square kilometres protect a unique wilderness of rugged peaks, permafrost landforms and abundant wildlife, all reflected in a rich First Nations culture.
Tombstone Territorial Park Interpretive Centre is a good spot for a bathroom break and a tea.
We could have spent less time here.
John and Leo.
Permafrost is a permanently frozen layer on or under Earth's surface. It consists of soil, gravel, and sand, usually bound together by ice. Permafrost usually remains at or below 0°C (32ºF) for at least two years.
We wee a lot of "home made" vans.
No moose...
The road got bumpier and bumpier and Leo got slower and slower driving.
We have a break because they wanted to stretch their legs. John says to me "why is he driving so slow? Doesn't he realize that going 20 KM an hour makes the bumps worse than at 50 KM???"
This was later echoed by A, when we are in the hotel.
Not happy campers at all at 6 PM when we finally check in, a 10 hour day in a van.
I gleefully point out the Cocktail Lounge sign to A!!!
August 2023/September 2023 - TUKTOYAKTUK NORTHWEST TERRITORIES/TORONTO
August 2023 - Skagway Alaska
This is a two-week recap as I didn't have time to post last week.
August 25, 2023 Tuktoyaktuk NWT
Saturday was a bit chilly, 7C, as we headed to Tim Horton's for coffee at 7:15. We had to check in for our bus and train tour to Skagway Alaska by 8. We boarded the bus at 8:30.
We met up with Leo, the tour guide, and the two other participants for the tour at 5. Leo is Mexican, and it is his maiden tour. He attempted to provide his daily schedule but he didn't include and departures times, instead we tried to write them down as he was a little disorganized and tended to confuse us.
I was not happy we were going to using a van.
The group was dismayed that they were required to pick up breakfast and lunch supplies daily at grocery stores. Leo took us to a Super Store and we picked up salads, bananas and yogurt.
We then went to dinner at G & P, we had a surprise as we went in, it was a very cosy steakhouse. We started well, with a charming server. We ordered cocktails, but then she brought our dinners before we had finished those, then had to wait for the wine. She knew how annoyed we were. Then said there were two crème Brulés left, should she save them for us, crème Brule, HELL YES. She ended up comping the cocktails and my steak was very good.
Monday we started our tour at 8:30, Leo the driver/guide, John and I, and two others. The four tour members between 70 and 79.
Cinnabon rolls the size of a dinner plate.
Lunch spot.
Dusty roads.
*SIGH* the van, a rickety tin can.
Dawson City night one stop.
Downtown Hotel.
It is a holiday Monday so much is closed.
We walk around town and then decide on the Sourdough Saloon, seen above at the right at the Downtown Hotel where we also tried the sourtoe cocktail as it was the anniversary.
First stop was Dredge 4. Dredge No. 4 is a wooden-hulled bucketline sluice dredge that mined placer (placer from the Latin loose) gold on the Yukon River from 1913 until 1959. It is now located along Bonanza Creek Road 13 kilometres (8.1 mi) south of the Klondike Highway.
With its 72 large buckets, the dredge excavated gravel at the rate of 22 buckets per minute, processing 18,000 cubic yards (14,000 m3) of material per day. It was in use from late April or early May until late November each season, and sometimes throughout winter. During its operational lifetime, it captured nine tons of gold.
About 1.5 kilometres (0.93 mi) south of the dredge's current site, further into the Klondike Valley, is the Discovery Claim where gold was found in August 1896 by prospector George Carmack, his Tagish wife Kate, her brother Skookum Jim, and their nephew Dawson Charlie. This is considered the site where the Klondike Gold Rush began.
It is a great view of the Klondike river junction with the Yukon river. That is the crystal clear water of the Klondike River (entering from left side of picture) mixing with the silty, brown water of the Yukon.
After visiting Robert Service and Jack London's homes in Dawson City, we went off to pan for gold.
The gold genie, quickly separates the rocks from the gold flakes.
Unlike hardrock mining, which extracts veins of precious minerals from solid rock, placer mining is the practice of separating heavily eroded minerals like gold from sand or gravel.
When gold was discovered in Alaska and the Canadian Klondike in the late 1890s, the gold-seekers who rushed northward brought with them various placer mining technologies. By far the simplest was the prospector’s pan that worked by swirling a combination of water and gravel or sand and allowing the lighter, rocky material to spill out. Relying on the fact that gold is heavier than sand and rock is the principle used in all placer mining operations.
The first challenge is to find a creek drainage that over the eons has carried gold dust, flakes, and nuggets downward to be deposited in layers of creek sediments. To do this, prospectors used pans to test the surface gravels or dug straight down to a point just above bedrock where placer gold tends to collect. They then tunneled horizontally to follow the richest ground. This approach is called drift mining (the horizontal tunnel is the drift). These shafts and tunnels were typically dug in winter so that frozen ground would not melt and collapse on the miners. Even so, the practice was arduous and dangerous. In the spring and summer, a defrosting pile of gold-rich gravel called paydirt could be processed using the placer miner’s friend: water.
