12 August 2018. Dempster Highway Day 2
Today was our favorite day of the trip so far. The pictures don’t do justice to the views. But it wasn’t really what we SAW that made the day special, it was what we FELT. We’d be driving along a ridge and you could look for 100 miles to each side and know that there wasn’t anybody out there. You knew the closest house was 200 miles behind you, or 100 miles in front of you. And you FELT alone. Yeah, there were the other quirky people making the same drive, but you knew that if you had problems of any kind, you were pretty much on your own. Self sufficiency was critical. It was easy to drive for an hour and not see another vehicle. But hey, there’s a place to get gas every 250 miles, so you know you’re not really alone…..
It had rained most of the night. The soft ground at our campground turned to sticky mud! Yuck for our shoes and our tires! No one in our campground seemed in a hurry to head out – everyone seemed to be giving the water at the ferry crossing time to recede. So we left before most everyone else and took our time…
We followed the Peel River along Olgivie Ridge for quite a while – Spectacular Views!
We stopped at the gas station halfway up on the Dempster Highway at Eagle Plains to check on the status of the ferry. It was still down. We decided to fill up there, to give us more options if things went wrong. The pump was definitely not self service! We couldn’t even figure out how to get it started!
Today we had planned on a lot of driving. The roads were rough, we were lucky to get 30-40 miles per hour. There were 200 miles to the first Ferry Crossing. Here are some photographs of the long and winding road, trying to show how vast the area is:
They mark the Arctic Circle with a small reststop. A dirt parking lot, a nice sign, and a couple of outhouses. No vendors, no T-shirts, no tour busses. Just views out to wilderness for many, many miles in every direction.
All day we were searching for wildlife. Beside the Ptarmigan yesterday and a few falcon, hadn’t seen much. Then I spotted an arctic fox and as we slowed down to get a photo (which we didn’t get) – and there was a huge male Grizzly wandering nearby! We did get photos of him. Then, just a few miles down the road – another male Grizzly! My quota of wildlife for the day has been exceeded!
We pulled into the ferry crossing area (we were now in North West Territories, Canada). People were queued up on both sides waiting. A few locals were offering boat rides to get folk across. We watched them work for a while. The going consensus was that they would be done in a couple of hours, but we decided it was better for us to find a spot to camp and not contend with the people who NEEDED to cross tonight. We figured that if the ferry started in the next few hours, the madness would be peaceful again for us the next morning. So we settled in for the night in a gravel pit (with several co-travelers). When the ferry did open again (you could tell by all the celebratory horn honking and people driving south very, very fast – because they were two days late to wherever they needed to be…) we already had dinner cooking and were settled in and relaxed.
