Journey to the Far North

An edgy trek to the Top of the World

The highway heads to the Top of the World

September 21, 2000
Web posted at: 10:45 a.m. EDT (1445 GMT)

By Jack Hamann
Special to CNN.com

In this story: Smooth traveling - at first A hero remembered No grizzlies, countless mosquitoes Dusty, tired, in one piece RELATED STORIES, SITES

Editor's note: Correspondent Jack Hamann and his wife Leslie spent several weeks exploring some of the breathtaking boundaries of the Far North, including the Bering Sea, the Aleutian Islands and the Arctic Ocean. This is the second story in a four-part series.

TOK, Alaska (CNN) -- There were moments when we dared not blink.

At the 80-mile mark of the Top of the World Highway, our knuckles were white and our neck muscles ached. Eyes glued to the narrow dirt road ahead, our peripheral vision picked up what seemed like the bottom of the world far below the steep cliffs. At any moment, we braced for another RV or fuel truck to come barreling toward our rental car, refusing to concede our half of this potholed highway, all in the name of driving farther north than we'd ever been.

INTERACTIVE GALLERY Click to see scenes from the high-altitude highways     FAR NORTH SERIES Monday - Bering Sea Tuesday - Kodiak Island Wednesday - Top of the World Highway Thursday- Arctic Ocean     RELATED STORY Mosquitoes, mosquitoes everywhere!     TRAVEL TIPS Click for practical information for driving around the Top of the World     MESSAGE BOARD Where in the world would you like to travel?

Two roads with hair-raising reputations -- the Top of the World Highway and the Dempster Highway -- are the unforgettable trails taking travelers as far north as most will ever go. There are few roads on the planet above the Arctic Circle, and the Dempster is the only public highway in the Western Hemisphere that actually allows you to cross that magic line in a car.

It's a journey of a lifetime -- if you're prepared.

Our trek began in Tok (rhymes with "Coke"), Alaska, a strip of service stations and restaurants 176 miles southeast of Fairbanks along the Alaska Highway. It's connected to Dawson City, in Canada's Yukon Territory, by the Top of the World Highway.

On the Alaska side, it's called the Taylor Highway; on the Yukon side it's known as 60-mile Road (named, obviously, before Canada went metric). We entered the Taylor Highway at a place called Tetlin Junction, and for the next 23 miles, the road was pure pavement. Miles 24 through 65 were wide, smooth gravel. The highway seemed fast and easy. And there lay the problem.

Most drivers have read horror stories about the Taylor, but by the time they reach the tiny hamlet of Chicken at Mile 65, they're feeling cocky. They stop to buy Chicken T-shirts and post cards at what must be the world's smallest tourist trap, then jump back on the road, confident that all the warnings are overblown.

Dawson City's muddy streets

Without warning, the road grows deadly.

Back in September 1988, a tour bus flew off a cliff, killing two and injuring 23 others. In 1994, a tractor-trailer hauling 9,000 gallons of diesel fuel overturned and burned. In June 1997, a woman flipped her Subaru and died before rescuers could reach her. A few weeks before we came through, another tour bus plowed down an embankment. Near milepost No. 95, an RV lay mangled at the bottom of a canyon.

Despite the precarious going, travelers venture onto the Top of the World Highway for two reasons. During summer, the highway offers a significant shortcut to Dawson City, saving more than 500 miles over the alternate route through Whitehorse (Taylor is closed in winter).

Almost as important, the Top of the World can provide some of the most beautiful vistas in the Far North. Travelers enjoy sweeping ridgetop views extending past hundreds of miles of wilderness in every direction. Bouncing along in the middle of the day (not the best time for wildlife), we saw birds, a porcupine, and the only caribou of our trip.

Hundreds of travelers make it all 165 miles to Dawson City every day without dying in a ditch, so there's no reason to avoid the road. Besides, negotiating the Top of the World is a reasonable price to pay to reach the amazing Dempster Highway.

