The Yukon

Tombstone Territorial Park on the Dempster Highway.

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I’ve read stories of the Canadian far north for much of my life. Explorers, shrouded in ice fog or struggling through blinding snow, battled the elements and ate their shoes, still hungry after finishing their dogs and companions. Less extreme but nearly as harrowing were tales of fur trappers and prospectors scraping out a living (or not) in the face of unimaginable hardship, driven by greed and a thirst for the untamed frontier. I’ve flown over Northeastern Canada on my way to Europe, staring down at the Hudson Bay and vast wetlands south of it where trappers once navigated a maze of rivers in pursuit of beaver, but I’d never set foot there or traveled north of the Icefields Parkway in western Canada. 

The Yukon, Canada’s most northwestern territory, has its own mystique. In the 1960s, when I was a kid, Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer aired every Christmas season. One of the characters, Yukon Cornelius, a goofy, crusty prospector, wandered around pecking at the ice with his pickaxe and licking its tip as if to taste for gold (or silver), declaring: “nothing!”, until he finally discovered a peppermint mine and realized that he’d been searching for it all his life. “Wahoooo!,” he shouted, before setting off to get supplies (cornmeal, hamhocks, gun powder, and guitar strings). Cartoons aside, it's easy to romanticize tales of gold miners and fur trappers living rough in horrible weather with meager supplies and little success, in a place so fierce and beautiful.

The confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers at Dawson City. The Yukon drains much of the Territory. This was the epicenter of mining activity during the Klondike Gold Rush.

So it was with considerable anticipation that I crossed into the Yukon from British Columbia on our way to Alaska, the highway having snaked back and forth between the province and the territory seven times before committing to turning north. Ellen had driven the highway one spring in the 1980s on her way to work in Alaska for a summer, stopping at the still-frozen Kluane Lake, which she remembered as gorgeous. When we camped there, it was early fall and aspens were bright yellow among evergreens and willows on the steep slopes of the spectacular mountains that border the lake. White Dall sheep grazed on cliffs high above willow-choked grizzly bear habitat where we hiked one day. 

One of our camps on the shore of Kluane Lake. Interestingly, the lake is low (exposing all of this gravel shore) because of the rapid retreat of the Kaskawulsh Glacier, which starved the Slims River that supplied water to the lake. Subsequently, the lake's outflow switched from a stream feeding the Yukon River and ultimately the Pacific Ocean to one that drains into to the Gulf of Alaska. More detailed discussion is at this link.

Dall sheep graze above Sheep Creek at Kluane Lake.

Later in our trip, we returned to the Yukon on our way to Haines, reaching Dawson City after crossing the Yukon River by ferry. We’d driven the Top of the World Highway from Tok, Alaska, through the tiny town of Chicken, to a remote U.S-Canadian border station. After showering and resupplying in Dawson City (and eating some pretty good bbq ribs), we continued to the Dempster Highway, following it north to Tombstone Territorial Park, where tundra vegetation in full fall color lay draped over craggy peaks visible during breaks in the rain. The Dempster Highway continues beyond Tombstone for another 400 gravel miles to the Beaufort Sea near the village of Inuvik. Though drawn by the lure of seeing the edge of the Arctic, we didn’t have time for another epic drive. 

The Dempster Highway leading north towards Tombstone Territorial Park. Beyond the park, it's 400 more miles of gravel road to the Beaufort Sea. 

The Yukon Territory occupies just over 186,000 square miles, making it larger than New Mexico but smaller than Texas. Unlike either of those, its population is only about 48,000, roughly 30,000 of whom live in the capital, Whitehorse, meaning that in most of the Yukon, the population density is vanishingly small. Once part of the Northwest Territories, it was split off in 1898 so that the huge influx of gold prospectors swarming into the Klondike could be more easily managed. The Yukon is geographically diverse, extending southward from the Beaufort Sea to the summit of Mt. Logan, at 19,551 feet the highest peak in Canada and the second highest in North America. Between those extremes are vast areas of tundra, boreal forest, obscure mountain ranges, and enormous rivers. We saw little wildlife, but herds of caribou are said to roam the tundra far from roads.

