Author: doug

Hi Travellers!

We reached Dawson City on Wednesday evening and have stayed until today. We have had a great time here and were able to see a bit of northern lights while in the town, and from our hotel room. Pictures will be coming soon. We’ve also got a good collection of pictures of the town, the dancehall girls at the casino (Canada’s first legalized gambling estabilishment). No sourtoe adventures (there’s only a 2 hour window in the evening), but we’ve got another night in town on the return trip.

Today we are heading off to the Dempster Highway and somewhere in the next few days we’ll be doing a backpacking trip in Tombstone Territorial Park. We are really excited about this leg of the journey and after talking to a local photographer we got some info on where the caribou and other animals are at the moment so we are feeling good about our chances for some great wildlife photography. For those of you who haven’t heard of Tombstone Territorial Park you should check out the photos of Robert Postma for some great ones of the park and the north. The colours are changing late this year so we might get the best pictures on the return trip rather than the trip up. As a spell of good luck, the clouds are clearing and the aurora are forecast to be active again tonight and tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll find a great camping spot for viewing!

More soon!

Why Hello Travellers,

Last night we found ourselves in the town of Faro, Yukon. After being soaked with rain in Whitehorse and with the good looking forecast for northern lights we looked for a place in the Yukon with a clear weather forecast and came up with Faro. When we arrived we found a lovely little mining town with a great campground in the town (so great that a $6.50 campsite comes with free hot showers, firewood, internet and coffee and snacks at the interpretive center across the road!). It should also be pointed out that the town itself is very beautiful. It’s covered in lovely gardens and even has a strange golf course that winds through the entire town.

We decided to view the northern lights when the sky cleared so we headed to bed for a brief nap. I was a bit confused about why my alarm didn’t wake me up at 2am like I had set it, and with Lana getting up and out of the tent, and the alarm ringing at 2:25am, I was even more confused about why hadn’t it gone off before. I climbed into the car with Lana and she informed me that she had told me to turn off the alarm numerous times and that I had just pushed the snooze button.  Apparently I was sleepy.

When we set off to the bridge right outside of town we were greeted by some northern lights in the NW in the clear portion of the sky. There was not too much sky without cloud cover, but we were able to get a little bit of a show. See some pictures below (they’re posted as proof that the lights were there).

The trip has been pretty interesting so far for wildlife, but we were in for a treated yesterday. While we were driving to Faro, a cougar slinked across the road in front of us.  It wasn’t a long look and we didn’t get any pictures, but both of us got our first look at a cougar in the wild. After that we proceeded to go the the Fannin Sheep viewing area just past the town. We were skunked as far as sheep go, but we managed to see a porcupine on the way back, and another while we were looking at the northern lights. One of the coolest things was the arctic fox that came up to us while we were cooking dinner. It wandered around us for a little while, about five feet away and then headed off. We saw it again when we returned from viewing the northern lights at about 5am this morning/last night.

So we are off today, of course the alarm didn’t go off, but that only seems to have pushed our 7am start to more like a 8am start. we are so excited and have been busy packing the car, and I should be doing that right now, so I will be off.

The adventure begins and I am stoked!

I am guessing that some of you might not know where Inuvik is, or where the path we are taking up north might be found. Well here is a map with our planned route, we might dip into Alaska through the Top of The World highway, but more on that later.
While i was doing some playing around with google maps I discovered that our trip is equivalent in km (although we will be doing at least 1400km on dirt highway) with the trip from Rome, Italy to Kiruna, in northern Sweden.

Should be fun!

View Larger Map

Hello Travelers,

We have been planning up a storm and have put together a rough itinerary for our trip, this is just a guide to make sure that we have time to see everything we want in the time we have. We love side trips and are planning to follow the interesting things we find. All in all, don’t be surprised if some of the posts aren’t identical to what this plan says, but it should be a good general guide for those following at home!

The planning is really starting to come together, with the start of the trip less than one week away I am getting deliriously excited about the trip ahead.



Getting through BC is going to be interesting, it looks like a total of 30hrs to drive from vancouver to whitehorse. A funny note is that prince george, a “central city” in northern BC is really only 1/3 of the way up the province as far as driving is concerned.

Some Driving times

That’s a total of 1 day and 8 hours of driving. The current plan is to drive to watson lake, 1 day and 2 hours of driving, in two days, I think we are going to have a good time.

Hello readers (if you’re out there)!  We are just 10 days away from our Northern Adventure roadtrip (probably one of many).  We’ll be updating where and when we can with photos, ramblings, bragging, etc. Itinerary to come shortly!