Day 8

Eagle Plains, Yukon Territory

Sunday 8/17

Carmacks is a work in progress. The morning light reveals a town that is trying to very hard to fix itself up for the growing number of tourists that are driving the Klondike and Campbell Highways. They've built a replica of the old telegraph office and a boardwalk path along the Yukon River. This will be a good place to look around provided people bother to stop, as those of us from Hopewell, VA, know too well.

Around noon, we arrived in Dawson, hub of the 1896 Gold Rush and the jumping off point for the Dempster Highway. This is a neat town that's actually larger than Whitehorse (31,000 vs. 20,000).. Looking down the Yukon River, it's easy to imagine the armada of boats and rafts filled with prospectors who dropped everything they had for the chance to strike it rich. And that all happened just 100 years ago, while my grandfather was alive. Today, it's a very rustic, yet cozy town with the usual assortment of gift shops, restaurants, etc. Although touristy, there are a lot of locals here, making it much like the "Northern Exposure" version of Ocracoke. Today, many of those locals who aren't serving tourists are at the city's annual Demolition Derby. You'd figure they'd need those cars in a few months.

With the gas tank topped and the jerry cans filled, we began the final leg of our journey--a 300-mile run up the Dempster Highway. Inuvik's only year-round ground link to civilization, the Dempster is named in honor of a mountie who volunteered to find a patrol that had become lost in the dead of winter. (The patrol was found frozen to death; hope our luck is better.) The road is in surpriningly good shape; we'd been led to believe that it was a pockarked, rutted path between the mountains. Instead, it's a farily smooth dirt/gravel road with only a few potholes. It's as good, if not better, than some stretches of the Bella Coola road. But nothing compares with the scenery! This is the best yet, with towering mountains and broad valleys. Some parts are treeless, leaving only a thing layer of grass covering the mountains. What's really fascinating is that *nobody* lives here. There's not a house or streetlight in sight. Yet it's far from a "lonely" road, at least for us first-timers; we're too busy gawking at the scenery.