David and Enid's Travels

Golden Eagle in Inuvik campground

Finally, a beautiful day.  Sunny, warm and with just enough of a breeze to keep the bugs away. 

We have a flight to Tuktoyaktuk booked for four pm today.  It will be about a four hour tour of the village, so because it is so sunny and bright we are really looking forward to it.  Then we hope to be able to get away tomorrow.  The Peel River ferry is closed once again though.  Perhaps by tomorrow, with no rain today the river will have dropped enough that we can cross.  Right now there is so much debris coming down the river and catching in the ferry cable that it is not safe for them to run the ferry.

There is a golden eagle that is perched on a power pole here in this campground.  It is very tame, and doesn’t seem to pay much attention to us, so I was able to get both a number of stills and video of it.  It doesn’t look too wild of course, sitting on a power pole, but it’s prbably about as close to one as you’ll ever come.

Michael, English cyclist at Inuvik

We are still awaiting better weather, though it has almost stopped raining and is now just sprinkling occasionally.  The forecast for tomorrow is still good, so we hope to go north to the Arctic Ocean then.

A couple of days ago while at the Mackenzie River crossing we met a man from England who has been cycling all over the north.  Michael, from Cornwall in England, though recently of many varied locations around the world where he has been cycling and teaching English as a second language, is now in Inuvik, and staying at the same campsite as we are.  This morning he was in the cook shelter, just finishing his breakfast as we arrived for ours, so we shared some breakfast with him.  He enjoyed the boiled egg, and toast with homemade wild blueberry jam that we gave him.  A long conversation about his and our travels and plans whiled away quite a bit of time, so much so that he missed his appointment at the library where he had booked Internet time.  Since I have my own computer, I don’t have to do that.  We hope that he was able to rebook.

After that we went for a swim, not in the Arctic Ocean though, but in the indoor Inuvik pool.  It is a very nice large facility, and they had lane swimming this morning.  Enid and I were the only ones in the lane for quite a while, though there were a few children playing in the other part of the pool.  Around noon more people joined us, and then the lights went out.  We were almost done our laps, so finished them as soon as the lights came back.

We are also all stocked up with groceries for another week.  Prices here are somewhat higher, and the fresh produce while acceptable is not in large quantity, and not of as good quality as you would get farther south.  Gas here is quite a bit more, at $1.40 a litre.

Igloo Church, Inuvik

We are still in Inuvik, and waiting out the weather.  Today was very cloudy and rainy.  Fortunately there is a good kitchen shelter in the campsite, so we have been able to cook there.  It’s not too cold, but nevertheless, it would be nicer to have good weather.  As of this morning the Peel River ferry was operating again, but the Dempster is closed south of Eagle Plains where it has been flooded by the Ogilvie River. 

We did the laundry this morning, so that was good to complete.  Right now we are waiting in the library, checking our email and so on.  The weather forecast looks good for Saturday, so our plans are to go to Tuktoyaktuk then. 

Inuvik has an interesting church, the Igloo Church.  It is a Catholic church built in the shape of an igloo.  We had a tour and talk about the church this afternoon, which indicated how it was constructed.  They allow you to go up into the attic, so you could see how it was built.  Most of the wood was shipped in from far south, but they even used hockey sticks in the building construction.

Mackenzie River ferry crossing

We arrived at Inuvik today shortly after lunch.  The afternoon has been spent getting set up in our campsite, and visiting a few stores in town.  The weather does not look great.

We were close to the last vehicle to get across the Peel River ferry last night.  This morning the ferry is closed, and we do not know when it will reopen, so don’t know how long we will be in Inuvik.  We checked out a flight to Tuktoyaktuk, and could have gone today, but it was on too short notice.  The weather forecast is very poor, and lots of rain is forecast.  We’ll see tomorrow if we can get there or not. 

