11 August 2018. Dempster Highway YT

11 August 2018.  Dempster Highway Day 1 again

Well, we are trying it again.  Got to the beginning of the Dempster Highway by about 1:15, got filled up with Diesel once more and started off. (I know, I know, the clock on the camera is an hour off! – but I need a WiFi connection to fix it…).  We soon spotted our first wildlife – Ptarmigans! We saw a total of five of them this day. Sadly, one of them committed suicide under our tires…

The gear, while getting us on this remote journey, was not working 100%.  We were still a bit nervous about the truck water pumps.  They were fixed by the dealer, but there’s always some concern about the job being done correctly.  We still carried a couple jugs of coolant and distilled water, and continued to pop the hood and check levels when we stopped.  For some reason the truck’s front air bag warning light was on.  Not a clue what the issue might be.  We stopped and let about 14lbs of air out of the tires before heading up the Dempster Highway.  We’ve done this a bunch of times before, and the truck runs well on dirt roads like this at speeds around 45-50 mph.  But this time the TPMS light came on.  We checked air pressure each time we stopped too, and none of the tires were losing air, or were at a lower pressure than desired.  But now, running 900 miles on a road famous for puncturing tires, we had lost the system that would give us advance warning.  The camper’s furnace and hot water heater had begun acting up.  It didn’t work very well the night before we headed up the Dempster, and it wasn’t working very well the first couple of night along the trip.  We still seemed to be getting warm water for showers, but the furnace would only operate at the low setting, would run most of the night, and wouldn’t heat the inside of the camper much above 62 degrees.  If you turned the thermostat too high it would cause the furnace to try and run at it’s high setting, and it would shut down and need to be reset.  So it became a challenge to pick the right setting that would allow the furnace to run, but not shut down in the middle of the night.

Because we had already stopped and hiked the Tombstone Territorial Park, we quickly passed through that area this time and camped in Engineer Creek – which is 120 miles up the Dempster.  The word was, that there was high water at the first ferry crossing (Peel River – mile 335) And the Ferry was shut down. There were folk in the Engineer campground who had gotten tired of waiting at the Ferry crossing and were heading back south.  We kept our fingers crossed that the water level would recede before we got there…Dempster Highway – the orange flags mean road damage — they really don’t mark all the road damage…

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