On the road again

Now that Gjoa is safely ashore until probably next May when we relaunch, we won't be writing about sailing travel for a while. Although we won't be sailing, we hope to still do some interesting things over the winter and will continue to post on occasion.

It's been just over two weeks since Gjoa's liftout and we have been on another whirlwind road trip since then. As I wrote earlier in the year, we acquired a camper van in the spring and drove it from Toronto, ON (Ontario) to Yellowknife, NT (Northwest Territories) and left it there while we completed the Northwest Passage by sailboat. The plan was to continue the road trip west in the fall, rendezvous with Gjoa in Homer to pick up a few things and then continue down towards Vancouver for the winter. 

Yellowknife to Homer, via Dawson City (we didn't complete the planned leg to Inuvik)

It's been a fabulous trip so far, except for the recurring theme of the trip which was: we're just two weeks too late. We'd planned to head west mid-September, but, due to losing a week to the crane operator fiasco in Cambridge Bay and a week lost waiting for the tide to haulout in Homer, we didn't get underway until October. We tried to arrange transit from Homer to Whitehorse where we could get a flight to Yellowknife. The bus service stopped running 'two weeks ago'. We then thought maybe we could get a ferry from Homer to Skagway and somehow from there to Whitehorse. The last service was 'two weeks ago'.  We ended up having to fly Homer>Anchorage>Seattle>Calgary>Yellowknife. It was a marathon four-airplane day, but, we got there.

During the drive back to Homer, all the campgrounds, parks, attractions and visitor centres were closed 'two weeks ago'. Luckily, nature was still open and the scenery was truly spectacular. The weather cooperated and we continued to get incredibly sunny, clear and warm days ideal for traveling through the mountains. The fall colour was muted and mostly past its prime (two weeks ago would have been better!), but, it was still very beautiful and probably much more interesting than a summer trip when everything is just green.

Winter weather was never very far behind. Many times we'd leave a place only to learn that snow had arrived the next day. In Dawson City we soon realized we'd have to abandon our plans to drive the Dempster Highway from Dawson City to Inuvik. This was going to be the highlight of the trip, but, common sense prevailed. We had snow while in Dawson City and rivers and lakes were starting to freeze over. The day we'd planned to start the Dempster it was winter driving conditions north of Ft. McPherson and 100 km hour winds through the Richardson Mountains. We had visions of taking the ferry to Inuvik and getting trapped by a partial freezeup. We'd then have to wait about three weeks for the winter ice road to form before we could cross back over. So, we were very disappointed, but, as we were not prepared to drive in such harsh conditions we had to reluctantly give the Dempster a miss. Maybe another time....

The border crossing into Alaska on the Top of the World highway, the highway itself and the Denali highway were also closed 'two weeks ago' which meant we had to drive the long way back from Dawson City to Whitehorse and cross into Alaska there instead. 

In the next couple of posts we'll share some of the incredible sights we've seen along the way so far. We should be back in Homer tomorrow and will be there a couple of weeks before starting out once again for the journey south to Vancouver.