We crossed the Mackenzie River just about 11:00 this morning.  The ferry also made a stop in Tsiigèhnjik (Arctic Red River) where it let a couple of trucks off.  One made a quick stop, and then got back on the ferry to continue on to Inuvik.  There was also a man there from England, a former biology teacher, now teaching English as a second language (just back from China) who had ridden his bicycle from Alaska.  He desperately wanted to see bears.  We weren’t quite sure why Europeans are so fascinated by them.  We would have been quite happy not to have had the encounter with one last night, though actually it is a good thing it happened, or we’d be stuck on the other side of the ferry.  There definitely is no place I’d want to camp there, but several nice sites on this side of the river.

Arctic Circle sign

A long day of travel, as we covered over 475 km.  We didn’t plan to go that far today, but more on that later. 

It was another beautiful sunny day as we set off this morning from the Tombstone Campground.  We stopped at several sites along the way to take pictures and video, and enjoyed the spectacular arctic scenery.  The vistas are incredible, as one can see for a hundred kilometers in all directions from the tops of many of the high plains.  The far distant mountains form a blue backdrop to the tundra plains. 

As we passed the Ogilivie River we could see why the road has been closed.  There was evidence of a good deal of flooding, but by now the water has dropped.  There were crews working on the road in several places.  Parts of the road have been washed out, but the river is now confined to its streambed, though it is still running very high and fast. 

By late afternoon we’d passed the Arctic Circle sign (which according to my GPS is about 2 km north of the actual site), and had reached our planned destination of Rock River campground.  We pulled in right behind a camper van, and chose a site.  We set up everything, including our kitchen shelter tent as we thought there might be a lot of mosquitoes here.  I went and got some water from the creek.  It was somewhat turbid, probably from all the rain, but good enough for washing.  Enid went and registered the site.  As she came back she said “there’s no one else here.  The others didn’t stay.” 

We sat in our camp kitchen shelter for a while.  I was reading the instruction manual for the generator to see when it needs an oil change (soon).  I’d set up the barbeque, and we were just getting ready to start supper, when Enid heard a cracking sound in the bush, said “I hope that’s not a bear” and turned around to see that indeed it was!  It was a small black bear, which disappeared when we yelled, but we decided not to stay here.  We quickly packed everything up, and headed off down the road again, to the next closest site (this one) which was about another 80 km down the road. 

Along the way we saw a couple of herds of caribou.  We also stopped at the NWT boundary and took a picture.   There is quite a bit of construction between the border and the Peel River crossing, so the road here is quite rough.  We reached the ferry just as it was about to leave, but he waved us on, so we didn’t have to wait at all (though we’d had to wait earlier for a flagman at the construction).  We then arrived at this campgrounds, and went to register. 

We chatted with the caretaker a bit while we registered.  He said that he was surprised the ferry was still running, as the river is flooding.  There definitely was a strong current and a great deal of flotsam as we crossed today.  He also said to take campsite 17 “as it’s the closest to the showers.”  Showers!!! We had no idea they had them here, and what a wonderful clean building they are in.  Though it’s the most expensive campground we’ve stayed in at $22.50, it’s by far the nicest from that standpoint, as it’s the first one we’ve been in with running water. 

This is the same campground as we stayed at in 1997, where they had the tables made out of huge logs, and where we first saw the midnight sun.  Unfortunately those tables have been replaced with concrete structures.  More stable and easier to maintain for sure, but not nearly as interesting as the old ones, some of which were still present at the campground entrance.

Caribou on Goldenside mountain

We had a beautiful day.  For the first time in several days we awoke to sunshine, and it stayed sunny and almost cloud free all day.  After breakfast we drove up about 1.5 km to the lookout over the Tombstone Valley, which is exactly where we had the flat tire when we were here in 1997.  This time though we drove just a bit farther on, and took a small road into a microwave tower.  Here is where the Goldenside trail starts.  At first it passes through small dwarf birch about 1 to 2 feet high, then crosses a stream, and then starts a gradual climb.  The climb becomes much steeper roughly a kilometre into the trail as it follows a grassy area between two rocky ridges coming down from the mountain.  We continued to climb past a small patch of snow where we saw a large Arctic ground squirrel.  As we neared the top of the ridge, Enid saw a caribou about 100 metres away from us.  Although it knew we were there, it didn’t pay much attention to us, and continued grazing.

