Sunday 7-15
As I have mentioned previously, our family is prone to over-using superlatives. In normal, everyday life, this can be a little annoying…this is the best penne pasta I’ve ever eaten!…that was the most productive PTA meeting ever!…he’s the nicest guy in the chess club!…that’s the biggest tater tot I’ve ever swallowed! As you read the posts for the next several days, you will need a healthy tolerance for superlatives. We’ve been lucky enough to travel to a lot of neat places. We’ve never seen anything as impossibly beautiful as this area—so there will be a lot of verbal oohs and ahs. And now for the rest of the story (sorry Mr. Harvey ).
Sunday was our first day on the Dempster Highway. This road is named for a Mountie, Corporal W. J. Dempster, who was part of the “Lost Patrol”—four RCMP officers that got lost and died along this route in 1910. Back in the day, you did this trip by dog sled (Michael Vick I hope you’re paying attention). Now, as you drive this road in your car, you marvel at the courage and commitment of the people back in the day.
Locally they call this road just, “The Dempster”--the same sort of truncation we use in California when we call Interstate 405 simply “The 405”, but here when they say “The Dempster” there’s a tone of reverence, respect, awe, or sometimes, trepidation. They’ll say, “The Dempster’s a tough ride today, eh?” or “What’s The Dempster look like today?” or “You drove The Dempster, eh?”.
The Dempster Highway runs north and slightly east for 500 miles, from just outside of Dawson City to the town of Inuvik (in-OO-vick) on the McKenzie River delta (a short hop from the Beaufort Sea and Arctic Ocean). Sounds innocent enough, eh?
At the beginning there’s a lodge and service station. The next services are 230 miles north in the booming metropolis of Eagle Plains (permanent population of 8 hearty souls). Virtually the entire road is gravel, clay, dirt, or mud. They say there are sections where you can drive highway speeds, and there are, but there are also sections where you need to slow to a crawl. We drove the 300 mile long, gravel Campbell too, and on the whole, we think The Dempster is a better road, but it’s much longer and it would be tedious to drive in a big Class “A” RV (although we saw a couple). Because we weren’t sure about driving the RV, didn’t want to pump $1000 of gas into the Admiral, and wanted the Cheap Jeep to get some serious experience, we left the Admiral in Dawson City and took the CJ—it was a good decision.
For the first 300+ miles, the Dempster runs through or near a spectacularly diverse parade of mountains; the Ogilvies, the Tombstones, the Little Mountains, the Mahoni Range, the Blackstone Hills, and the Richardson Mountains. There is no way to adequately describe how beautiful it is. There are many 360° panoramas with mountains all around—craggy mountains, tree covered mountains, naked mountains, and every combination in between. If you are an extra-terrestrial from Jupiter and don’t like mountains, there are also vast forests, and, of course, the tundra (we’ll talk about the unfrozen tundra later). We took billions and billions (sorry Mr. Sagan) of pictures, but none remotely captures the presence of this place. To truly appreciate this area, you’ll need to make this drive yourself. I hope that someday you get the chance.
Not only is this area beautiful, but it’s absolutely pristine. The air is clean, the highway is unlittered, and the space is mostly empty. Remember, this is a 500 mile long, gravel road to more or less nowhere—there are a few trucks, a few campers, a few cars & SUVs, but you can drive for MANY miles without seeing anyone. It’s remote. It’s teeming with wilderness. It’s kind of like a road cut through the Garden of Eden.
