Monday June 29, 1998 - Fort McPherson

On the Arctic Red River ferry

I guess we all decided to leave today. Liz and Clem and I went into one of the Inuvik hotels for a big breakfast of eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast and coffee. We exchanged addresses and said good bye. I did some more email at the Inuvik Research Centre which was very busy today, shopped around for souvenirs and checked at the Visitor Centre for highway news. The highway officially opens at noon tomorrow, so at 2.30 pm I set out for Fort McPherson.

There was a Gwich'in guy at the Arctic Red River ferry looking for radiator stop leak, which kind of scared me. I hope he found some. Somebody told me though that you could use black pepper instead of stop leak, so I thought that might not be so bad.

There is supposed to be a fee for the Nitainlii campground but I have not seen anyone yet. A few trucks drove through but did not stay. The frappe-a-bord are dying down and now there are a few mosquitoes but not many. It's a good campsite.

Sunday June 28, 1998 - Inuvik

Chuk camp

Chuk Camp - windy, warm and sunny

I decided not to go anywhere today, did some mending instead. Margaret suggested that we have a potluck supper in the camp so we walked around to all the campsites inviting everyone. I met the American couple from Texas and a Canadian couple from New Mexico.  The Texans were famous in Chuk camp because they had the biggest RV rig and Liz and Clem were inside it once and reported that they even had a jacuzzi bathtub. They hardly ever emerged because of the bugs. We had fewer bugs than the Happy Valley camp but that doesn't mean we didn't have any. The worst were the bulldog horseflies, or frappe-a-bord as Clem called them. Very large and very aggressive; they make ordinary horseflies in the south seem like harmless house flies in comparison.

I enjoyed spending time with a couple from Austria just down the hill from my campsite, Gert and Helga Pader. They were outrageously funny. Very dry wit and a constant stream of funny remarks. Not very good English, but what they knew they used well. Gert is a software engineer. Like many Europeans they get long vacation times every year and they are using theirs to explore North America. They fly to some major city on the continent, buy an old car and then travel for several weeks before selling the car and flying home. this year they are doing the North. 

They were anxious to get out of here to sell their car and fly home, so when the girl in the camp office reported today that the Peel River ferry was now open they were packed and gone within fifteen minutes. I inherited all their kindling, a dozen eggs and 2 litres of milk. Another couple from Whitehorse and fellow who was travelling with his Dad also packed up and left. The father-son duo had a tiny pickup truck like mine and they never came out of it because of the frappe-a-bord. I don't know how they could stand being cooped up in their little truck all day every day.

In spite of all the departures the potluck was a success. The Texans did not come but everyone else who had not left for the ferry did come. Margaret made deer meat stew, Liz did the fish, bannock and spotted dick pudding, Jack and Jackie (the New Mexico Canadians) made cookies and so did the young couple with two dogs. They also brought scalloped potatoes and onions done in foil. I'll have to try that.

Vern, the camp operator, has been giving me a deal on the camp fee but tonight the girl is collecting so I am paying full fee for the first time. Vern gave me Saturday for free and charged $10 for the other nights. $12 is the regular fee.

Saturday June 27, 1998 - Inuvik

Hanging out at Liz and Clem's campsite

Chuk Camp - cloudy, cool and windy

The people from Vancouver Island decided to try their luck and leave for the Dempster. Clem and Liz told me about their trip to Tuk and fed me a big breakfast of eggs, pancakes and coffee.

They said that Tuktoyaktuk consisted of a bunch of shacks, an expensive craft shop, a few government offices, and a caribou soup meal. As the trucker at the Peel River ferry said, "I'd as soon cook my runners as eat caribou soup". What the locals there have to say about native life is nothing more than I know already. Do I sound cynical? Life in most northern towns is pretty much reduced to tourism when the primary resource industries are gone. It used to be oil and gas exploration here and mining in the Yukon, but that's pretty much gone now. The Indians and Eskimo (so far all the native people I've talked to refer to themselves as "Indian" or "Eskimo") hunt, fish and trap and whatever else comes their way. Liz said she was shocked by how bad the kids' teeth were there. A lot of pop and chips; as the trucker at the Peel River ferry said, it's an essential service there.

I told Liz and Clem I'd share whatever fish I caught on my big fishing trip and left to meet my guide Alvin.