View up the Slims River (now almost dry) towards Kluane National Park and Reserve. Mount Logan, the highest peak in Canada in one of many summits in this glaciated park. 

The Yukon was probably occupied by some of the earliest people to cross the land bridge from Asia to North America. Human-associated material in the Bluefish Caves was dated to 24,000 years before present, though not without controversy. People may have settled there before there was an ice-free corridor allowing migration southward. Today, First Nation people make up 22% of Yukon’s population. Tlingit, Tahltan, and seven Athabascan languages are spoken, though English and French are more common.

Ellen in Dawson City. The stop sign is in English and Han. Han is spoken by the Tr'ondek Hwech'in First Nation people.

The red-haired Yukon Cornelius aside, Europeans began exploiting resources in the Yukon during the 1800s, first collecting furs and then coming in droves starting in 1896 when gold was discovered in the Klondike. Prospectors disembarked from steamships in Skagway and struggled over White Pass with tons of gear to get to the Yukon gold fields east of the coastal mountains with enough supplies to survive a winter. By 1900, when the gold rush was essentially over, roughly 100,000 people had entered the Yukon, many of them finding their way to Dawson City. 

Dawson City.

We visited Dawson City twice during our time in the territory. It was established at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers by entrepreneurs eager to sell goods to miners. During the gold rush, prospectors floated the Yukon River to this frontier town after surmounting White Pass or other routes from the coast. Even today, placer mining is important in the Klondike region, and there are miles of gravel piles along rivers and streams, the detritus of hydraulic mining. Miners regularly unearth Pleistocene fossils buried in river sediment.  

Signs like this one supporting placer mining were all over in Dawson City.

After leaving Tombstone Park, we spent a couple of nights at a hoity-toity hot spring north of Whitehorse on our way to catch the Alaska Ferry at Haines. The Eclipse Nordic Hot Springs was  a little expensive but within our budget, and it seemed like a nice way to relax after a LOT of driving. The resort, once more rustic and inexpensive, has been transformed into a sort of Nordic-Japanese fusion experience, with warm pools, cold plunges, and heated relaxation chairs bathed in calming New Age music. We sat up late in a warm pool one night, chatting quietly with other guests and hoping to see the aurora (not that night). I wonder what Yukon Cornelius would have said had he stumbled upon a resort like this in the Yukon after one of his prospecting forays? "Wahooo!"? or "What the Hell?" In either case, washed, warm, and relaxed, he could have continued on his way to the hamhock and guitar string store, whistling a New Age tune. 

A lake west of Canyon Creek along the Alaska Highway in the Yukon.

The first building we saw after driving off of the Yukon River ferry into Dawson City.

The North Klondike Trail in Tombstone Territorial Park.

Tundra along the North Klondike Trail in Tombstone.

Fall color on a peak in northern Tombstone.

A drainage in Tombstone Park

Ellen hiking up the Grizzly Lake Trail in cold rain at Tombstone Park.

Ellen and our new friends, Terry and Bruce, who we met at Denali, hiking down from Goldensides Mountain in Tombstone.

Ellen looking south from Goldensides into the Ogilvie Mountains.

A stormy day along the road to Haines, which crosses from the Yukon back into Alaska.

Driving to Alaska

Fireweed along the Icefields Parkway north of Lake Louise in Canada

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During the Last Glacial Maximum, which waned about 19,000 years ago, so much water was bound in ice that a land bridge connected northeastern Siberia to Alaska. This and an ice-free corridor south of it known as Beringia opened the door to hunter-gatherers who migrated into what is now Alaska and Canada, eventually populating much of North and South America. Some of these became the Athabascan people, and around 1,000 years ago, a group of them moved to the U.S. Southwest to become the Navajo and Apache.

