Dave and Sandra's "More Moose Than People" Tour of The Yukon, 2013

So I'm 50 this year, I want to go back to Canada, and I want to do something exciting while I'm there. It's a mid-life crisis kind of thing.

There is plenty of Canada that Sandra and I have yet to explore, including the bits tourists usually visit (which seems to be mainly T'rono in the summer), as well as the parts perhaps less touristy, such as Atlantic Canada and the middle bit (Saskatchewan and Manitoba).

But Canada also goes upwards, and quite a long way at that. Last year, during Canada-related internet trawls, I discovered that a road exists called the Dempster Highway, which is the only all-weather road in Canada to cross the Arctic Circle. This sparked something inside me; here was adventure, a drive north into the Arctic Circle through wilderness more absolute than anything we'd experienced before on our trips to The Great White North. Was this the excitement I'd been looking for?

More research led me to start discovering the Yukon (or is it just "Yukon"? It's certainly not "the Yukon Territory", since a Canadian Library and Archive document states, "The name of the Yukon Territory was officially changed to Yukon on April 1, 2003". I'll probably use "Yukon" and "the Yukon" interchangeably, until a Yukoner tells me which one is right).

The Yukon is the westernmost of Canada's three northern territories (the territories differing from the ten provinces in that they receive their power from the federal government rather than the Constitution Act; to go into this further would be dull). It sits on the top of British Columbia, and stretches up to the Beaufort Sea, a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean. To its east is the Northwest Territories, to its west Alaska. It gets its name from the Yukon River, the longest river in the territory, which snakes from British Columbia up through the Yukon itself and into Alaska. With a land area almost twice that of the United Kingdom, but a human population of only 34,000 souls, it's a territory that is mostly empty of people (contrast this with the estimated moose population of 70,000). Its capital is Whitehorse with a population of about 23,000, and after that it starts getting empty fast, the next largest conglomeration being Dawson City with around 1,400 people.
 

In the Western psyche I guess the most common association with the Yukon is the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897. This was a short period of history when an estimated 100,000 men forged deeper into North America than ever before in search of gold. Boom towns, such as Dawson City, sprang up and were filled with hopeful prospectors, but the gold rush only lasted a couple of years; the crushing journey up into the Yukon, plus the harsh conditions during the winter made mining a difficult and risky option, so eventually the prospectors moved on and the big companies took over. These days places like Dawson City rely on tourism for their income.

 

The more I dug into the Yukon, the more I was attracted to it. The sense of the pioneer spirit which fascinated me so much in Alberta and British Columbia seems to be so much more intense, and the wilderness which smacked me about the head and face on Vancouver Island seems to be greatly magnified. Hesitantly I sent off for travel guides and maps to see if it was even possible to put together a holiday in this remote territory. Yukon's own tourist agency produce an online guide which I found invaluable.

 

So finally I pieced together - and am indeed still piecing together - our tour of the Yukon, 2013. It's based on something I found called the "Klondike-Kluane Loop" tour, and it goes a little like this...

 

Fly to Vancouver, spend a day in Stanley Park (which we missed last time), then fly up to Whitehorse. Our time in Whitehorse will include a trip to Skagway following the White Pass Trail, which the prospectors used when they came up to the Yukon (they walked, we'll be on a train). From Whitehorse we'll drive up to Dawson City, taking in an old mining town on the way. In Dawson I intend to partake of a "sour-toe" cocktail (more info to follow!), and from there we will head out on The Top Of The World Highway into Alaska, down through a place called Chicken, back into Canada to another place called Beaver Creek, then on to an extended stay in Haines Junction where we will be doing some hiking (not the too strenuous kind though). Finally we'll head back to Whitehorse, fly down to Vancouver, then travel home.

 

The Arctic Circle? I'm still thinking about that. I'll see if I can fit it in somewhere.