Yukon Travels: Better For Soul Than Car Rewarded With So Much Great Scenery, The Bad Roads Seem To Be All Part Of The Adventure

Dawson wasn’t the end of the line, but it was close enough for us.

The only road north from here was the Dempster Highway - 165 miles up to the Arctic Circle, ending eventually at the settlement of Inuvik, in the southwest corner of the Yukon’s Reindeer Grazing Reserve.

It was tempting. The Dempster is the only public highway on the continent that crosses the Arctic Circle. We’d never seen reindeer. And Inuvik, the largest Canadian community north of the Arctic Circle, with a population of 3,400, really is the end of the line - the tundra version of Key West.

But we’d had it with the roads, and with more than 500 miles to go in our journey - basically a 1,200-mile loop from Juneau north to Dawson City and back again - we weren’t looking for more.

If the dust and construction on the Alaska Highway hadn’t been enough, the 176 miles of dust and flying stones we endured getting over the Top of the World Highway was. By some miracle, all the window glass was intact in the Ford Explorer - rented, thank goodness - but we’d seen more than a few RVs and cars and trucks that hadn’t been quite as lucky dodging rocks thrown up from the highway by churning wheels.

We would spend a day here in the old gold-rush town of Dawson City, before heading south to Whitehorse, and then southwest to Haines, Alaska, where we would catch the car ferry back to Juneau to complete the circuit. The books recommended two weeks for this trip; my friend, Jim, and I were doing it in six days - admittedly scratching the surface of a land still largely wild and unpopulated.

But if that diminished the experience, as first-timers we didn’t feel it. We were too busy craning our necks at the scenery, or pulling off the road to explore outposts such as Chicken, Alaska, where the main business is run by a University of Pennsylvania Wharton graduate and his wife, who’s from South Jersey. Or walking the streets of Dawson City and trying to picture the town as it was during the Klondike gold rush of 1898, or a few years later when the poet Robert W. Service took up residence.

Or meeting roadside entrepreneurs such as Mary Underwood, who parked her 10-foottall stuffed grizzly along the highway in Tok, Alaska, and was charging tourists $3 to take their own picture with the bear - $6 if they used her Polaroid. “It’s been slow, but anything new takes time,” she said, explaining that the 1,100-pound bear had been shot by somebody else in 1992 and that she’d found it boxed up in a store.

The Yukon is a very big place, with a very small population. It’s larger than Belgium, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands combined, but has a population of only 31,395 - fewer people than at the height of the gold rush, when Dawson City alone had almost that many residents. To put it another way, there are more moose than people in the Yukon Territory, and six times as many caribou.> Our summer journey - you should come between May and September, or you’re risking snow - began one morning with a four-hour car-ferry ride up the Inside Passage, from Juneau to Haines. Short of flying, it was the only way to cover the distance of about 100 miles because Juneau - a real oddball as state capitals go - is hemmed in by mountains and water, and has no road exit to the outside world.

If the words “great scenery” and “bad roads” seemed to sum up the whole trip, glaciers and waterfalls synopsized this small portion on water. When we weren’t locked in fog, we were looking at waterfalls cascading over sheer cliffs; high, bright-green meadows bordered by dark spruce forests; or tongues of blue-green ice protruding from between snow-capped mountains.

Approaching Haines, we passed a rookery of sea lions, sunning themselves on boulders at the water’s edge. Then Haines itself appeared, a settlement almost surrounded by the Coast Range Mountains, with a road north through the Chilkat River Valley.

At Haines Junction, we grabbed dinner at a roadhouse and picked up the Alaska Highway, which angles northwest along the border of Kluane, in the Yukon. The Kluane wilderness supports one of Canada’s largest and most diverse wildlife populations, including grizzlies, moose and caribou; predators such as wolves, coyotes and lynx; and Dall sheep and mountain goats.

The road here wound along the shore of Kluane Lake, the largest in the Yukon Territory. What was startling about this lake was not its size, but its pale blue color, caused by fine particles of glacial silt, suspended in the water, that reflect light.

At Soldiers’ Summit, we pulled over to examine a plaque that recalled the ribbon-cutting ceremony of Nov. 20, 1942, officially opening the Alcan Highway between Dawson Creek, British Columbia, and Fairbanks, Alaska. Thanks to wartime exigencies and a lot of U.S. and Canadian troops, the road was built in just 10 months.

Again, the scenery had us shaking our heads. This region was so wild and vast that it made Texas seem like a little backyard patch of semiarid land. But soon we were shaking our heads involuntarily. We’d hit the Shakwak Project - about 100 miles of very, very bad road, almost all of it under construction and peppered with delays.

