Dempster Highway

David changing tire on Dempster

The Dempster is a highway whose existence one could easily question. Completed in the 1970’s, with hopes of an oil or gas boom, but that went bust, it is 737 kilometres, all but 15 or so of them tire chewing gravel. Today it serves little purpose other than to supply Inuvik (and indirectly other small towns like Tuktoyaktuk) and to bring tourists to the North. Without any industry to speak of, except for the hope that gas will still be discovered, Inuvik, like so many other northern towns doesn’t really have much promise for the future. One wonders why the people of Tuktoyaktuk seem excited about the possibility of a road to Inuvik, for it will destroy the isolation which makes the town unique, and Southerners want to visit.

Tourists are the main users of the road in summer, and there are far more campers on the back of half and three quarter ton trucks than there are supply semis. It is often a very long distance between each vehicle on the road, so isolation and remoteness are truly present, and what draws the tourists. There aren’t a lot of travellers, but most of them are Europeans seeking the wilderness experience.

This morning we left Inuvik early, on the road by seven am, and drove 670 km to the Tombstone campground. The reason for our early start was a restless night. It’s the August long weekend, and it was noisy in the town. It wasn’t the campers keeping us awake, but rather the party going on across the street.

Before we even reached the Mackenzie River ferry we had our first flat tire of the day. It was almost impossible to get the nuts off the wheel, but I just managed to do it by jumping on the tire iron and forcing it as hard as I could. Finally the final nut broke free. It didn’t take too long to change, in fact we were the first vehicle on the ferry when it opened at 9:30. The Peel River crossing was very high, as the river is in flood. Many large driftwood logs were floating rapidly by. Because of the high water, the approach to the ferry is very soft, and I put the Yukon in four wheel drive to get off.

Just before the NWT-Yukon border we spotted several small herds of about twenty to thirty caribou. They have magnificent huge antlers, and were grazing in the tundra. The caribou were not very frightened of vehicles, several of which were stopped along the road in this area; however, when I got out of the vehicle with my cameras they were much more skittish, though they stayed around long enough to allow me to get some good pictures before they moved out of sight.

Grizzly on the side of the road

Just a few kilometres down the road was a grizzly bear, walking quickly down the road. We stopped, and Enid took this picture. My cameras were all in the back of the Yukon, and I was not going to get out and get them! I did climb over the back seat and dragged them to the front. To top off the problems, I only had one picture left on the memory card in my camera, and so had to change that. I missed some good pictures because of it. The bear wasn’t too large as grizzlies go, but would have weighed three hundred or more pounds. Its coat was very long and shaggy, fur probably 10 centimeters or more in length. It walked slowly along the edge of the road, digging at things, probably ground squirrel nests, paying absolutely no attention to us in the vehicle. Then it stopped about 25 metres farther up the road from us, and started eating something from the ditch. I thought it would be a ground squirrel, but we drove right up to the bear and saw that it was eating a caribou. It stripped the flesh from the skin, and ate only the flesh, leaving the hide behind. A few ravens sat watching, but didn’t come close. We watched for about ten minutes, before it stopped eating and moved slowly away still with its head down scratching at the ground and searching for other kinds of food.

After lunch we stopped at Eagle Plain and got our tire fixed and changed, so we once again had two spares. Later in the afternoon we reached the flooded area of the Ogilivie River. There was a stretch of several hundred metres where they were repairing landslides, and the road was very rough. It was here that we got the second flat tire of the day, this time on the passenger side rear. We pulled off to a viewpoint, and tried to change the tire. I couldn’t budge any of the wheel nuts. There were two trucks there that were hauling and working on the road repairs. One driver came over and used a sledge hammer to pound on the nuts while we torqued them off. Most of them came loose doing that, but two would not budge. He then got a four foot long pry bar and we used that on the tire iron while he hammered again, and that broke the nuts free. To complicate matters further, the jack couldn’t lift the Yukon high enough from the ground. Enid got a flat stone from the river bank, and we put that under the jack to lift it higher. At this point another delivery truck came along and the two men in it helped us finish changing the tire. They even threw it back up on top of the roof racks for us.

We drove on with no further incident to Tombstone Campground, and got here about seven pm, NWT time. So all told we were on the road for twelve hours today.