We climbed the rest of the way to about 50 vertical metres from the crest of the ridge, where we tucked in behind a large rock to shelter us from the wind, but where we could sit in the sun.  We watched the caribou through most of the time while we ate our lunch.  The last part of the trail is very steep, and so Enid started down.  I continued on to the crest of the ridge, where it became very flat on top, and I walked easily up the last 400 metres to the summit at 1860 m.  From here there are spectacular views in all directions.  Coming down was tricky, because it was steep, and it was muddy.  I slipped twice and sat down hard.  Enid was quite a way ahead of me, but she went slowly and had no trouble getting down to the starting point at 1300 m.  The total round trip was about 4 km for Enid, 4.5 for me.

At the bottom we saw some very interesting flowers.  They look much like a crocus, but are white with dark blue streaks in the petals.  There were also many bright red leaved cranberries all through the higher part of the trail.  After we got back to our campsite, we walked over to the interpretive centre, and spent about an hour looking over the exhibits.  It is a very nice new building.  They have two huge solar panels outside of the building, and they are mounted on pedestals that constantly align to the sun.  The whole building is designed to be environmentally friendly.  It has many large windows on the south.  I’m not sure how late in the year the building stays open, but they would catch a lot of sunlight until later in the fall.

We set up our shower and had a good wash once we got back.  The shower bag works really well now that we have figured out how to support it in a large cloth recyclable grocery bag which we bought in Whitehorse for this purpose.  There wasn’t quite enough sunlight in our campsite as it is quite shaded, so the water wasn’t quite hot enough, but we added just a bit heated on the stove, and that worked great.

Mushrooms found along the Tombstone Campground trail

Another gray and rainy day.  It seems like there have been far too many this summer, including our canoeing in early July, and now our travels through the north of Canada.  When we awoke the sky was clear, but it soon became very overcast as we travelled towards the junction of the Dempster and Klondike highways.
We stopped to refuel before heading north and were pleasantly surprised to find they had free wifi access at the service station.  This allowed us to post yesterday’s blog, as well as catch up on our emails.  We were not so pleasantly surprised to learn that the Dempster highway is closed by flooding at Engineer Creek and the Ogilvie River.  There is no word on when the road will open again, though we hope that it will be in just a couple of days if it stops raining.  Unfortunately, that is not the way the weather looks now, as it has been raining for much of the afternoon.

We stopped in Tombstone Campground, as we intended, though with the weather as it is, it’s not very conducive to hiking.  We did go for a short hike this afternoon down the campground trail which follows the North Klondike River,  as well as scrambling a bit over indistinct trails over some higher ridges.  There are a very large number of mushrooms here, though unfortunately we’re not very good at identifying them.  The only ones we can identify for sure are the puffballs.  It looked to us as if someone might have picked them.  There were also many low bush cranberries.  They aren’t quite ripe yet, but will be in just a couple of weeks.

For the rest of the afternoon I caught up some by backing up picture and GPS files.  Also I’m recharging both my and Enid’s camera batteries.  Enid spent the afternoon reading in the Yukon, as it is quite cool outside.  The rain has stopped, but it’s very cloudy and cool.  It didn’t rain anymore after the late afternoon, and this evening we built a good fire and sat around it and read for a couple of hours.  There were many tiny black flies, almost like fruit flies, which didn’t bite, but which did land and crawl all over any exposed skin, and were very annoying.

We arrived at the gas station (Klondike Lodge) at the junction of the Dempster Highway this morning.  The highway is closed at Eagle Plains.  So is the Top of the World Highway out of Dawson to Alaska.  So we may be here for a while.