In August, Ellen and I drove north from Silver City, passing through historic Apache and Navajo lands in triple-digit heat, a far cry from Pleistocene times when mammoths scratched their backs on boulders in the Chihuahuan Desert, polishing them to a glassy sheen. We’d decided to head towards Athabasca in the face of another fizzling monsoon, the summer weather pattern that historically brings rain, moderating summer temperatures in the southwest. It’s hard to pin a few weak monsoons on human-induced climate change, but there’s no denying that the weather has been extreme in the last few decades. On our drive north, shrinking glaciers, vast swaths of burned boreal forest, and melting permafrost left no doubt that the climate is out of whack. Our purpose wasn’t to catalog climate impacts, but the farther north we went, the harder they were to ignore.

Unlike Beringians finding their way southward on foot or by boat, modern nomads drive to Alaska, and in the summer, the route we took to Anchorage is traversed by travelers in all manner of rigs including huge bus-like RVs, pickups with drop-in campers, converted vans like ours, sedans stuffed with gear, and a surprising number of motorcycles. At a laundromat in Whitehorse, Yukon, we saw a lovingly maintained yellow VW bug (from Denmark) equipped with a rooftop tent. At a long wait for road construction, I chatted with a German woman and her husband outside their rented RV. She’d been jumping rope beside the road to get a little exercise, and their kids were happily playing in the camper. She said with a smile that after weeks on the road, the kids didn’t feel much need to come out.

The Alaska Highway extends for over 1,300 miles from Dawson Creek, British Columbia to Delta Junction, Alaska, southeast of Fairbanks, where it connects to the Richardson Highway. Though much of it is in Canada, it was built quickly during WWII by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a supply artery connecting the lower-48 states to Alaska. Originally longer (1,700 sinuous miles) and rougher (unpaved with grades up to 25%), it’s now paved the entire way with services at regular intervals. We drove to Dawson City via the Canadian Rockies, traveling through Banff and Lake Louise, up the Icefields Parkway to Jasper, and then north to Dawson Creek. Other travelers get to Dawson Creek from farther west (Vancouver, etc.) which is also reported to be a beautiful trip. From there the route crosses into the Yukon before finally entering Alaska on frost-heaved asphalt.

Naively, we were surprised by north-country weather. Rain began just before we crossed the Canadian border and for most of the rest of our trip it was wet. Very wet. At first, we welcomed rain, hydrating our parched southwestern skin and cooling temperatures to the delightful 50s. For a time we were loath to wander in it, but eventually, we learned to hike in the rain, like the hardy Canadians and Alaskans, encasing ourselves in rain gear and walking into the mist, bear spray at the ready even though seeing a grizzly through fogged glasses in time to spray it might be a fantasy. In the Yukon, we asked a woman working a Visitors’ Center desk if it was normal to have this much rain. “This summer has been shit, shit, shit,” she replied immediately. “We’ve had 11 days of summer and none of them in a row. I can’t even get my garden to grow—there’s not enough sun, and now it’s fall. I can’t wait to get out of the Yukon.” It’s possible that a Visitors’ Center job wasn’t the best fit for this woman, but she was friendly.

Despite the rain and all the driving (it’s a long way from Southern New Mexico to Alaska), the trip was well worth the effort. We saw spectacular landscapes, enjoyed brilliant fall color in forests and on the tundra, made new friends, and expanded our mental geographies almost to the Arctic Circle. I’ll post separately about specific places we visited, a tiny fraction of mountain ranges and coastal forests where one could spend lifetimes exploring. After seven weeks on the road, it was with reluctance that we turned the van towards home. 

The annotated photos below describe a few highlights from the drive, and I’ll follow them with some very brief logistics since there is no shortage of information already online.

Grain elevators in Warner, Alberta, along the road north of our border crossing at Sweet Grass, Montana. 

A peak in Kootenay National Park viewed from the Numa Creek Trail where we hiked after being stymied by the crowds at Lake Louise. Banff and Lake Louise are overrun by tourists in summer and even getting to trailheads can be impossible.

Looking north along the Icefields Parkway. Throughout the trip we were awed by vast mountain ranges that seemed to go forever into the distance.

Ellen at Mistaya Falls along the Icefields Parkway. Rivers, like mountains, were innumerable in the north. We crossed many huge rivers that we'd never heard of, though each would have been famously historical farther south.