Back to town, we went for Greek and then to Diamond Gertie's Saloon and Casino. It was rather underwhelming and has a $20 entrance fee, luckily it was included with our tour. I would not have paid it.
Wednesday and we begin our journey on the Dempster Highway, until you've driven this, you cannot imagine. Think of the bumpiest, muddiest, dustiest, noisiest road you've been on times 740 km!! Add in rain and fog and construction.
It is a gravel road through the mountains. Only the first 5 miles (8 km) of the Dempster are seal-coated, and the last 6 miles (10 km) before Inuvik are paved, the rest of the road is gravel. The stretch from Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk is also a gravel road. This makes the route very strenuous.
The Dempster Highway, also referred to as Yukon Highway 5 and Northwest Territories Highway 8, is a highway in Canada that connects the Klondike Highway in Yukon to Inuvik, Northwest Territories on the Mackenzie River delta.
Tsiigehtchic (/ˈtsiːɡɛtʃɪk/ TSEE-getch-ik; "mouth of the iron river"), officially the Charter Community of Tsiigehtchic, is a Gwich'in community located at the confluence of the Mackenzie and the Arctic Red Rivers, in the Inuvik Region of the Northwest Territories, Canada. The community was formerly known as Arctic Red River, until 1 April 1994.
Eagle Plains has a population of 8, making it one of the smallest communities in the Yukon. It’s the only hotel and garage between Dawson City Yukon and Inuvik NWT and literally the only place to stay!
We four are so happy to see a bar!!! After 9 hours in the van we all want a drink!
However, the buffet dinner at a set $42 was a rip-off, mainly potatoes, gravy and pasta.
Dogs everywhere.
Thursday was sunny as we had breakfast, not "included" as Leo said. It is provided at a price, $20 for a fried egg and toast, bacon an extra $5!
Please note the clean white van.
BTW you keep meeting the same people. The car that is parked belonged to a man who was getting coffee in Dawson City the other morning with John. We would also meet them at the Arctic Circle sign and later in Inuvik.
.
View from Eagle Plains parking lot.
The Arctic Circle is a parallel or line of latitude at approximately 66°33’ N that marks the border of the Arctic, the northernmost region of Earth. The geographic point at the centre of Arctic Circle is the North Pole. It covers 40% of Canada’s territory and is home to more than 200,000 inhabitants, more than half of whom are Indigenous.
We celebrated with champagne and our certificates.
Gorgeous colours!
We were at the Artic Circle at 9:50 AM and got into the NWT (Northwest Territories) at 11:06 and the fog starts.
I am very grateful that Leo is a good driver.
Artic Ocean 475 KM.
Remember the clean van? This is the back window now.
RAP Report a poacher!
We have two ferries today.
Groceries are expensive this far north! Once again, we are picking up breakfast/lunch supplies.
In the shadow of St. Matthew’s Anglican Church in Fort McPherson lies the final resting place of the infamous Lost Patrol. It began on a lonely trail straddling the Yukon and Northwest Territories over a century ago. Inspector Francis Fitzgerald and his three constables departed on an 800-kilometre dogsled journey from Fort McPherson to Dawson City. They never arrived.
Their corpses were found by search parties that spring — as were their diaries, which told a ghastly tale of desperate meandering as the patrol became lost and their food ran out. Fitzgerald and his men eventually tried to retreat to the Northwest Territories, but their hunger won out. They died just 40 kilometres shy of Fort McPherson.
Another long 8 hour day, we get to the MacKenzie Hotel in Inuvik. Looks very nice, but the elevator doesn't work. And worse, dinner is only served until 7 and it is only take-out. Are we annoyed? Yes. Do they have a liquor license, no. We order dinner, the server says the liquor store is down the street so John takes A's request and heads out after dinner.
We understood that Leo said 9:30 departure time in the morning, as did the others, however, they tell us he changed it to 8:30. Someone calls him and he says he always said 8:30, whatever...
Friday after a very basic provided breakfast (with nothing gluten free although it had been made clear to Leo) we leave at 8:30 for Tuktoyaktuk, on another rainy day and bumpy road which turns out to have no bathroom spots on a 4 hour drive.
As we leave, Leo asks if we want to stop at the liquor store because there isn't any liquor available in Tuk!
4 hours on the road and the toilets are locked! John was fine, he just ran behind the building!
Pingos are ice-cored hills that form in recently drained lakes. The unfrozen ground directly beneath the lake, called “talik,” is surrounded by permanently frozen ground called permafrost. After the lake drains and the water-saturated sediment at the bottom of the lake bed becomes exposed, its surface begins to freeze.
We eat our lunch in the van as it is raining and cold. Into Tuktoyaktuk and we have some time to kill as our guide isn't ready for us. But it is raining as we approach the Arctic Sea!
S had some wine left over (from Eagle Plains) so we toasted A's 75th birthday!
Tuktoyaktuk is the only community in Canada on the Arctic Ocean that’s connected to the rest of the country by public road and the furthest north someone can drive in Canada.
