Author: lana

The sourtoe cocktail club is a strange Dawson city tradition of sorts. You can be inducted in the Sourdough bar in the Downtown Hotel (where we stayed) between 9 and 11 each night by an entertaining fellow known as the captain. The original captain has now retired and moved to Whitehorse. You can buy his rather odd memoirs/biography throughout the Yukon. From what I gather, the original captain got to bragging about his navigation skill shortly after his arrival in Dawson. The locals got a bit tired of his boasting and decided to play a bit of a prank by getting him to drink a cocktail with a preserved human toe in it by telling him that all true captains of the area had to perform this task (the toe was provided by a fellow who’d cut it off to prevent gangrene from spreading and had kept it as a reminder to himself). Apparently this caught on and now there are something upwards of 38,000 inductees (my membership number is 38249). I may be butchering the tale a bit, but here are the photos of our induction (toe must touch your lips for the drink to count).

Yeah… we had to take pictures of ourselves eating Klondike bars in the city of Dawson, center of the Klondike gold rush.

Hi all,

I thought that since we didn’t get to write about a lot of the stuff we got up to while we were doing it (much of the north, particularly the parts without people, doesn’t have internet), I’d post a few photos and descriptions at random.

Here’s a photo of the grizzly bear that approached us on the Dempster highway. Things were going great until it walked behind the vehicle. We turned to watch and through the small mud-free opening (where the wiper cleared the rear window) we saw nothing but bear. It had jumped up on my bike and was gnawing on the handlebars. Doug urged me to put the car in gear so I threw my camera at him and managed to pull forward a few meters. The bear decided my bike was not delicious enough to chase and ambled off down the road (probably to find one of the many insane cyclists who complete the 800km gravel road trip each year.. I imagine it already had a taste for cyclist).

We’ve managed to return to Vancouver in one piece… which is remarkable considering the number of bears we saw around where we camped our last night (14!).

We made it safely back down the Dempster in two days, abandoning our plans to hike due to persistent cold and rain. No more flat tires or other woes, but we did meet a grizzly, which proceeded to chew on the handlebar of my bike (bear photos to come).

We then spent a night in Dawson and joined the Sourtoe Cocktail club (photos to come). For those not aware, new inductees to the club must drink a shot of some hard liquor (choice is yours) with a mummified human toe in it. The toe must touch your lips for the drink to be considered complete. As per anything in the North, there’s a colourful story behind that.

We drove from Dawson to Whitehorse yesterday in the hopes of a sunny day or two to visit the Kluane. No such luck. My tent is thoroughly soaked, but most of our gear is dry so we’ll continue to camp here in town until the weather clears, or it’s time to head back home (we have to leave by early Saturday). I guess we’ll do the touristy things: shopping, visiting the hotsprings and the wildlife preserve, and sitting in warm internet cafes, for the next couple of days if we have to.

After a couple of days on the Dempster (somewhere between 700 and 800 km of dirt road), we arrived in Inuvik on Sunday evening. The daylight up here, even this late in the year, is hard to get used to. Darkness doesn’t completely come and it’s still sunny at about 11pm. Add that to nights spent watching the northern lights rather than sleeping and you have some very strange sleep schedules starting to form. We had to force ourselves to get up with an alarm today in order to be ready for a charter to Tuktoyaktuk, on the Arctic ocean. The town of Inuvik itself is quite large and developed from what we’ve seen. Today we’ll get our incredibly muddy bikes off the truck and do a bit of exploring. Below are a few pictures of our trip. I’m sure we’ll get more time to explain them when we return, but as always, we’re eager to get out there and enjoy the adventure, rather than documenting it all in detail. The photos are from along the Dempster and our overnight camping stops. No major mishaps on the road, except for one flat, which we enjoyed changing in a blackfly infested roadside pullout at sunset. Our consolation prize was the excellent makeshift campsite we picked out a little down the road, where the northern lights blanketed the sky from dusk to dawn.

We made it to a very soggy whitehorse. Here are some photos from the road:

We managed to get on the road at 9:15am Saturday. Spent the first night at Mcleod lake (it’s so easy to find places that have ‘Douglas’ or ‘Mcleod’ in them… but there’s never a Rupp River or Lana Meadows anywhere to be found). We spent Sunday cruising past wildlife and forest, with very few stops for photos and made reasonable time to Liard River Hotsprings. The hotsprings are a completely natural set of pools in the middle of a boggy moose and bear filled forest. They were beautiful and very warm and we spent a good part of the evening out on the boardwalk in the bog taking photos of the steam in the moonlight. The stop is highly recommended, even though the campground was pretty crowded. The surprise of the trip up was the buffalo. Apparently there’s somewhat of an infestation. I believe they’re a re-introduced herd. They have taken to sleeping on the hwy and can be seen all over the place around the hotsprings and for the next 90km north. This morning we packed up and drove the last leg to whitehorse. It looks like we’ll be camping just south of the town so we can cycle in and about (also there’s showers!). Anyways.. we’re on the wireless at the public library so we’ll make this one somewhat short. Tonight.. reasonable chance of northern lights. Tomorrow/Wednesday even better. I’m seriously stoked to being in viewing range. Next stops: Dawson on Wednesday, then Tombstone!

It’s beginning to look a lot like the Stewart-Cassiar Hwy will be either closed, or too smokey to be enjoyable. Since there’s a bigger, better road to the east of the province (97), we’ll likely take that instead. The change of route will add about an hour travel time to the trip to Watson Lake (but probably that would have been lost due to visibility, road closures or other fire related hazards on the previous route choice). Also, I hear there are really nice hot springs that we should be coming across midway through our second day of driving!

I’m counting down the days until we get out on the road. I’ve got a reasonably sized stack of gear accumulating in my room, which also serves as a daily reminder. I thought I’d post a couple of photos from our last trip (Sept 09) to Whitehorse. The northern lights photos below aren’t great. I managed to lose battery power early on in the night when the lights were slow and lazy and I hadn’t yet gotten the camera focus down. This time will be different (2 cameras, 3 batteries, 2 tripods and a bit of daytime shot planning will hopefully net me some better pics!). For now, here’s the yukon in fall: