The Dempster Highway

The Dempster highway, the reason I wanted to do this trip. This highway runs from outside Dawson City in Inuvik NWT and spans 750 odd Kms of dirt road. I had mixed views about driving it because I had heard many different opinions about the condition of the road, so we went by the, we’ll drive until the road gets to bad route. The women at the info center said the road was in fair condition with lots of huge rocks so we wouldn’t be able to go faster than 50 km/h, this was discouraging but we ventured out at 815am to see what we could do. We drove to Tombstone park, 75km into the drive, where there are pretty amazing mountain ranges and the road was good so we decided to continue on to see if we could indeed reach the arctic circle. We drove along and the road seemed fine being able to go 80-100km/h in many spots. There was one new SUV parked by the side of the road with two flats. This was worrying because we only had two spare tires and were only 180km into the 810km trip up and back. But we proved to be stronger then that SUV and many others, although we were the only car on the road amongst SUVs, pickups, and semi trailers. The scenery was wonderful the highway drives along high plateaus through the plains and valleys and the stark arctic landscape was very interesting. We made it to the halfway mark of the highway and stopped and had a very late lunch but it was delicious and better priced then we thought since it was in the middle of nowhere. We continued on the remaining 40km and made it to THE ARCTIC CIRCLE‼‼‼ We took our photos and ended up meeting a guy from Alberta with two travellers from Switzerland. The guy from Alberta wanted to celebrate reaching the arctic circle with shots of Yukon Jack for everyone. I was very sceptical of this drink as it looked and smelled disgusting, none the less not wanting to offend we partook and it turned out not to be as bad as thought but not something I would ever drink again. We made our way back to Dawson city and the round trip took 15 hours and lots and lots of dust later. My car is disgusting. Upon reaching the end of the highway there is a gas station that has a power washer and we wanted to clean some of the mud off. We didn’t have the correct change for the machine and the gas station was closed so we asked some people that were parked there for change. Here we learned some interesting things. One chap from the NWT told us about his and a few other’s trips down the Dempster that day. He had got two flats and a bent rim in his SUV, another traveller in an SUV broke his axel on the way down his towing bill was $1000, the SUV we saw parked at the side of the road had strange sized tires and so had to wait a number of days to get the right size tires sent in. What we deduced from this is; a) we avoided the rocks better b) new tires are better than old on 810km on gravel road and c) Mazda 3s rock SUVs on the Dempster.

Animals – moose (same moose twice once up and the other time down wanted to die both times), fox, beaver
Kms - 927