Alvin is a 39 year old Inuvialuit man who sets a net on Airport Lake for white fish, but as it turns out knows nothing at all about rod fishing for trout or pike. He put snare wire on my fishing line as a leader in case I caught a pike. We tried several places: in a creek, at a creek mouth, on the lake. I tangled my line several times but gradually got the hang of casting, which after three hours you'd think so. Alvin showed me an eagle's nest on a cliff and told me about the eagle chick in it. He walks along the top of the cliff and climbs down to the nesst to see the chick every day. He leaves fish for it. While I was casting, he was cleaning the white fish he took from his net that morning. He said if I didn't catch anything he'd give me some.

While we were out in the lake floating around in his boat, we chatted. Alvin asked me questions about my travels and told me he once lived in Hay River. I asked him what he was doing there. Long pause, then he said, "I was a bad boy." Later he said they fished and hunted and had satellite TV, "it hardly seemed like jail at all." He liked Hay River. I was there once and hated it; I guess I should have known that the Hay River jail was the place to be. Didn't ask what he did to go to jail, alone in a boat with him I didn't really want to know.

Alvin spent a lot of time untangling my fishing line; he said he would like to just cut off the tangles and keep them as souvenirs of me.

We went to Moe's cabin for a lunch of instant rice, smoked white fish, bannock and tea. Alvin lives in Moe's cabin. He's actually not allowed to be here, this is Gwichin territory and he is Inuvialuit. He should be fishing further north but he says it's too far to go so Moe lets him stay here and turns a blind eye. The sun was up and it was getting pretty hot, I was worried about Yohan shut up in the truck so I wanted to go back. Alvin gave me some bannock and white fish fillets, and smoked white fish for Yohan. I didn't much like the smoked white fish so I was going to give it to the dog, but it turned out Yohan didn't like it either. Alvin smoked it himself so I didn't tell him I didn't like it and was planning to give it to Yohan.

Liz cooked the white fish for me, we had white fish, rice, cabbage and custard for supper. There was lots of fish left over but we ate all of the bannock. We stayed up well past midnight talking. I love there camping van, if I ever bought an RV or camping van I'd like to get one like theirs. They have hookups so they can cook inside or outside under an awning, so cooking smelly fish doesn't stink up the inside sleeping area. The van is wide enough for their bed to be crosswise instead of lengthwise and there is a raised roof for headroom. They also have a vertical windbreak that attaches to the awning making a second wall.

Friday June 26, 1998 - Inuvik

Chuk Camp - sunny and hot

Liz and Clem went to Tuk with Margaret and George, the couple from Saskatchewan. I took my laundery into town. I went back to Moe's Stationery to make arrangements for a fishing trip. Moe had a guide lined up for me, I was to meet Alvin at Airport Lake at 11 am on Saturday, for $50.

I went to the Inuvik Research Centre to do some email, it turns out you can get unlimited access for free there. On the way I met Gert and Helga, an Austrian couple at Chuk Camp, and told them about the free access so Gert came along too. The librarian there helped him setup a Hotmail account. She asked him how long he was staying in town and he grinned and said, "Bad joke!" None of us know and none of us are happy about it! When the librarian wasn't there someone came in wanting to buy a poster. Gert offered to sell it to him, and said he'd split the profit with me. The guy said "I heard that!" and left.

Later when I got back to camp the two couples from Vancouver Island invited me for beer and chips and we talked about their travels to Haida Gwaii and also Newfoundland. It seemed like the two couples were going to all the same places. Liz and Clem got back from Tuk but I was busy getting supper and then it started to rain and so everyone went to bed early. One of the returnees from town said that they had heard that the Arctic Red River ferry had reopened and we wondered if the highway would open early too.

Thursday June 25, 1998 - Inuvik

Igloo Church in Inuvik

Chuk Camp - sunny and hot

Yohan seems better; he ate the chicken I saved for him and is walking around.  But even though it's a bright sunny day and Yohan is better, and I'm having all these adventures, I'm having a 'blonde day' (Liz's term; she apparently does not think highly of blondes). Clem and Liz play cribbage (they have a cribbage sticker on their van) so I might suggest a game to them tonight.

Liz is also having kind of a blonde day because they had signed up for a tour of Tuk today, but they got bumped from the flight. Liz is pissed off. They are going tomorrow, if the tour people don't screw it up. We went up the Chuk viewing tower to look at the Mackenzie Delta. We could see the Richardson Mountains, but not Aklavik.

Liz at the Viewing Tower

I went into town to send some more email, wrote to one friend about how discouraged and lonely I was feeling. Then I went to the Visitor Centre to enquire about fishing, and the guy there sent me to Moe's Stationery next to the Cafe Gallery. He also told me the latest news about the Dempster; it will be closed until July 2nd, a week from now. They will be escorting people out of Eagle Plains tomorrow, but you can't get there from here because the Arctic Red River ferry is shut down due to debris in the river coming from the south.

The Utilidor connecting Inuvik homes

This will be the longest I have stayed anywhere, and not by choice!

Ran into "Greasy Stick" and a German woman at Moe's and we chatted for awhile. His real name is Joel and she is Judith. I gather they hooked up at the dinner theatre last night. He said he was going to Alaska in his van. He plays fiddle and says he hopes he is retired.

After talking to Moe about a possible fishing trip I went back to camp. Liz invited me to have a beer and later supper, it was nice. A guy who came up the Dempster after it was closed down dripped by to show us photos of the washouts. Pretty incredible, the road is definitely shot to hell. Someone said it was on the CBC news today.

Looks like I'll have to do a laundery, I am running out of clean clothes. I'm not real happy about being stuck here but really it is an opportunity to catch up on things I meant to do but haven't done.

Wednesday June 24, 1998 - Inuvik

Sign on the road into Inuvik

Chuk Camp - cloudy and cold

I slept in, had a nice hot shower in the camp washroom and a late breakfast of oatmeal. I paid for a second night (still $10!) and drove into town in the afternoon. At the Inuvik Visitor Centre I learned that the Dempster Highway was closed until at least Saturday or Sunday, maybe longer. I visited the Cafe Gallery and the Library where I sent a bunch of "Stranded in Inuvik" emails to friends in the south. At the front door of the library was a sign asking you to take your shoes off before entering. Apparently so many people track in gravel stuck in the treads of their boots or runners that it was making a mess of the floor. You get one hour free per day of internet time, but it was a slack time so the librarian seemed amenable to bending the rules. I could stay on the computer until someone showed up wanting to get on.

There are two campgrounds in Inuvik, Chuk Camp on a hill overlooking the town and Happy Valley camp right in the town. I was told that I picked the right camp because Happy Valley is very buggy, Like Caribou Camp that I visited yesterday. Because Chuk Camp is on a hill it catches the breeze and that keeps the bugs down.

Yohan is unwell. He doesn't want to eat and just doesn't look healthy. I left him in the truck all day. When I returned to camp I spoke to Liz and Clem about Yohan, Clem wanted to examine him. Clem is a retired gastro-enterological surgical assistant (GSA) with, as he puts it, a 'psycho' knack, which among other things apparently means he understands sick animals (and humans). I brought Yohan to their campsite (I drove over) and Clem 'examined' Yohan. He was extremely gentle, Yohan appeared to pour his heart out to him and said that Yohan was very sad, very anxious, but the worst thing wrong with him was his age. Clem's wife Liz thinks Yohan is just having a bad arthritis day. Clem thought that as long as Yohan was drinking water he would probably be okay.

As a consolation to all of us who are "stranded" in Inuvik, the town invited us to a special dinner theatre production. The play was called East Three, it was about the history of Inuvik which was originally called East Three. Inuvik was created to replace Aklavik which was prone to flooding. Engineers surveyed six potential townsites, three on the west side of the Mackenzie delta and three on the east side. East Three was the final choice. Kind of symbolic because this area is the meeting place of three races: Indian (Gwich'in), Inuit (Inuvialuit) and European-descent.

I went to it with Liz and Clem, there were people there from both campgrounds. The play was very good and there was also a skit using members of the audience as the characters in the skit.  Liz got to play "Pearl", the man in the next campsite to me played "Bubbles" and a guy from San Diego played "Greasy Stick".

Liz hammed it up something fierce. In fact at one point she took the story line in the opposite direction than was intended, leaving the narrator speechless. Had everyone in hysterics. "Bubbles" told me later that he was going on a 2-week canoe trip with several other people who were in the audience that night, and that he was probably stuck with that name for the duration.

Dinner included caribou meat balls, roast musk ox, white fish and arctic char, I saved a bit of chicken for Yohan. All in all a great evening of local culture and meeting people.

We are all signing up for various tours and activities, a favourite at Chuk is the trip to Tuktoyaktuk. I would have liked to go but you have to fly in and I didn't want to leave Yohan at the camp that long. Instead I asked around about getting a guide to take me fishing on the Mackenzie. You have to have a guide because it is a huge delta with many channels and you can very easily get lost. I figured leaving Yohan for a couple of hours would be okay, just not all day. He could sleep in the truck.

