Nunavut, Normal Wells, Dawson City, Eagle, Anchorage
We managed to make it out of Nunavut and broke out of the clouds over Great Bear Lake. We stopped for fuel at Normal Wells, an oil and gas town on the mighty Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories (no road access). We proceeded to Dawson City, Yukon, famous for its party atmosphere. Dawson City is marvelously endowed with government funds in the best Canadian wilderness tradition. The buildings are restored, Parks Canada is everywhere and in period costume, there is a school and a health clinic and an indoor swimming pool. This was my first tourist town of the trip. In Kugluktuk the last tourist had been through in April and he wasn’t there to sightsee, unless you count the sights that can be seen through a rifle scope.
Tourism in the far north is nice because it brings together young and old. Mostly the youngest North Americans, notably Quebecers, are drawn to a life in the Yukon, either year-round or for a summer service-industry job. Mostly the oldest North Americans are the ones with enough time to take a drive that far away (Dawson City is a two-day drive from Anchorage and probably a three-day drive from any large city towards the south). The cruise ship companies have built hotels in Dawson City and offer it as a side excursion via bus and river boat from Anchorage or Juneau. Instead of a paddlewheel steamer they’ve brought in an Australian-made catamaran that blasts from Dawson City down the Yukon to Eagle, Alaska every morning and then returns against the current in the afternoon. Dawson City is also the starting point of the Dempster Highway, a gravel road that crosses the Arctic Circle on its way to Inuvik and supplies windshield cracks to nearly every vehicle in town, including my rental car.
I left “the Bunkhouse”, Dawson City’s one dog-friendly downtown hotel, around noon in my rental car for the drive to Dredge #4, one of the world’s largest wooden bucket dredges, now preserved by the Canadian national park service. In the U.S. there would have been a big “no dogs” sign at the site. In Canada the rangers in the ticket trailer offered to dogsit while I took the one-hour tour. Basically what happened in Dawson is what happens everywhere that there is gold in the streams. The big nuggets are mined out within a few years by guys using hand tools, including the famous standard gold pan, and then only small bits remain (early 1900s in the case of Dawson). The Canadian government didn’t want to lose population and sovereignty over the Yukon so it accelerated the process of granting vast concessions and bringing in industrial dredges that can efficiently sift for the oatmeal-size pieces of gold. The dredges scarred the creekbeds but they kept Dawson City alive at a town for about 70 years until its economy could be rescued by senior citizens in motorhomes. This dredge is a fabulous piece of machinery with massive electric motors and steel-on-steel rotating surfaces (grease causes gold to float out the back of the dredge so it isn’t used in some of the most critical locations).
After my tour the rangers suggested that I continue driving the “unmaintained gravel” loop road to King Solomon’s Dome, which turned out to be quite passable in a standard car. Coming down from the scenery I stopped for a soda at the Goldbottom Creek family mine, which offers electricity-free cabins and tourist goldpanning. A guy from Quebec demonstrated the technique of shoveling some creekbed into a pan and then swishing the lighter pieces out until all that remained was some sand among which he found a few flecks of gold.
The coolest people that I met in Dawson were a young couple who were camped out by the Yukon River waiting for some friends. They had a silky Border Collie and were planning to take two canoes, four people, and two dogs up the Dempster Highway to the Porcupine River then paddle down to the Yukon and pull out on the Alaska Pipeline haul road about a month later. There they planned to hitchhike with their two canoes and two dogs down to Fairbanks. Unfortunately I met them late Saturday night as they were applying first aid to a puncture wound on Alex’s back and my finger inflicted by a Pit Bull (visiting from New Jersey so once again the U.S. proves to be the source of all violence in the world). The unleashed Pit Bull, owned by an aging hippie driving back to New Jersey in his white van, was initially friendly but as soon as he got excited decided it was time to kill and was not easily discouraged. It had been so long since I had witnessed a real dog fight that I forgot not to try to pull the Pit Bull off with my hands so I got bit as well. Eventually some hard kicks to the (small) Pit Bull’s back and stomach convinced him to let go. Alex stopped bleeding pretty quickly but 36 hours later he is still sore (as is my finger). I picked up hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin in Eagle, Alaska about 12 hours later.
