Day 07: Dempster Highway to the Arctic Circle

Trip Log for 1 Jun 2012

• Miles Driven: 547
• Sunrise: 04:14 PDT / Sunset: 00:19 PDT

I'm in the car as I write this, on our way back from visiting the Arctic circle at mile 252 (KM 405) of the Dempster Highway and just after fixing a flat tire. They say this road is notorious for them and after 75% of the way, we fell pray to the sharp rocks. Thankfully it appears to be a small, slow leak right in the middle of the tire so it should be easily fixable when we get back to "the corner" (what the locals call the junction of the Dempster and Klondike Highways). These tires are equiped with pressure senors so we saw a warning light on the dash when it happened.

Everything started out great this morning, though. We filled up with gas (for $5.98 a gallon, so no complaints down there in Texas) and started up the highway a little before 09:00. It was overcast as we headed into the mountains and through Tombstone Territorial Park. It's really the most beautiful part of the drive so if you don't feel like going farther, you still get a lot out of the Dempster experience. The road really isn't that bad. It's all dirt and gravel with many rough sections but it has a posted speed limit of 90km (55mph) and we drove around 80km. The Ogilvie and Tombstone mountains are just so beautiful and when we got to higher elevations in the pass, it even snowed on us a little. The rest of the way we ran into rain showers off and on but nothing steady or drenching.

Just after 15:00, we made it to 66° 33' north latitude. Even better, there was a geocache nearby so Wes and I now both have a new "farthest north" find. Those ammo cans seem to really hold up to the elements year after year. It was very, very windy but temperate at the circle and after a few photos, we started back. About 23 miles south of there is the official halfway stop between Dawson and Inuvik called Eagle Plains (probably because the little hotel/gas station is located on the Eagle Plain Plateau). We had a little less than half a tank so we filled up, checked out the gift shop which hasn't been stocked for the season yet and kept going south.

At 18:30, we stopped to make dinner at the Engineer Creek Campgound which was going to be where we would have camped if we had decided we didn't want to keep driving back to town. Going up, we alternated driving every couple of hours but Wes has been driving the whole way back and says he's in his zone. He's driving more cautiously now that we've had a flat as we don't want to have a second one before we make it back to town. I'm glad we decided to do this and have fit it into one day instead of three. Even though we have been doing more difficult and longer driving today, it has felt more relaxed because we're not trying to get somewhere by a certain time.