Only a day's drive away...

Yesterday was one of those days where family members phone you up to wish you well and ask you how it feels to be aging. It always feels rather like the day before they phone when I was officially a year younger.

To celebrate this particular milestone and, in my view more importantly, a much needed holiday for The Man, we took advantage of a long weekend and went on a short road trip (by our standards at least). During this “short” trip, we managed to pass over the arctic circle twice and travel over 2000km by the time we arrived back home. The woman who checked our rental vehicle in thought she’d made an error while calculating our mileage. We reassured her that she hadn’t lost her math skills and yes, we’d enjoyed our drive.

The scenery was beautiful and it was wonderful to see such diversity of gorgeous country within a day’s drive of home. We ferried over three rivers, drove through tundra, taiga and forest (and did some berry picking –yum!) along a looooong gravel highway taking us through multiple mountain ranges until we finally stopped driving south and hit pavement and our turnabout point at Dawson City, YT. We toured through town and wandered through shops looking at the touristy gold rush kitsch and lovely log cabin homes back up the hill from the main streets. I particularly enjoyed watching the swirling blue eddies of the Klondike spinning by as they converged with and became the muddy waters of the fast flowing Yukon.

The Alaskan border beckoned and as we were so close, we decided to drive a further 120km or so to the border via the Top of the World Highway. There are a few white-knuckle, guard rail-absent turns beside precipitous drops along the way but as I wasn’t the one driving, I quite enjoyed it! We drove halfway before stopping to camp and got up early to complete the drive before other vehicles were likely to be on the road after the border opened. The sun was just peeking through the mountain tops and as it climbed higher, it illuminated the heavy grey clouds in changing shades of pink, orange and yellow. The light was soft, the air fresh and to our great pleasure, some of the local fauna put in an appearance.

Before descending back down to Dawson we had seen a family group of 3 grizzlies, between 15 and 20 caribou (including bulls, cows and a calf) and even a porcupine which waddled away and refused to turn around for a proper photo. The bears behaved and did us the favour of reappearing on our return route when we had cameras at the ready and our photos didn’t record blurry bear bums bouncing away in the distance as at our first encounter.

By the end of our trip a cow moose, a fox, mink, shrew, multiple rabbits, as well as ground and red squirrels had also been checked off our list. Many of the birds we saw flitted away before we could get a look at them but among the many Canada jays, herring gulls, ravens and grouse we also saw a red crossbill, and saw and heard ptarmigan (what fantastically weird calls they have!). To top off our bird sightings was a group of sandhill cranes foraging along the banks of the Peel River. Although unlikely, it was a bit thrilling to think that we might have seen these very birds flying over our home in Saskatchewan before all of us migrated north.

And no, we didn’t actually cross the border to Alaska as we didn’t want to wait the hour before it opened. The Man hopped across the barricade for a photo while I wondered when the guards would come out to shoo him back over.