DRIVING CANADA’S TOUGHEST ROAD
The Dempster Highway is one of Canada’s ultimate road trips - but anyone who drives it needs to be prepared for misadventure.
Ospruce forest, tundra and snow-covered hills before Northwest Territories.
The Dempster Highway was conceived in the late 1950s to open up the MacKenzie Delta to oil and gas route. Now, a new stretch of highway connects to the found out myself. storing caught game in the community freezer underground. Some, like local guide Eileen Jacobson, who welcomed us into her home to try on her fur staple – were both hopeful and apprehensive about the permanent impact the new road will have on their lives. there were undercurrents of concern as well. Locals up here are all too aware of how other, more accessible been devastated by the twin scourges of drugs and are nevertheless dying out, as dependence on modern tacos cooked inside an old school bus covered with hemmed in by dwarf spruce forest, and made it was turned away from the Peel River ferry landing, meltwater had raised the water levels in the river and a medical emergency in Fort McPherson during the returning to the car ferry landing the following day.
Dense evergreen forest hugged the road on both rivers behind and the world outside my car had been myself. But besides the hassle of having to rearrange my travel plans, there was a more compelling reason which have become increasingly common in the storms. Having had to drive through the smoke of discovered that the smell of burning triggered visceral, primal fear. Luckily, along the Dempster that day, the weather obliged and the forest around me remained on my windshield became a deluge. Before long, the car skidded sideways as gravel-and-dirt turned to mud,
steady and away from the sloping sides of the road. To
So when the Eagle Plains motel – the halfway the menu of burgers and meatloaf. “The driver went satellite phone. Had to catch a ride back here with the next car they saw and wait a couple of days here before Before long, my car started beeping, snapping me pressure in one of my back tyres dropping alarmingly. A puncture. Flat tyres are less common than they used to be, back in the days when the Dempster was covered in tyre-shredding shale rather than more benign gravel, to coast the last few kilometres into Eagle Plains mechanics, who patched my car up, enabling me to
Now, on my way back to Dawson City, the last half of the drive back to the Klondike Highway was smoother sailing, with the forest opening up, the sun shining, the road arrow straight. But then, as a crowning touch, to a halt as the engine died – yet another reminder of the obstacles that the Dempster may throw at you. Klondike Highway some 40km east of Dawson City, my would not drive by for hours. However, within minutes of my breaking down, a Good Samaritan picked me up. As he drove me to my guesthouse in Dawson City, disaster, fortune smiled on me. all.
There’s no phone signal along the Dempster for the most part, and hardly anyone’s got a satellite phone