Tag: camping

13 August 2018. Dempster Highway to Inuvik. Day3

We awoke this morning alongside our neighbors in the gravel pit.  It had rained lightly most of the night and it was muddy.  But we packed up camp and got in line for the ferry.  We got lucky and were among the eight vehicles that made the first trip across the river.  It was a “cable ferry” and it had us over in about 10 minutes.

It continued to rain all morning.  Not heavy, but just enough to maintain the water level in the pot holes, keep the road slick, and eliminate any chance of enjoying the scenery. 

Our timing for the second ferry crossing was perfect.  It’s a bit longer crossing at a confluence of two rivers and has an optional stop at a town between the rivers.  But the ferry was loading as we came around the last corner and we drove right on and were the last vehicle loaded before departure.

It was only a couple of hours drive from the second ferry to Inuvik, and every inch of it sucked.  There is no way to describe how bad it was, you just have to trust us.  Sometimes you just cross that line from “having fun” to “get me the hell out of here”, and we crossed it.  It wasn’t just the lousy drive this morning, it was an accumulation of things that just weren’t going quite right and creating some anxiety.  But the world just seemed to change.  We were no longer tourists going on an adventure, we were strangers in a strange land trying to survive.

The road had changed too.  No longer a road cut into the mountain, it was a road built on top of permafrost.  To build a road up here, they add an insulating layer on top of the soil, and build the road on top of that.  That means for 100 miles, there is no shoulder.  The road sits about 5 feet above the surrounding ground.  You can’t pull off when you want to, and there certainly isn’t any place to change a tire, or even safely “use the restroom”.  This made avoiding pot holes more of a challenge, as was passing on coming traffic.  The road was actually only packed in the middle for long stretches, causing you to constantly hope for no cars, and NO big trucks.  

We hit Inuvik in the early afternoon.  The first stop was the car wash.  $10 got the heavy mud off the outside so we’d be able to pop up the camper.  The underneath would have to wait.

Inuvik and the campground were actually quite nice.  While muddy, the campground had nice sites with electrical hook ups.  There were laundry facilities which we took advantage of the next day.  The campground was close enough for us to walk, on pavement, into town.

The campground continued to fill through the afternoon.  Many sites were filled with people we had talked to over the course of the previous couple of days.  We talked a bunch and shared war stories.  One had a broken tail light, one had lost two tires on his trailer, another was headed to find a welder in town.  Most talked about trying to get enough mud off their rigs to make doors able to be opened and gear accessed.  Mud was the common theme.  As beat up as we felt, it was clear we hadn’t had as bad a day as had others.

It is worth mentioning here the hearty folk that ride their motorcycles to Inuvik.  The mud that packed the exterior of my truck was also packed into their bikes and clothing and gear.  They slept in tents, and I don’t know how they kept warm, and how they dried out once wet.  I don’t know how they maintained vision while on the road, and dealt with the slop thrown up by the four wheeled vehicles especially the construction trucks.  My hat is off to them!!!

We spent most of our afternoon cleaning, and trying to get the camper furnace to warm up.  There were occasional rain showers, but it started to dry out most of the afternoon.

Several people had made the additional drive up to Tuktoyaktuk, and several had plans to head up the next morning.  It was about 90 miles each way to get up to the Arctic Ocean.  As we tried to decide if we were also going to make the additional drive, one thing became clear.  None of the people we talked to actually enjoyed the drive up there.  It was an accomplishment, but it wasn’t fun.  People talked about the mud, the wind, the cold temperatures, and nothing to do up there except say that you had been there.  With our feeling beat up, and with things not working quite at 100%, we decided to skip the additional drive.

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…