Driving from Dawson City to Whitehorse

Posted On April 22, 2024

When I wrote about my April 7th flight to Inuvik, I said that it would probably take me five blog posts to tell you about the 5-day trip. But here we are on the final day’s drive to Whitehorse on April 11th, and this is Arctic blog post #10, with a total of 210 photos (including the 20 in this one).

The drive down the Dempster (or was it up the Dempster, since we gained elevation?) was among many other things, exhausting. It was the longest day I had been active in a very long time, and our final day started later than usual. The first photo was shot at 07:40, from the window of our room at the Downtown Hotel – it shows the hotel’s main building on the opposite side of Second Avenue.

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Looking the other way from our room, with several notable historic buildings – Lowe’s Mortuary, the Palace Grand Theatre to the far left, the Old Post Office to its right, and the Dawson Daily News building to the distant right.

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Over the years, I’ve spent hundreds of nights in Dawson. Almost all tours I drove spent 2 nights here, and adding my many personal trips, the number is probably over 400, but I never tire of the place – I still find it enchanting. I still believe that you can’t understand the Yukon without spending time in Dawson City. Here’s the view up Second Avenue from ground level…

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…and the opposite direction, toward the iconic Moosehide Slide. Although it looks like it could have been caused by modern mining, it’s been there forever.

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Well that’s a poor way to start the day! Tyson pumped it up with the portable compressor he carries, though, and we drove a few blocks to the Eldorado Hotel for a large breakfast.

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On the way to “the Eldo,” we stopped for a jug of windshield washer fluid, which we ran out of on the Dempster. The large hotel in the background is the Westmark, the only Holland America / Westmark hotel remaining in the Yukon, and I expect they only still operate this one (in the summer) because nobody else wants it.

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The view down Third Avenue from the Eldo – stuffed with grub and ready to hit the trail to the big city after 4 days wandering through the Arctic wastes (as the novelists back in the day would have said 🙂 )

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Fuelling up at the junction of the Dempster and North Klondike Highways, 40 km south, was our next stop. I was surprised to see two gas cardlocks here now. AFD had built a new one since the last time I was there, and their old one is now “operated by a Yukon First Nation company” according to the sign. The old location had been the site of the full-service Klondike River Lodge for some 40 years, but it burned in December 2012. I shot the next photo as we were leaving, looking back towards Dawson. The junction is officially Km 674.6 of North Klondike Highway, measured from the ferry terminal at Skagway.

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I’ve probably never driven past the panoramic north to the north provided by the Tintina Trench Rest Area without stopping. An interpretive sign explains that the Trench is a fault line along which the bedrock has shifted a minimum of 450 km laterally. Some 65 million years ago, the rocks presently beneath Dawson City were adjacent to those of Ross River.

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Here’s a tiny section of that panorama.

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Next, we stopped at Moose Creek Lodge. This is the view to the north from their driveway, of a recently-rebuilt hill on the highway.

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After countless times going into the lodge with tour groups and solo, Tyson and I walked past it this time. The purpose of the stop was to visit the owner, my long-time friend Maja Nafzger. She lives in a cabin tucked into the forest behind the lodge, and we had a wonderful visit.

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The only sense I can make of this work just south of the lodge is that the slope is going to be cut way back to eliminate a curve in the highway.

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When I started driving the North Klondike in 1990, Stewart Crossing had one of the nicest historic lodges in the territory, and that made Stewart Crossing a community. The Stewart Crossing Lodge was torn down in May 2000, though. It was eventually replaced by a convenience store and gas bar (the historic lodge and its replacement are shown in the first 2 photos on a lengthy blog post about a 2012 drive to Keno and back), but now there’s only a cardlock.

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Until very recently there was a small visitor centre at the Stewart Crossing Rest Area, but it was rarely if ever open in recent years, and now it’s gone, too. There is, however, a new Flo EV charger there.

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A brief stop was made at the pullout overlooking the Pelly River and the community of Pelly Crossing. There we met a young couple from France who had rented a truck-and-camper unit in Whitehorse and were going to Dawson and perhaps up the Dempster a bit. I of course encouraged them to have a look at the Dempster 🙂

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The Five Finger Rapids Rest Area was the next stop, because how can you just blow by this magnificent and incredibly historic spot? This photo was enhanced as an HDRI.

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It was a good place for a photo of Tyson and me – the only one of the trip.

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A general view of the rest area. It’ll get much busier starting on the Victoria Day weekend (May 24th).

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Our final stop was at Braeburn Lodge, a long-time supplier of coffee and food for my tour groups and me. I had a nice long chat with a friend, and picked up one of their famous gigantic cinnamon buns to take home.

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We reached Whitehorse just before 5 pm. Wow, what a trip – it’s hard to believe what we did in just 5 days. It’s going to take me a while to process all of it, but this was a very significant trip in a few ways. To start with, the timing was perfect – a month earlier I was still too sick to have accepted the offer. My last improvement after a session with my osteopath made the crucial difference, but even Cathy was anxious that I wouldn’t be able to handle it. So, though I still have a long way to go to get where I was before my accident, I’m pleased with where I am.

We’re counting down to Cathy’s retirement – 20 work days to go – and it’s hard to say what will come after that. Many more Adventures for many years, we hope.