I spent the night at the Peel River Inn, the settlement's only motel, returning to the car ferry landing the following day. Imagine having a medical emergency in Fort McPherson during the freezing (November to December) or the thawing (March to April) of the two rivers, when ferries aren't running but the ice road isn't open either. Unlike the locals, however, it was not a matter of life or death for me. Like the locals, I'd found myself at the mercy of nature's caprices. I was told that the summer meltwater had raised the water levels in the river and this ferry could not dock. The waiting car ferry promptly whisked me across, past the blink-and-you'll-miss-it Gwich'in settlement of Tsiigehtchi sitting across the tributary from the ferry landing.Ī little while later, I was turned away from the Peel River ferry landing, south of the marginally larger Gwich'in settlement of Fort McPherson – the last town I'd see before Dawson City, some 580km south. I navigated the bumpy washboard section of the Dempster in my SUV, hemmed in by dwarf spruce forest, and made it to the banks of the mighty MacKenzie River in just more than two hours. I was still pondering all this a couple of days later as I was leaving Inuvik and its igloo church, rows of pastel-coloured houses and Alestine's, where I'd been going every day for bowls of reindeer chilli and fish tacos cooked inside an old school bus covered with sassy bumper stickers.Īt first, things went well. Also, while Canada's Inuit receive government support for their traditional ways of life, age-old skills are nevertheless dying out, as dependence on modern technology replaces age-old navigation and hunting skills. Locals up here are all too aware of how other, more accessible Inuit and First Nations communities in Canada have been devastated by the twin scourges of drugs and alcohol. 'And maybe the price of gas, of groceries, will go down.'īut there were undercurrents of concern as well.

'Maybe it'll bring more visitors,' she said. Some, like local guide Eileen Jacobson, who welcomed us into her home to try on her fur parkas and to sample pipsi (dried Arctic char) – an Inuit staple – were both hopeful and apprehensive about the permanent impact the new road will have on their lives. Until 2018, the Inuvialiut (Western Canadian Inuit) hamlet could only be accessed via bush plane, boat or ice road in winter, and Tuk's inhabitants still live mostly off the land: fishing, hunting and trapping, storing caught game in the community freezer underground. Our little group – me, the pilot, a couple more sightseers – was returning to Inuvik after a day trip to Tuk (as locals call Tuktoyaktuk), run by Tundra North Tours. Anyone who drives it needs to be prepared for misadventure, as I found out myself. It's also a hard drive in a hard land (you get a certificate of completion from the Inuvik tourist office if you drive its entire length) as the road is unpaved, there's no phone signal and there's only one petrol station around halfway along. This long, lonely Dempster Highway is one of Canada's ultimate road trips an exhilarating four-wheeled adventure across a pristine northern landscape. Now, a new stretch of highway connects to the Dempster, extending a further 147km beyond Inuvik, all the way to the tiny settlement of Tuktoyaktuk on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. The Dempster Highway was conceived in the late 1950s to open up the MacKenzie Delta to oil and gas exploration and traced a decades-old dog sled patrol route. 'Highway' is a rather glamorous term for a lonely gravel road that branches off the Klondike Highway – which runs between Yukon's capital, Whitehorse, and the Klondike Gold Rush settlement of Dawson City – cutting its way through 764km of dense spruce forest, tundra and snow-covered hills before arriving in Inuvik, the northernmost Arctic town in the Northwest Territories. The Dempster is considered to be one of Canada's toughest drives. A couple of days prior, I'd driven the Dempster Highway all the way to the Arctic Ocean and wanted to see it from above before making my long journey back to Dawson City, Yukon. A dark ribbon of road wound its way between these strange, rounded protrusions.

'Permafrost hillocks,' he explained, seeing my raised eyebrows. 'Pingos,' the pilot's voice came through my headphones. In places, the land bubbled up in smooth green hillocks. Our tiny Cessna juddered above the tundra – a landscape of vivid green threaded with dark blue streaks of meltwater streams and blotched with myriad ice-melt lakes.

Death road to canada fishing