The highway is named for Jack Dempster, a heroic Canadian Mountie who set out in December 1910 to find four lost Northwest Mounted Police dog-team travelers. Braving miserable weather, he ventured 310 miles north, only to find the men frozen to death (they'd eaten their dogs).

The starting point for the Dempster is Dawson City, an eclectic rebuilt remnant of the short-lived Klondike Gold Rush of 1896-1900. The banks of the Klondike River just east of town are still littered with small mountains of tailings from a time when 100,000 prospectors flooded this bend in the river.

A storm brewing on the Dempster Highway

These days, tourism is Dawson City's gold, and visitors fill the Palace Theater for vaudeville and can-can dancing, or head to Diamond Tooth Gertie's for a chance to roll dice and feed slots in Canada's only legal gambling hall. The town is still restoring its historic buildings and tries to keep the authentic 19th century charm of wooden sidewalks and unpaved muddy streets.

Driving north on the Dempster is like driving back in time -- way back. At milepost No. 47, a spacious valley opens to the west, revealing a distant jagged peak called Tombstone Mountain. The vast landscape is hypnotic, looking eerily like the painted dioramas that museums place behind their displays of woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers.

For the next 114 miles, every view is like a national park: no other roads, no fences, very little sense that other humans have passed this way. Giant green meadows, sprinkled with fireweed, foxtail and arctic cotton, stretch to the horizon, clinging to a thin layer of soil atop the permafrost.

In midsummer, most glimpses of wildlife come early in the day or late in the evening. We saw one moose, two black bears, an arctic fox and broods of ptarmigans, a grouse-like bird. We were fortunate to see a few peregrine falcons gliding along the cliffs, and turned a corner to startle a small flock of regal sandhill cranes. There were reports of grizzly bears along the route, but we never saw one. The farther north we drove, the more mosquitoes emerged from the tens of thousands of ponds in the tundra.

Most travelers make the Dempster a two-day trip, many of them staying at clean campgrounds, each offering 20 to 25 sites, that dot the route. The only hotel is the Eagle Plains Hotel at mile No. 229. Built to house highway workers, the structure's flimsy carpets and threadbare towels still retain the smell of mud, mildew and cigarette smoke from those early guests.

Twenty-three miles beyond the hotel is a monument that almost no one passes: the Arctic Circle. Here, just beyond 66 degrees north latitude, the sun never sets on June 21 and never rises on December 21. I found myself transfixed as a I stared in the general direction of the North Pole, a mere 1,650 miles to the north.

At mile No. 289, we crossed the border from Yukon into the Northwest Territories (NWT). Standing at the border, the view north flattens to the vast expanse of the McKenzie River Delta. This area is so unpopulated, most of the thousands of lakes do not have names -- in fact, the highest point in the territory doesn't have a name, either.

The final 150 miles of the Dempster were relatively smooth going. At mile No. 378, we reached the McKenzie River, where travelers wait for a small ferry that comes once an hour. We chatted with Pierre Norman, a 62-year-old Gwich'in Indian who spends his summers living in a tent on the riverbank, catching and smoking whitefish and Arctic grayling.

The final push to the end of the road was a monotonous 90-minute scramble along a wide gravel road that gets heavy use from road crews and their dust-spewing trucks. We pulled into the surprisingly modern city of Inuvik feeling tired and dusty, but not nearly as frazzled as we did after our trek across the Top of the World Highway. We inventoried the damage: a new crack in the windshield, a slow leak in one tire (and a heavy-duty wilderness tire at that!) and a solid coat of caked mud on the back half of our vehicle.

All in all, the Dempster Highway was nothing near the horror we expected. If the weather had been a little drier, the dust might have been a bigger issue. If it had been a little wetter, the mud and potholes might have made it all a little less spectacular.

If you'd like to ask Jack Hamann a question about his trip, send him an email at cnnjack@aol.com

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