Road Trip in the North

This will be a short one. Deadlines have me scrambling, and while I started a different Kennel Club, I can’t quite see the end of it yet.

But yesterday, we heard from my mother-in-law. She’s on a Travels With Charley type of trip in Northern BC and the Yukon with her simple-minded, affable, golden retriever Buddy.

“The people up north are kind,” she says. She’s been driving for 5-6 hours every day, with many detours to walk Buddy and stretch their legs. “Everyone’s friendly, chatting and asking me questions.”

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A couple invited her to dine with them the other night and paid for her meal. And Buddy? The waitress brought him a bowl of water on the patio.

She’s heading to Whitehorse, YT next and will spend several days out of the car. “It’s monotonous driving for so long,” says the woman who’s the primary source of the hub’s I-can’t-sit-still energy. “I’m looking forward to walking and staying in one place.”

Her trip reminded me of one I took in July 2008, a roundtrip drive from Fairbanks to BC with the two kids – 8 and 10 at the time – that started as a vacation to visit friends and family, but which changed the trajectory of our lives.

If you haven’t driven the Alaska Highway (otherwise known as the Alaska-Canadian Highway, or ALCAN Highway) and haven’t spent a lot of time in the wilderness, it might be difficult to conceptualize how long and desolate the highway is. Imagine driving for six hours without seeing a building, with nothing but mountains and trees lining the road and scant vehicles in either direction. Then imagine traveling like that for four days.

I’d taken the ALCAN once before my trip with the kids, so I knew how desolate the 3,600 km (2100 miles) drive would be – few gas stations, few habitations, and lots of wild animals. I packed a second spare tire, just in case. With no other drivers in the car, I limited myself to driving 8 hours each day with a stop somewhere for lunch and to stretch our legs.

The kids were keen and set up the tent whenever we arrived at a destination. On the first afternoon, however, we drove into the wooded campground near Kluane, Yukon Territory, and a big sign greeted us: “CAUTION: BEARS IN AREA, NO TENTS.”

Whelp, that was unwelcome. I drove down to the private campground filled with massive RVs and asked the guy if I could camp there. “Sure,” he responded. “But we’ve had three grizzlies around every night, so it’s your own decision.”

We camped on the lake with no mishaps except that I left a very cool fishing knife set on the picnic bench when we left, and I’ve missed it ever since.

My mother-in-law says the weather has been warm, and even though the locals say the mosquitos are bad this year, she isn’t finding them overwhelming. But she’s staying in motels. If she were to be camping in the trees, she’d be inside her tent and cursing Buddy who’d be carrying a cloud of them into the tent with him.

The kids and I had a bug tent that I set up over the cooking/eating area every night, or the mosquitos and yellow jackets would have annihilated us. The worst bugs were in Liard Hot Springs, where it took a boardwalk trek through the muskeg to get to the rustic hot pool. The only way to avoid the mosquitos was to dunk our heads under and hold our breath. I wished I had a straw.

Also in Liard Hot Springs? Stormy weather and a steady rain that wouldn’t let up when we were packing up the tent and gear in the morning. I let the kids stay in the car while I got soaked loading everything up. A few hours later, we stopped in Fort Nelson, BC to use the laundromat to dry gear and to get myself a new rain jacket.

We didn’t experience the hot weather that my mother-in-law is having. It was comfortably warm, and some days involved heavy rain, which made the drives feel longer. It’s not as enjoyable driving gray-sky highways, but you know what makes it special? A rainbow.

We stopped at a rope swing over the Yukon River in Whitehorse, the Sign Post Forest in Watson Lake, and a beautiful campground off the Icefields Parkway in Banff National Park. After six days, we reached our destination in BC and reunited with family and friends, including the hub, who I hadn’t seen in 20 years.

I’d known the hub and his family since he was a baby, I’d seen him last in 1988 when he was thirteen, and I twenty-two. Twenty years later, he was no longer the twirpy kid I remembered, the smart-ass who shamelessly stole my cribbage points.

This Kennel Club won’t go into the details of how the hub and I reconnected and within the year got married (impatience and impetuosity – the story of my life). Suffice it to say that on the final day of our two-week stay in the little village the hub called home, he and the kids and I spent a very easy day touring the Sandon Museum, collecting smooth glass polished by the waters of Carpenter Creek, and playing beach volleyball in the park. The ease of that afternoon got me thinking….

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The kids and I took a different route going home, driving up Highway 97 and through BC’s interior rather than skirting through northern BC into Alberta. We camped at provincial parks and met lots of Germans driving rental RVs. “The land is so wide open here. There’s nothing like this in Europe.”

Our journey home – Whitehorse, Carmacks, Pelly Crossing, Stewart Crossing, Dawson City – mirrored the route of the Yukon Quest a long-distance mushing race in which I’d had several friends compete. We went to the hot springs in Whitehorse. In Carmacks a burly bearded guy served us cinnamon rolls, and I filled my thermos with weak coffee for the afternoon. In Dawson City, we walked the boardwalks and felt closer to home than any other part of the trip.

Leaving Dawson City, we crossed the Yukon River on the little ferry, and I marveled at the unending wilderness. After the crossing, we drove the unpaved Top of the World Highway back into Alaska.

The name of the highway is apt. It truly feels like the top of the world. It cruises along the ridgeline of a long line of mountains with incredible 360º views. Not soon after we started the trek back into Alaska, we came upon a few caribou who clomped goofily in front of us for a half mile or so.

We spent our last night in Chicken, Alaska (legend has it that no one knew how to spell ptarmigan), a town that’s inhabited by less than a dozen people, then we drove five and a half hours home.

My mother-in-law will be up north for the next few weeks, and I’m excited to hear more about it. While she’s not heading into Alaska, any solo trip up north, where most only dream of going, is impressive. She’s even going to cross the ferry and check out the Top of the World Highway. For those of us who appreciate the wilderness, nothing compares to the vastness of the Northern BC, the Yukon.