Eagle is right on the Yukon and has 120 people, several churches, and two airports. This is the town where Roald Amundsen, in the winter of 1905/06, sledged down from the Arctic Ocean to send a telegram announcing his successful Northwest Passage in Gjoa. (Amundsen of course later went on to additional fame by being about the 13th mammal to arrive at the South Pole, the first mammal over the Pole being his lead dog Etah, a Samoyed.)
Because of the Yukon Queen II catamaran that arrives every day from Dawson it is possible to clear U.S. Customs at either the downtown uphill 1800′ grass/gravel/dirt/crossroad strip or the 3600′ gravel runway two miles out of town. “Just fly over the town before you land,” Chuck, up for a month from Anchorage said on the phone, “and I’ll come out and clear you in.” It was a beautiful, though slightly bumpy, ride up the Yukon River valley at about 1500′ above the river and 1000′ below the nearest mountain peaks. That’s one thing that I love about Alaska flying. You can look down, sideways, or up and see interesting sights.
Eagle has some historic military buildings from its days as Fort Egbert and a bunch of mushroom pickers working in town temporarily. They walk through the woods and/or bogs all day collecting Morel mushrooms and sell them for $500 or more in the evening to a local businessman who dries them and ships them out. Some of these folks are very strange characters indeed, with craggy features from living hard in the wilderness for many decades.
I left Eagle at around 12:30 for a flight to Anchorage. This would have been an easy flight in a Piper Malibu with its ability to climb above the 15,000′ clouds and, at 24,000′, pick its way around any high cumulus buildups. In an unturbocharged unpressurized plane, however, this required following the highways through passes underneath the clouds. The Cirrus can’t handle ice and the freezing level was around 8000′ so ice would have been a distinct possiblity at the 10,000’+ minimum enroute altitudes on the instrument routes. Also thunderstorms were forecast and you wouldn’t want to blunder into one while flying blind. So you’re in a mountain pass, which fortunately tend to be wide in Alaska due to having been carved by glaciers rather than rivers, and there are mountains on either side, scattered clouds below and next to you in some places, rain showers reducing your forward visibility to 5-10 miles, and an overcast layer right at the tops of the nearest peaks. For the flatland pilot this is terrifying. I put the flaps in and pulled the power back so that I was going slow enough to evaluate every next step and so that my turning radius would be reduced if I decided to go back. One thing that was odd about this flight is that the views to the southern coastal mountains were sunny and clear, revealing beautiful icefields and glaciers. It always seems like the only bad weather in a region is right where one is intending to flying. Unfortunately in Alaska it is tough to get complete information. The Flight Service folks have Webcams in many of the most important passes and can tell you whether they appear open but most of the state’s weather is not measured by ground stations or RADAR. If you go off an established route you are truly on your own.
Coming out of the mountains into the “Anchorage Bowl” was like returning to civilization. RADAR, approach control, control towers, etc. All the comforting bureaucracy to which a New England pilot becomes accustomed. I landed at Merrill Field, which is smack in the middle of downtown Anchorage, and taxied over to the Ace Hangars. This little cooperative has self-serve gas pumps ($3.35/gallon for members), a pilot’s lounge with high-speed Internet, and motel rooms for rent above the hangars. You can stay right next to your airplane! The guys at Ace gave us a lift to my friend’s house by the water where Alex was reunited with his Husky/Border Collie friend Bobbie.
Thus ends our little trip from Boston to Anchorage via Yellowknife and Kugluktuk. We left on Wednesday morning and arrived a week later on Sunday afternoon, making it an 11-day trip with about 35 hours of flying for a total of maybe 4000 nautical miles. The Cirrus is holding up quite well except for one distressing incident an hour from Yellowknife in which the entire Avidyne Primary Flight Display “red-screened” for 15 seconds but then came back to life. Once again the latest in software technology proves to be less reliable than what mechanical engineers designed 50 years ago.
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