Saturday on the Dempster

Looking north around km 30 (estimated).

We took a drive up the Dempster Highway a bit yesterday afternoon. It was just after a few days of light fluffy snow, and the trees were all freshly covered.

The Dempster was closed further north, at Eagle Plains, so there was no traffic at all. There was no wind, no noise, no colour, and it was gorgeous.

Artsy fartsy shot

I love how much snow can gather in these trees.

Jeff wanted to get out of town to shoot his new gun. It is a big bullet gun we’ll use for bear self-protection should a grizzly ever try to tickle our toes when camping.

We brought our snow shoes, but didn’t end up hiking. Just driving around, stopping to look at stuff, taking photos, scouting for signs of live with the binoculars.

Even in the frozen sub-arctic, which doesn’t thaw all winter, there is often water still moving. It builds up from seeps and can sometime risk the road. If you notice here, there are poles on the left. These mark the culverts, and the roads department will hook up a generator to thaw a line through the culvert to allow some of the water to drain.

Here are a few pictures from the lookout just north of the Tombstone Park Interpretive Centre that we always stop at:

It was so quiet and still here. I wish you could experience it!

It must have been really windy here earlier, because in some places the snow had blown away and the ground was bare.

Not today though, everything was covered in a really thick, coarse frost. All of the ground, road, rocks, trees. It was really neat. It wasn’t too cold, -13C or so.

The temperature fluctuates significantly. It was -23 less than 50 kilometres north of here.

Me:

We couldn’t quite get into the sunshine. As you know, Dawson City is in the shade for 2 months in the winter, so we don’t see it much. We kept driving north until we could get into the sun. We found it at Two Moose Lake.

Two Moose Lake

I tried taking some photos right into the sun.

Looking north towards Eagle Plains, across the open tundra.

There aren’t many caribou tracks here anymore. We saw no animals at all, but there are always tons of tracks. Likely rabbit, and fox. Some moose. Perhaps a caribou.

At some point, the highway was open again at Eagle Plains and we met several big, loaded transports headed north with fuel, and goods, for Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk, and all small communities between.