Tuesday June 23, 1998 - Dempster Highway

Richardson Mountains

It was a windy clear day when I woke up in the gravel pit, and cold. The wind was so strong that a raven just floated over my truck. The view was fantastic, the Richardson Mountain Range lay to the north of me. The highway goes through a broad pass that has never been glaciated.

Snow!

I set out right after breakfast and thought I would be in Inuvik in the late afternoon, I was making good time. The highway crosses treeless mountains and valleys to the NWT border, and you don't start seeing trees again until you approach the Mackenzie Delta. There's a time zone change at the Yukon/NWT border.

There are two ferry crossings, Peel River and Arctic Red River, before Inuvik and when I got to the first one, Peel River, there was a long line-up of vehicles waiting to cross. It is a cable ferry and both the wind and the current in the river are very strong today so they did not want to chance a crossing until the wind died. The river flows north and many of the trees that came down in the rain the day before were floating down the river, driven by the strong current.

The semi truck that I met the day before was in the line-up a ways ahead of me. I greeted the driver as someone I knew and we chatted. His name is Norm and he told me that he drove the route between Edmonton to Inuvik on a regular basis.

I asked what he was carrying in his truck and he said, "Oh, I'm an essential service in the North. Chips and pop."

He said the highway washed out and was closed just south of Eagle Plains this morning. It was still raining down there. So we were all stuck between the Peel River ferry and Eagle Plains, no one could go south, no one could go north.

I waited all afternoon, there were about twenty vehicles in the line-up and I met people from Montana, Saskatchewan, Vancouver Island, and Alaska in the line-up. The wind would probably not die before evening.

I tried to take a look at the river but you couldn't get close to it because of the sand in the wind. There are sandy cliffs up river and the wind is blowing the sand down. It stings the skin and you have to keep your eyes closed. There is a tiny native village here. I talked to a ten year old boy who doesn't go to school but hunts moose and wolf and fishes too. There are a few native cabins, and one entrepreneurial type who sold hotdogs, chips and coke from a tent.  One cabin has a komatik in front of it.

There are no bugs thanks to the wind, except if you have to go into the woods to pee. It is mostly treeless taiga tundra here. I picked some really bright blue Arctic Forget-Me-Nots on a hillock. All kinds of tufts of tiny flowers, white, yellow and blue.

Around 6 pm the shift changed on the Peel River ferry and the new skipper decided to cross. Around 6.30 he started ferrying people across and I crossed around 6.45 pm. I drove straight through to the next ferry at Fort MacPherson, only stopping once to feed Yohan. 

The Arctic Red River ferry does a 3-point route: from the Fort McPherson side to the Inuvik side to Arctic Red River and back to Fort McPherson. There was a hitchhiker at Fort McPherson who was picked up by the car behind me, a white station wagon with four guys in it. He was from New York and was kayaking across the country. His kayak was at the ferry landing. While we waited for the ferry he set up his tent there.

After getting off the ferry I drove to Inuvik. I stopped just before Inuvik to look at a campsite, Caribou Creek, which appeared to be bug-free but there was no one there. I continued to Chuk Camp, on a hill 5 km before the town, arriving around 11.30 pm. This was the campground recommended by Al and Mick. The owner was nice, I talked to him for a while debating whether to stay there or at Caribou Creek. Caribou Creek was free, Chuk Camp was not. Regardless of what I decided the owner said I could have a shower at Chuk. 

A couple I met at the Peel River ferry, Clem and Liz, they had a Wild Rose camper. Clem said something I kind of liked while we were waiting for the ferry. We were talking about Yohan's breed. Clem thought he was a collie, I told him that I always thought so but some people where I worked thought he was a Nova Scotia Duck Toller, and that after all he was from Nova Scotia. Clem said, No he was definitely a collie, so he called him a 'Cajun Collie'. So I think that's what I'm going to tell people from now on, he's a Cajun Collie.

I decided to go to Caribou Creek but discovered that it was now very buggy so around 1 am I returned to Chuk Camp and registered. The owner only charged me $10 even though the fee was supposed to be $12.

The clock time means nothing, this far north the sun does not set but just goes round and round, so it never gets dark at all. There are no stars and no moon, just the sun. I picked out a site and went to bed.