The Arctic

Today was a driving day. We drove further than we originally planned due to the weather forecast: tomorrow will be the best weather in the area for the next few days.

The scenery again today was spectacular. We started by climbing into an Arctic Alpine region. Again, it’s fall, the colors were vivid greens and golds. We thought the trees were gone because we were too far north, but they reappeared later.

We passed two significant borders this morning. First was passing the Arctic Circle!

Second was a new Territory for us. We entered the Northwest Territories (NWT). The border was at a mountain peak and the wind was blowing hard. However it has been about 60 degrees (15 C) all day, so it looks colder than it was. We ran into a time zone oddity. The Yukon does not change their clocks for DST. They are MST year round. Over the summer, that means they align with PDT. The NWT do subscribe to DST. So our clocks changed to MDT.

One strange feature of the Dempster is that it crosses two major rivers that do not have bridges. Instead they run a free ferry for half the year. In the winter the rivers freeze over and it becomes an ice bridge. For two weeks in the spring and fall the ferries can’t run because of the ice but it isn’t thick enough to drive. During that time the road is inaccessible.

The first ferry is over the Peel River. When we arrived, the ferry was on the opposite side. The pilot moved the ferry right over for us. It was pretty quick.

We thought that the ferry was pretty efficient. Then we got to the second ferry, over the Mackenzie River. We just missed the ferry but there were three vehicles ahead of us. One was an oversized construction truck and one was its lead truck. The third was a passenger van. The Mackenzie ferry has three landings, the north and south of the Dempster plus a stop at the First Nations village nearby. It took 45 minutes for the ferry to go from south to north to the village and back to the south. The construction truck took the majority of the ferry. We thought we were going to have to wait another cycle. Luckily for us, the passenger van was going to the village and they managed to squeeze us onto the ferry. It took us about an hour to cross the river. Once we got to the other side, the construction truck was taking up the entire road plus it created a dust cloud similar to the character Pigpen from Peanuts. Luckily they were speeding along so we just kept our distance. There were no other vehicles behind us for the rest of the day thanks to the slow ferry.

We drove past the town of Inuvik, which we plan to visit when we have more time on the return drive. Today we pushed all the way to the Arctic Ocean! We reached the end of the road: the village of Tuktoyaktuk. This is the northernmost point on our trip.