Residents of Tuktoyaktuk still hunt for food, often travelling on the land to traditional hunting or fishing spots for harvesting purposes.
We get settled into our rooms at Roger's house.
Roger climbs into Leo's van and takes us on a guided tour. Roger Gruben, was raised in Tuk as a hunter of whales, caribou, polar bears and geese, but became a radio talk-show host after attending college and returning to Inuvik. From 1984-1994 he was arguably the most powerful person in the Western Arctic as CEO of the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, the group founded on the millions from the land settlement.
He tells us of his life in a residential school (Anglican). We sit and get numb/frozen listening to him inside the Catholic church.
Donated on behalf of Pope Pius XI in the 1930s, the schooner Our Lady of Lourdes sailed the Beaufort Sea for decades, delivering supplies to far-flung Catholic missions and carrying Inuvialuit children to Catholic residential schools.
It's 5 PM time for dinner...at Grandma's Kitchen. Place your order at the window and then sit inside a house on the right.
Our dining view. Burgers (again) but these are delicious and the buns are homemade. Need to use the washroom, she'll let you go into her house!
That's Grandma on the far right, she was so surprised when John tipped her.
Leo drops us back at Leo's and we read for the rest of the evening. I got up at midnight to use the bathroom and it was still daylight outside!
Saturday we are first up and have coffee and toast with Roger. We were in the van at 9:30 for the trip back to Inuvik.
But first a stop to dip toes in the Arctic Ocean.
No, I didn't bother!
4 hours later we are back in Inuvit and our rooms are ready at 1:30. It paid to throw a hissy fit the other day about the broken elevator, we got a room on the ground floor.
I would have made more sense to go straight to the airport from Tuk, rather than overnighting in Inuvik. There is NOTHING in Inuvik.
We had great plans and walked over to the only restaurant in town, Alestine's, opens at 5. There was a table of 5 waiting in front of us and we were told it would be at least an hour's wait. Plan B - hustle to the liquor store and then get take-out in the hotel. The four of us dined in our room with wine!
Sunday was a total waste of a day. Leo met us at 11 for a sightseeing tour of Inuvik. But it is Sunday and mass was taking place at the church (we had been inside yesterday) but they managed a quick visit.
He took us to the MacKenzie river that becomes the ice road in winter.
Then the Visitors Centre, oh, it is closed on weekends!
We ended up killing time back in the hotel lobby, there are no coffee shops, bars, restaurants etc to spend time.
On the way to the airport we make a stop at the Inuvik sign.
We stop in Old Crow and Dawson City finally arriving in Whitehorse at 11 PM (we gained an hour).
And we got a decent snack!
Monday we pick up some souvenirs and have breakfast at Burnt Toast, where we recognize on of the servers as our server last Sunday night at G&P.
We have a late checkout at noon and then wait in the lobby for the shuttle at 1:30.
We fly Air Canada Business Class to Vancouver.
We spend a couple of hours in the Vancouver lounge.
Business class to Toronto overnight, we are delayed leaving but make up the time in transit, landing on Tuesday morning around 6:30.
Tuesday we get home and head to bed until around noon.
Wednesday John heads out to golf and I pick up dinner at Longos. I had plans to call the plumber but he happened to be in the parking lot when I was waiting on the bus. I showed him the weird leak from our toilet and he said he'd message me about coming by.
Thursday John had a golf lesson. The plumber dropped by and decided we need a new gasket which he needs to get.
Friday John played golf and I went to Longos.
While waiting for the bus, the air show was rehearsing.
Amish family in Union Station.
WATCHING
We finished Manifest!
Watched a movie Heart of Stone - An intelligence operative for a shadowy global peacekeeping agency races to stop a hacker from stealing its most valuable and dangerous weapon.
EATING
Basically we did not eat anything exciting on this trip! In fact we are all tired to death of fried foods.
Saturday hamburgers in Tony's in the hotel
Sunday G & P chicken brochette for John steak for Jackie
Monday Sourdough Saloon John - Jackie -
Tuesday Drunk Goat Greek
Wednesday Eagle Palins buffet
Thursday Inuvik John - burger Jackie chicken sandwich
Friday Tuk burgers at Grandma's Kitchen
Saturday take-out hotel club sandwich and burger
Sunday deli plate on plane
Monday chicken and rice on flight from Inuvik to Whitehorse. Breakfast on flight from Vancouver to Toronto.
Maybe because this was airport reading, but I really enjoyed it despite its bad reviews. One Step Too Far kept me entertained, the twists and turns surprised me.
A Deadly Divide definitely appealed to me as it is set in Quebec and deals with racism.
Khan's latest addition is powerful and hard hitting, examining the outpouring of hate that so blights our troubled world, far beyond a small town in Canada. In this graphically realistic, complex and depressing portrayal of a mass shooting and a small town community, Khan focuses on the issues of race, religion, politics, culture, community and wider society that give rise to such horror with an acutely observant eye.
The Soulmate is more domestic drama than mystery/thriller. Again, another good plane read.
.jpg)
