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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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