Despite our best intentions, we didn’t get started until early this afternoon. No more remarkable transformation on this journey than our sense of time and sleeping habits. Nancy and I have always been "early to bed and early to rise", our days filled with minute-to-minute schedules dictated by external persons or events. Now we go to sleep very late (hey, it’s still light out), arise later, and do the things we need or want to do with no defined schedule. Nancy has our only watch sitting on her “desk”. She’s the master of ceremonies in our Game of Time. “Brian”, she’ll ask, “What time do you think it is NOW?” Invariably I’m off by a couple of hours on the early side—I think it’s 10 in the morning when, in fact, it’s 2 in the afternoon. So we’re always late, and very happy about it. But I digress…
Today in the first 6 hours, we covered 60 miles of The Dempster. This is arguably the best section of the road so it wasn’t the conditions that slowed us down, it was the, “Holy cow, look at that” moments. We also stopped at the Tombstone Mountain Info Center. First unpleasant experience we’ve had at one of these, but easily disregarded. Also took a self-guided nature hike. Learned about Fireweed (watch for more pictures of this beautiful pink flower that grows in open areas and where forest fires have consumed the trees), Artic Cotton (used locally to make super-warm long underwear—not), other wild flowers, various berries, other flora, and fauna.
A few miles beyond the Info Center we came upon a mini-glacier on Blackstone River. Compacted snow on the river bed that was up to about 6’ thick. I trekked down to it and made snow angels. Cool—in every sense. Later I unsuccessfully fished in this river—must have had the wrong fly because it’s the kind of river that HAS TO HAVE fish in it.
The Dempster is billed as a great place for birding and it did not disappoint us. Today many birds including 4 new ones for our life-list: Northern Shoveler, Goldeneye, American Wigeon, and a sparrow that we’re still working on identifying.
We expect to see lots of wildlife. We’re about as remote as you can get in a vehicle and usually have commanding views of the area around us including expansive, steep, grass-covered, mountain sides. Near the North Fork Pass, about 50 miles into the trip, Nancy spots an Artic Fox. Nancy’s our champion wildlife spotter. I’m pretty good at finding a McDonalds or a Pizza Hut, but if you’re after wildlife, you want Nancy on your team. The Artic Fox is sitting right at the edge of the road as nonchalant as the neighborhood Labrador. He poses artfully.
At Two Moose Lake (so named because it’s shallow and filled with the aquatic plants that moose like and had two moose in it when it was originally discovered) there’s just one moose. Even I can see this moose right away because it’s standing right there in the lake. MIP 12 is a group of 6 Europeans; Austrian, French, and Swiss couples. They’re traveling in very funky European off-road campers, and are on the third day of their return trip from Inuvik. The French guy is an artist who’s doing a watercolor of the moose. The Austrians are knitting lederhosen. The Swiss couple is making cheese. The French lady gives us an enthusiastic preview of the road ahead and tells of the many animals they’ve seen. Turns out they were all traveling independently, met in Inuvik, and decided to caravan back to civilization—very nice people. We bid “adieu” and “auf wiedersehen” and head up the road.
At about 8:30 PM we stop at Chapman Lake for lunch (our body clocks are a little out of whack). We cook chili on our Coleman stove (remember, we’ve forsaken the Admiral and are in a tent-camping mode).
Back in the car we enter a new section of mountains. We pass a Gyro Falcon nest high on a cliff (it’s written up in the guide books or we’d never have seen it)—more about the Gyro Falcons later. We pass a very red section of rock and cross the Red Creek both the result of high concentrations of iron oxide. At 10:30 we stop at the Engineers Creek Provincial Park and set up our tent.
All of the guidebooks warn that the mosquitoes get more noxious as you head north. The guidebooks are not wrong about this. At Engineers Creek we get our first taste of this amplified buzzing. There are swarms of mosquitoes. SWARMS! I get the idea that we could use these mosquitoes to power a boat. It would be easy to adapt a Hobie Cat to take advantage of this power. Smear red meat on the sail and get ready to rocket. A couple hundred million of these guys generate a lot of wind.
We sleep fitfully. Three guys next to us are drinking Labatts and singing Canadian campfire songs (Michael Rowed The Boat Ashore, Eh?...Eh? There…Tie Me Caribou Down Mate, Tie Me Caribou Down…The Dredge Boat Song—Me say Eh? Me say Eh? Me say Eh? O), sun is still shining, bears could be in the woods…at least we have the white noise of the mosquitoes trying to drill their way into the tent.