And rough. Very rough.

“You don’t want to bring along the good china,” quipped Jim as we bounced and slewed our way toward the Alaska border.

We counted our blessings for having rented a 4-by-4 vehicle, and wondered how those in RVs and passenger cars were handling it. The very unhappy guy ahead of us with North Carolina plates on his big new Buick was wandering off on his own in the many wide-open stretches, to avoid the dust and stones being churned up by vehicles ahead.

Twice he was almost wiped out by huge gravel trucks going in the other direction - mammoth vehicles capable of carrying 90 tons at a time. “I’m just trying to protect my new car,” he snapped during conversation at one of the frequent construction stops.

By midafternoon, we were pulling into Tok, the first major settlement in Alaska for those heading north on the Alaska Highway. Tok wasn’t much: a strip of stores, restaurants, filling stations and shops catering mainly to tourists.

At the town’s big visitors’ headquarters, the Alaska Public Lands Information Center, we perused a comment book and chuckled at what drivers had written about the road we’d just traversed.

“Horrible road; like riding in a blender,” said one.

“Need a back brace and lumbar support,” said another.

“The dips will kill you.”

“Needed helmet.”

“Like driving bumper cars.”

And, more to the point: “C’mon - it wasn’t that bad!”

Next morning, we doubled back on the Alaska Highway to Tetlin Junction, and headed north on the dusty gravel of the Taylor Highway, which would connect with the equally dusty Top of the World Highway back into the Yukon to Dawson City - a total of 177 miles.

Unlike the Alaska Highway, the Taylor was built after World War II, and dead-ends (if you don’t make the turn for Dawson City) at the town of Eagle, on the Yukon River, once a supply and transportation center for gold miners. The Taylor and Top of the World Highways are closed October through April, meaning that the good folks of Eagle (pop. 150) and Chicken (pop. 11) are locked in for the winter.

Chicken, like Eagle and so many other surviving settlements in this corner of Alaska and the Yukon, was settled as a gold-mining camp. It’s named for the ptarmigan, a kind of grouse that’s commonly called a “chicken” in these parts. (The story is that the original miners wanted to name the outpost Ptarmigan, but nobody could spell the word, so they settled for Chicken.)

Back on the road again, we emerge from the low, scrub forest onto a rolling, treeless plateau, with low-lying mountains undulating both north and south, as far as the eye can see. A sign soon heralds a return to the Yukon - “Welcome to the Land of the Midnight Sun” - and we pass from Poker Creek, Alaska, to Little Gold Creek, Yukon Territory, “A Nuclear Weapons Free Zone.”

Not surprising, we note, since there is nothing here to nuke.

An hour more and we are on a small car ferry with a strong motor - the only ferry remaining of dozens that once plied the Yukon River - crossing the swiftly flowing, silt-gray water in less than five minutes and entering Dawson City in early afternoon.

Dawson City became the Yukon capital - the Paris of the North, some called it - and remained the seat of government until 1953, when it was moved south 330 miles to Whitehorse. Today, Dawson City has just under 2,000 year-round residents, while Whitehorse has 22,249 - about two-thirds of the population of the entire Yukon Territory.

But, unlike Whitehorse, where fire or ill-guided urban renewal has virtually wiped out the city’s history, Dawson City has managed to preserve and even restore some of its early buildings. A stroll around the board sidewalks and gravel streets will turn up places like the old brothel on Second Avenue, which, says a plaque on the outside, was run by a madam and Paris native named Ruby Scott from 1935 to 1961, “with the tacit approval of local officials.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: If you go WHEN: Summer is by far the best time to visit the Yukon. But if you have difficulty falling asleep while it’s still light outside, be sure to take a sleeping mask. Complete darkness comes just about midnight, with sunrise just a few hours later. HOW TO DO IT: The easiest way is to fly to Anchorage or Juneau and rent a four-wheel-drive vehicle (and accept the insurance, too, so you don’t end up paying for superficial dents or windows that might get broken by thrown stones). Expect dust and delays on some roads, particularly sections of the Alaska Highway. TRY SOME FISHING: Even if you’re not planning to camp, if you like to fish, pack a rod and reel, and buy a license at any sporting goods store. There’s a stream, creek, river or lake at every bend in the road. PLANNING IT: An absolutely essential book for traveling in Alaska or the Yukon, is “The Milepost,” which rightly boasts that it’s “the bible of North Country travel.” Pick it up at most bookstores early in your trip planning, or order it by mail for $25.95 from Vernon Publications; call (800) 726-4707. It’s also a good idea to contact tourist offices and ask for their annual guides. For Alaska, call (907) 465-2012; for the Yukon, call (403) 667-5400.