The Road Less Traveled

That is what they say the Dempster is. Located outside of Dawson City on Yukon Hwy 2 is Hwy 5 which turns into NWT 8 (NorthWest Territories) better known as the Dempster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dempster_Highway . We started on Sunday 6/23/19 at 10:43am. Side note the car and trailer are amazingly clean, which changed soon after. It took us a little less then an hour to reach the Tombstone Interpretive Center this is where we noticed are first change in the landscape. Roy was looking at the landscape and described broken rock face hills to the right that quickly changes to a smooth black polished look. I also got my first look at snow. Tundra frozen or not always look so lush. Driving along it was interesting how the trees turned to shrubs with an occasional tree.

As far as animals on or near the road they were few a bunny, marmot, and a crazy duck trying to cross the road. In some of the lakes we saw loons, and gulls. No real big animals, about 4 million little ones with wings and fangs. Oh wait, those were mosquitoes. 😅.

The funny thing about the mosquitoes is you think people are exaggerating there is no way they are that many. My thought was I can handle these guys, because the state bird of Wisconsin is the mosquito. So a word to the wise I am not exaggerating when I say wear chainmail. The other thing we noticed is they seem to be immune to all the usual repellents. I guess the caribou migration ended about two weeks ago. Maybe on the trip back to Dawson we might catch something.

Even if the animals are scarce the vistas  make up for some of it. Speaking of vistas the view from Ogilvie-Peel viewpoint   you can see for 120 miles on a clear day which we had. Other interesting things we saw this first day were our first pingo, an airstrip that we drove on (Ok it is the road that can be used by airplanes.), white flowers so dense it looks like snow on the ground, and of course snow. The one thing we did not see alot of on the road were cars.

The drive was extremely dusty because of the dry roads. Dust can be brushed or blown off except to keep the dust down you have trucks go through and spread water on the road. When you add water to dust you get guess what mud. So the trailer looked like it had been through a rain storm (BTW it did go through one on the 24th, more later.) Upon our arrival at Eagle Plains, Erica checked us in answered all my questions before I could ask them I think she must get the same questions over and over so she covers it all before she’s asked.  Check out my blog about Mayberry RFD oh I meant Eagle Plains.