Athabasca Falls off of the Icefields Parkway. Many of these violent falls punctuated otherwise tranquil stretches of river, and it's easy to understand how they terrorized early explorers and trappers.

One of many huge burns that we encountered throughout Alberta, BC, and the Yukon. This photo is from our stop at Athabasca Falls. The town of Jasper was devastated by fire last year, but the downtown is thriving and visitors are welcome.

Western bunchberry (I think!) at Yellowhead Lake west of Jasper.

Kinney Lake in Mt. Robson Provincial Park. Mt. Robson is shrouded in clouds to the right, but it revealed itself to us by the time we returned to the trailhead.

The landscape east of Jasper. Limestone mountains and broad valleys extended away from the highway in all directions.

A giant beaver in Beaverlodge, Alberta. 

A First Nation church at Prophet River. In Canada, indigenous people are referred to as First Nation.

Sleepy wood bison near Muncho Lake in northern British Columbia. Despite a constant barrage of signs warning drivers to watch for animals, we saw almost no wildlife on the trip, which is not that unusual. A dogsled guide in the Yukon told us that it is so vast that animals have no reason to congregate near humans. 

Liard Hot Springs, a famous stop along the highway. The campground here is surrounded by electric fence to keep the bears out, and we passed two shotgun-armed rangers on the boardwalk leading to the pool who said that there'd been some "bear activity" the night before. 

A memorial plaque near the start of a hike (Sheep Creek) at Kluane Lake in the Yukon. A hiker on the trail had been killed by a "young male Grizzly Bear" in 1996. At this stage, we were still very nervous about hiking in grizzly country but as time went on we came to take it in stride, always with a can of bear spray at our side.

Ellen on the Sheep Creek hike where we passed a young woman hiking alone who told us that she stopped carrying bear bells after hearing them described as "dinner bells."

A dispersed (free) campsite beside Kluane Lake in the Yukon. 

A lake near Tok, Alaska.

View from Near Point on the Chugach Front Range above Anchorage where we hiked after arriving at our friends' house there. 

Ellen and Robin Moore descending from Near Point towards Anchorage. Robin's son, Adam, lives in Anchorage with his wife, Allie, their new daughter, Juniper, and two excited dogs, Echo and Norma.

Brief Logistics

There are many resources online for planning a driving trip to Alaska from the lower-48. I'll bullet a few useful tidbits below:

• Buy a copy of the Milepost, an annual publication that has mile-by-mile information on many of the routes through Canada and within Alaska. It's ridiculously detailed and especially useful if you have someone traveling with you who can read from it as you go.
• Be prepared for wet weather. At least on our trip, it rained a LOT. Don't let the rain stop you from getting out and doing things. Bring good rain gear.
• Carry bear spray almost everywhere. You are not allowed to cross the border into Canada with pepper-spray, mace, etc, but you can bring bear spray. We had no bear encounters, but they are out there.
• Gas is expensive in Canada and Alaska. Budget for it.
• There's no need to carry an extra gas can unless your car has a very small tank. Pay attention to filling up, but there are plenty of gas stations. 
• Give yourself LOTS of time for the drive. We spent about 11 days getting from the Canadian border to Anchorage and could easily have taken many more. 
• There are many campgrounds along the route and many options for dispersed (free) camping. We used an app called iOverlander to find campsites. It maps paid and free campsites as well as places for water, wifi, car repairs, etc. For $9.99/month you can subscribe and download unlimited states or provinces ahead of time (recommended) so that you aren't reliant on cell. 
• Cell coverage was spotty but surprisingly good a lot of the time. We have Verizon.
• If you camp outside of campgrounds, please learn to properly dispose of toilet paper! Many dispersed sites where we stayed were tainted by visible TP. You can put it in a small zip lock and throw it away at readily available trash cans or burn it (if you are extremely aware of fire danger). At the VERY LEAST, bury it rather than leaving it on the surface or draped in vegetation. Carrying a small shovel is useful.