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15 August 2018 Dempster Highway day 5

It’s hard to get a feel for the weather along the Dempster Highway.  Being 450 miles long, there is no single forecast for it.  But the forecast for Wednesday was for DRY.  And it was supposed to be dry everywhere.  And then it was supposed to rain for a couple of days.  This created a bit of a quandary for us.  If you get one dry day, how do you use it?

We spent the morning walking Inuvik again.  We walked the mile or so to the Visitor’s Center to look at their exhibits.  We did some more window shopping and decided to buy the hoodie we picked out the previous day.  We would have, but the store wasn’t open despite the “store hours” sign saying it would be.  Damn.

Then we let our lack of enjoyment driving up to Inuvik in the mud get the better of us.  We decided to spend our day of DRY, driving back towards asphalt roads.  We ate lunch in camp, then masking taped the truck and camper, gassed up the truck, and hit the road.

We swung by the “hoodie store” on the way out of Inuvik and lucked out, they had opened.  So Chuck got his Inuvik hoodie and the bragging rights that go with it.  We hit the dirt out of town about 2pm.  The road itself was dry and it was an easy drive.  A stark contrast to the drive up.  A 50mph speed was common.  

We made good time, when we were moving.  We just missed the ferry at both crossings.  The first one made for a 45 minute wait, the second about a 15 minute delay.  Then at about the 200 mile point we hit a road closed point.  Apparently a tanker truck hadn’t negotiated those slick roads a couple of days ago as well as we had, and had gone off the side.  And we arrived as they closed things down to pull the truck back up.  We chatted with other drivers for 30 minutes and got to follow the damaged truck back to the small “town” about 10 miles down the road.  And as luck would have it, all the rigs in front of us were diesel, and needed fuel.  Add another 20 minutes waiting for the antique gas pump.  Even with all the delays, it was still a much more enjoyable drive with the dry roads.

We pushed on until about midnight.  We had driven about 330 miles and were approaching one of the few campgrounds, one we had used on the trip up.  We swung in, only to find all the sites taken.  Back out on the highway….     But about a half hour down the road we found a nice secluded side road that would work for the night.  And it was very quiet.   🙂

The Dempster is an interesting road.  At it’s best, it’s a long dusty pot hole filled road that goes for 450 miles.  450 miles is wider than most states.  Think about where you drive that’s 450 miles away, now think about going there on a dirt road at much slower speeds, twisting through turns while avoiding the holes that can ruin a tire.  At it’s worst, it’ll suck you in and leave you stranded.  Most of the dirt is a fine dust on a hard base.  When dry, a nice surface.  When wet, it becomes a cross between clay and wet cement.  It’s slippery to drive, and horrible to walk in (even to just pull over to use the rest room).  The “mud” gets into every nook and cranny of your vehicle.  Even if you keep it on the outside, it acts like caulk and fills every exterior seam.  When it’s raining you lose those nice views that make the drive so enjoyable.  You now see just the clouds.  And the water fills every pot hole making it impossible to tell the difference between a shallow one, and one that will destroy your tire.  You can’t avoid them all, so you gamble, and sometimes you lose.  You drop your speed to minimize the chance of vehicle damage, and the trip just gets longer.  The road is straight and boring for miles, and 30mph is all you dare go.  About half the traffic on the Dempster Highway is construction equipment maintaining the highway itself.  Those guys know the road, and those big trucks handle the bumps and holes well.  In dry weather, most vehicles are going close to the same speed and life is good.  In wet weather, only the tourists seem to slow down.  So added to the fun is the prospect of a big truck flying around a corner in front of you, or suddenly appearing in your rear view mirror.  There’s quite a speed differential between them and you, and they sure throw up a lot of debris when they go past you, regardless of direction.

14 August 2018. Inuvik, NWT, Dempster Day 4

Today was one of those rare days where we knew we were going to be sleeping that evening in the same place where we woke up.  Two consecutive nights in the same campground!  

We decided to give the truck a rest and do some walking around town.  The weather was cloudy, and we experienced only light showers through the day.  We set out on a quest for an Inuvik t-shirt.  We soon learned that the opening of the road to Tuktoyaktuk has created a busy summer for the local shops.  If Chuck wanted a women’s sized small, or a mens 3X, he was in luck, otherwise they were very low on stock and wouldn’t be getting any more in for the season.  This became our major quest for the day!  We found a hoodie that was pretty neat, and planned on going back to the store the next day to pick it up.

We stopped by the library to use the only public wifi in town.  They gave you a password that gave you two hours of internet use.  And that’s about how long it took us to download five pictures of our mail that had been texted to us by Barb.  Yeah, great free connectivity, but no bandwidth.

We also stopped by the local hardware store that was VERY well stocked.  We bought a scrub brush for cleaning mud, and a roll of masking tape to seal up the exterior compartment doors for the drive back to pavement.  Due to small repairs and such that have occurred over the course of the trip, we’ve visited the hardware stores in several small towns across Alaska and northern Canada.  We have found them to be about the best stores in town.  The are usually a little cramped, but there’s lots of aisles and they’re packed full of items.  This is especially a contrast to the grocery stores in the same towns…

Inuvik was a friendly place, but that doesn’t mean we felt comfortable there.  There was a stark contrast between the visitors driving their RV rigs, and the people that lived there that were just trying to survive.  While there were mostly smiles from the locals, it was clear there were a lot of people hanging around with nothing to do.

Inuvik is built on permafrost which creates a lot of challenges.  The biggest of which is to not warm the ground below.  If you warm it up, it compresses and sinks.  So not only are the buildings built on raised platforms with air circulation underneath, so are the utilities.  All the “hook ups” are run through above ground conduits.  It just looks really weird, but apparently works.  Then these conduits are heated (to keep the water pipes from freezing).  It looks like a maze of dryer vents running throughout the city.

We also walked our campground a couple of times.  Making the drive up to Inuvik creates a bond with the others that have successfully completed the challenge.  You smile and exchange stories when you run across people you’ve met earlier that day, yesterday, and over the course of the past week

So Chuck likes to eat/drink what he likes to eat/drink.  Some might call him “picky”.  He thinks of himself as having a mild brand preference.  And this has created some shopping challenges on this trip.  You’d think all of North America would have peanut M&Ms.  Not a chance.  There have were several small towns where we scoured every grocery store in town (both of them), looking for peanut M&Ms.  And in an area of the world that was explored due to the discovery of gold, you’d think that that was what peanut M&Ms were made of when you see the price!  Well, we all have our bad habits.  It has been fun to get down to the Yukon and find all the packages also labeled in French.  Monster energy drinks have been another challenge with regard to availability and price.  We pay about $1.40 per can at home.  Normal gas station price can be $2.00 to $2.50.  These things must be expensive to ship up here!