We will be going up to Tombstone campgrounds where we were going to spend at least a couple of days anyway, and see what happens.  Hopefully the road will be open again soon so that we can go to Inuvik.

Evening on the Stewart River

Last evening (Friday night) I walked along the Wolf Creek trail.  It goes out to a high bank overlooking the Yukon River, then winds its way back along the clear waters of the creek.   Although this is a salmon spawning river, I saw no migrating fish, but if they were coming upstream, they would be easy to spot.

It was raining during my walk, and it continued to rain off and on throughout the night.  Our tent fly was again thoroughly soaked, though the tent itself is perfectly dry.  As it didn’t look like there would be many sights to see today, the clouds hanging low obscuring the tops of the mountains, we decided to spend some time in the Beringia Interpretive Centre.  We watched a couple of videos, and looked over the displays, spending a couple of hours in total there.

Noon brought us to the “marge of Lake Lebarge” so we drove to the lake, and walked down to its shore.   We ate our lunch as we drove on.  In early afternoon we drove into a tremendous downpour just south of Carmacks.  I pulled in for gas, and waited for a few minutes for the rain to slow down before getting out to fill up.

Next we stopped to see Five Finger Rapids.  It wasn’t raining, so we walked down to the river.  There are 220 steps down, and a total walk of a little over a km to the rapids.  Frankly, the rapids aren’t much, though they have a strong current, there is no white water at all.  In some ways they remind me of Silent Rapids.  At one time though they were a much larger rapids, but the obstructing rocks were blown up to allow steamboats easier travel through.  It began to rain just as we reached the river, so it was a good thing we had worn our raincoats.  We were still quite wet by the time we got back to the parking lot.

It continued to rain squall, and looked like it would be a poor camping evening.  We thought about finding a hotel room, but there aren’t any at the small villages along the way, so that wasn’t an option anyway.  By the time we got to Pelly Crossing the rain was over.  We stopped for a short time at the cultural heritage centre and looked at the interesting displays.  There was some beadwork for sale there, and a number of artifacts from years past.

We arrived here at Moose Creek campground, and the weather was starting to improve.  It is now a very nice evening, and we just got back from a few km walk on a nice trail to the Stewart River.  The river is very wide, and the water runs swiftly.  Coming back we met a botany student who is studying invasive plants.  She was set up in the camp kitchen where she was scanning the leaves of plants onto her computer.  There were several thousand samples in small envelopes in the window of her vehicle.  They were drying so that she could take them back to UBC and finish the measurements of their mass and area there.

The trembling aspen all through the Yukon look very different that those I am familiar with.  I thought they might be a sub-species, so asked the botany student if she knew the answer.  She told me that the aspen here have leaf miner which is why they look so different.  The leaves are very silvery grey, almost dusty looking.  The bark is chalky white.   I believe that both of these differences in appearance are from the stress the insects are causing to the trees.

Sculpture outside Yukon Tourist Information Center, Whitehorse

It was a cool and cloudy morning, not solid overcast, but not letting much sun through either, so it was quite cool today.  We drove into Whitehorse early, and Enid left her boot at the repair place.  They are going to try and fix it, though it will penetrate the GoreTex, so how well the boot will work after, we’ll see.  

After that we did the laundry.  There is a nice big Laundromat there, and so it didn’t take too long to finish.  While Enid was doing that, I took the Yukon to an oil change place, and had the oil changed, and there was a hair dresser right next to the laundry with a sign that read “Men and Women, Walkins Welcome” so I followed the hairdresser in right as she opened the shop, and I got my hair cut too. 

We then shopped for groceries, and stocked up for our long trip up to Inuvik.  So today was a necessary break from travel to keep up on the other necessities of living.  It will probably be several days before we can upload our postings again, probably not until we get to Inuvik.  We should be there within the next week.