Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Arctic Adventuring





Whirlpool Canyon. Wow!  Just a small dirt track off the highway to a set of rapids on the Liard River.  You can’t even see it from the road, but when you walk down though the woods to where the trail opens up an UNBELIEVABLE site greets your eyes. Thousands of logs, full grown trees stripped and throw up onto land by the power of the river, are jammed like giant pickup sticks for 150 yards up an old creek bed and along the jagged rocks that frame this bend of the river. When spring runoff hits the river probably quadruples in size and creates this huge whirlpool that everything gets sucked into.  Humans are completely dwarfed by the scale of this natural sculpture.  Adding an over-the-top component to the scene is the mineralized, vividly colored and layered rock upon which we walked to explore the area. And once again, love was all around as evidenced by the loverocks Jim was able to find.  Hopefully his pictures can give you a hint of what this incredible corner of the Liard River holds.

When we finally pulled ourselves away from Whirlpool Canyon the next morning we headed  to Watson Lake, a SMALL town on the AK Hwy that had the distinction of being a location of one of the military camps supporting the construction of the highway in 1942/43. Apparently one afternoon a homesick soldier added a board to the local sign post indicating the name of, and mileage to, his far away hometown. The idea took hold and the sign post grew to include other distant, longed for places. When the highway was opened to civilian traffic several years later, folks started making and posting signs to their hometowns as they passed through. This “sign post forest” has grown to include over 65,000 signs from all over the world. REALLY.  It’s not like anything you could imagine until you see it!  Of course we stopped only to check it out, but got inspired, made our own little ‘Yobp’ sign with a pie pan and a sharpie, adding it along with our beloved Glacier Brewing Company sign (Susan was really sad to see that pulled off of Thumper) to the crazy forest of other signs. If you ever get up to Watson Lake be sure to look for them….

After all that fun we just rolled along for quite some time (i.e. a few hundred miles) before turning north off the Alaska Highway at Whitehorse to take the side-route through Dawson City (hint, hint for those of you playing “guess the miles” ;-).   Dawson City is on the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers which was the crux of the Klondike gold rush in the late 1890s and prior to that a long standing fish camp of the Native people. It’s a pretty cool, well preserved little town with a wild history.  Jack London was there for a year or so trying his hand at getting rich.  He failed, like so many others, but did get good material for a couple of his well known books.

While hanging out in DC for a couple days we learned that the road up to the Arctic Circle from there is  actually pretty good (for a rain washed, permafrost heaved, dirt and gravel ‘highway’) and so we decided to head up to 66*33’ and check it out. The Dempster highway actually did turn out to be an extraordinary experience. The journey ran through grey, black and red stone mountains, along clear, deep rivers and through autumn colored boreal forest and tundra following a route established by the nomadic First Nations(who followed the caribou migrations for many centuries before anyone else showed up here).  Every couple minutes one or the other of us was pulling out the camera trying to capture the miracle of this place. But forget about it! There is no way to do any of it justice-blazing reds, oranges, golds and yellows sweeping up mountainsides and across the valleys literally hundreds of miles in every direction! All you can really do is thank the universe for the privilege of being witness to it. 


A mere 252 miles of this glory and we arrived at the Arctic Circle, delightfully enough situated on the crest of a rolling hilltop with mind blowing 360’ views of the just described color.  We pulled off the road into a sweet little spot where we could enjoy the scenery. The sun was still not ready to set at 10:00pm so  Jim spent some time taking photos while Susan made a celebratory dinner (local wild harvest morel mushrooms J).  We were just ear to ear smiles, reveling in the amazing beauty and awesome day, not expecting anything else too extraordinary would happen….  Then Jim went out the back door to grab something from the cab of the truck and about ran into a grizzly bear that had come up to explore our camp!  Needless to say, Jim backed in pretty quickly, grabbed the camera and we spent the next several minutes trying to get a good look at Mr. Bear while the light faded from the sky.


We had been hoping to spend the night outside watching   for the aurora borealis, which starts getting visible again this time of year, but between the bear and a light rain that started falling, we just finished the wine and went to bed. In the morning Jim went out to see if he could find bear tracks in the mud. And boy, did he! Not the biggest bear tracks ever, but lots of them all around behind the camper and on down the road. It looked as if our friend came back around later, too. And to answer the often asked question “Does a bear poop in the woods?” the answer is “No. He poops in the middle of the road” and having first observed a very clear example on this misty morning, we have now seen supporting evidence on several other occasions. Pretty clear what bears think of humans driving through their territory!

But Bear was not our only visitor. VERY big, clear paw prints in front of the truck reveled a wolf had also checked out our camp during the wee hours. Just a short distance up the road we found deep hoof prints indicating a large caribou came through as well.  Never have I been so appreciative of Thumper’s indoor plumbing than I was that morning realizing all the critters I might have met in a middle of the night trip outside!

One other cool find on this part of the journey was the existence of Inushucks. These stacked rock sculptures are rather human shaped and are traditional “greeters” to travelers in these ancient lands.   On the dome above the highest pass on the Dempster we found several such guardians who lent a very sacred feel to their windswept mountain top. We were, again, overwhelmed by the gratitude we feel in being able to experience such rare and amazing beauty.  On the way out we channeled our dear friend Dave and created an Inushuck lower down, next to a pull out, to greet other lucky travelers- it got a nice set of loverocks to go with it, too!

And just because the universe is so kind, coming down a hill in the last couple miles before the turnoff back to Dawson, we found two fox kits playing in the middle of the road. They ran and hid as we went by but then jumped right back out and went to investigate the car that came after us. We watched them play and wrestle for a bit before running off into the brush again. This time, we actually got a picture!

 

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the awesome blog, you guys.
    Hearing about wild animals bigger than a breadbox makes me happy. Europe's pretty cool but we don't have many of those left.

    ReplyDelete