Our Travels
Realizing a dream that was 25 years in the making
Hello, Arctic Ocean! Our visit to Canada’s North, including experiencing 24-hours of daylight above the Arctic Circle, was 25 years in the making and was finally realized in 2019.
In June 1994, my husband John and I quit our jobs in Toronto, packed up our 1975 Volkswagen Westfalia camper and headed east to visit Newfoundland and Labrador, before turning around and heading west.
We’d driven west from Toronto many times before, but travelling from coast to coast in the course of one summer made the 1994 trip special. In Vancouver, we told our then seven-year-old nephew, Matt, that we’d driven across Canada. He asked if we’d been to the Northwest Territories. When we said no, he politely informed us that we hadn’t been to all of Canada. Ouch, a geography lesson from a seven year old!
Last year, an ad for an airline seat sale pushed our plan to visit Canada’s North into action. The flight from Vancouver put us in the Yukon in just over two hours. We rented a car at the Whitehorse airport and set about seeing as much as we could in two weeks.
About 150 kilometres east of White
horse, along the Alaska Highway, is Haines Junction, and Kluane National Park and Reserve. Much of Kluane is not accessible except for multi-day backpacking trips or sightseeing flights. We satisfied ourselves with short hikes from trailheads near the highway.
Along the portion of the Alaska Highway that we drove (as well as the Klondike Highway and a short excursion on the Dempster Highway), we were rewarded with the sight of two grizzly bears, a black bear and two coyotes, not to mention the abundant Arctic ground squirrels and hares. It is such a joy to see wildlife in natural settings.
Next on our itinerary was a drive up to Beaver Creek, then through U.S. Customs for a drive along the Taylor Highway carrying us back into Canada along the Top of the World Highway and ending up at the ferry dock for a 15-minute ride across the Yukon River to Dawson City.
Dawson City was the heart of the Klondike
Gold Rush and we are happy to report that it hasn’t lost its spirit of adventure. It’s a vibrant town with dirt streets and wooden sidewalks, where history lives on in the preserved frontier-style buildings.
Dawson City was our gateway to Inuvik, N.W.T., the starting point of the Inuvik-tuktoyaktuk Highway, which was only completed fairly recently. Prior to 2017, access to Tuk was by air or ice road in the winter. We felt privileged to drive the rough gravel road. The landscape was fascinating, featuring cotton grasses, tundra swans and sparse, scraggly trees before encountering the tree line. It was nature like nothing we’d ever seen before! Nearing Tuktoyaktuk, we stopped to view the pingos, large mounds of earth-covered ice.
At the Arctic Ocean, we talked with a fisherman who was generously giving small samples of beluga whale (called muktuk) and smoked broad whitefish to everyone who happened by. He loves what he does, heading out in his boat to fish then spending time preparing the catch in his smoke shack. He is a true ambassador for the small hamlet, enjoying introducing people to each other and truly interested in knowing where everyone who was visiting hailed from. That day in Tuktoyaktuk was definitely the highlight of our trip and one we will never forget.
Canada has always been our home and we are so grateful to have seen so much of it from coast to coast to coast. We sent Matt a postcard while we were up north. He’s 32 now and probably doesn’t remember what he said to us when he was seven. But we know what he’ll say now, “What about Nunavut? Have you been there?”