Demster Hwy, the devils road

I’m jumping forward to our ride to Inuvik over the Dempster Hwy…..

Doug and I had been to Dawson City, YT a week earlier (than now). We had nearly been rained out, but the morning we were set to take our dual sport bikes the nearly 350 miles north to the Arctic Circle and a 150 miles beyond to Inuvik, we were stopped by ferries that were out of commission. You see there are two river up there, the Peel and the Mackenzie, that must be crossed by ferry.

About early June the ice has melted and the rivers have slowed enough that a ferry can operate on them. And of course, when the rivers are frozen thick enough you have an ice bridge. If the river rises due to rain and too much debris, it will shut the ferries down for a couple days or more.

Interesting is that the rivers up there all ice over in the winter, but the peculiar thing is that the ice clears in an instant. The ice breaks up on each river at a different time, but when it happens, it resembles the rear window of a car in a hot sun. The locals even bet on when it will happen, right down to the minute. It’s kind of a Yukon lottery.

As we were driving toward Fairbanks after having toured Hatchers Pass, We found ourselves on the Denali Hwy (from Cantwell headed south) feeling sorry for ourselves because we failed at the Inuvik attempt a week earlier by those ferries being shut down by high water. We found ourselves grousing about not getting to ride the Dempster Hwy. We noted that the weather was clearing up, so we called the girls at the Yukon Visitors Center when we got some cell signal, who said that the ferries were running again. So we decided to go back over the ‘Top of the World Hwy’ and make a run up the Dempster in the present good weather.

We got as far as Chicken, that night, which left only a couple hours into Dawson City. Once in Dawsom the next morning, we used the rest of the day to get our bikes packed for a couple days on the road.

I wanted to be able to spend a night on the road if we should have to. That meant sleeping bags, a tarp, tools, bug spray, and food. Oh, yes, and we would each need an extra two gallons of gas.

The logistics are that it is 232 miles to Eagle Plains from the turn off 23 miles south of Dawson City. With 2 gallons extra I have 300 miles of range. Doug had 280 miles of range with his NX250 with an extra 2 gallons. It should be easy to average 40 mph, or just about 5 hours to get to fuel at Eagle Plains.

Then the other side of Eagle plains is a similar distance, but with two ferries. So add another hr for the two ferries. We should make Inuvik by 7pm with an 7:30am start. A little longer if we dawdled.

Since we had that all figured out and planned for we went into Dawson for a walk about, and to see what was cooking. A bus tour had been in that day, as most days, so there were twenty or more tourist milling around. There were that many locals doing what not.

Doug and I settled down on a couple chairs on the boardwalk to see if we could learn anything.

We sat there and watched the world go by, and talked to the old timers. Ralph Nardling talked on and on about the gold History, and what he was going to do to revive gold mining, and J J Deberg told stories.

Apparently Dawson City had quite a past where ladies of the evening were concerned. There was one gal in particular who was named 'Liberty'. It became a local saying in those parts, that if something went up and down a lot of times, you would say that it went up and down more times than 'Liberty's drawers'.

J J (a 75 year old Firt Nation man) was a card. He even found time to work an attempted watch sale into the mix. Still, I liked the old guy, and respected him the more for it, I think.


Dawson City had 40000 folks living there in the second year after the gold strike. It was discovered in the fall of 1896, word got back to the states, and the rest of the world in 1897, and folks that were hungrey for a fortune made the trip up there during the winter of ’98, in order to be there when the weather was good the spring and summer of ’99.

That meant they traveled all winter, and winter up there sucks. Typically they would sail into Skagway and carry, somehow, their supplies about 100 miles to a lake on the other side of Whitehorse, where the Yukon River flowed out of on its way, 300 miles, to Dawson City.

There is a mtn pass outside of Skagway called the Chilkoot Pass
Where the mounties would wait. You had to have a ton of supplies with you or they wouldn’t let you go on to that lake. The last of this pass was about a 1000 ft tall, of steps chopped in ice at an incline of 45 degrees,. You had to carry that ton in multiple trips up that mountain. There were 20000 men in Skagway trying to get in that line 20 times carrying a 100 lbs up that 1000 ft.

When you finally somehow got to the Yukon River, you had to build a boat to float down the river with your ton of supplies which you'd carried a 100 mile from the pass…..and when you got to Dawson City you would find that all the claims were already taken by Alaskans and others that were much closer when they heard about the Klondike Strike.

Sometimes life is just the pits.

…….But enough of all this history crap. We stayed on the boardwalk till around 11pm. It was still light outside, and the temp was about 65 degrees. It had been sunny all day and we expected clear sailing in the morning. We called it a night and went to bed by 11:30pm.

The sun was long up by 6am when we got up. We strapped the stuff on the bikes, and had time to get some breakfast at the RV park café. There was a gas station 23 miles out of town where we would make the final turn onto the Dempster Hwy. It would open up at 7:30. We needed to top off there so we left a half hour early to make that 7:30 gas connection.

It was brisk at around 50 degrees, but it would warm up quickly once the sun got into its act. I was dressed with all my coats on already. Doug had his stuff on except for his rain gear. As we left Klondike Corners it was still brisk. The road was good. Everything was a go.

We rode for an hour or so before we took a break. The sun was still shining, but it wasn’t getting any warmer, I didn’t think. We pulled into a rest area overlooking the Tombstone Valley some 80 kms up the road, we had been running 60mph.

I was trying to run beside Doug. The philosophy being that that kept us out of each other’s dust, and both of us would likely notice the other one missing especially if the trailing guy had bike trouble. When you have a gas situation you don’t need the other guy running 20 mile before he notices that he has to come back and get you.

But that made Doug nervous as he was unsure of himself on gravelly roads. He told me to either go ahead or hang behind, but not to hang alongside of him. Oh well, whatever, so I was behind from then on which would be alright if nothing went wrong.  I tried to stay close to him until I took a piece of gravel to my lip.  I dropped back after that.

At a small construction delay we stopped and I noticed that Doug’s gas can had fallen off his rack and was leaking gas from a hole rubbed in the plastic contain by the tire. There is a rule that says, a fellow should get his auxiliary fuel inside his main tank as soon as he can, because there are way to many things that can go wrong with fuel in a gas can.

Luckily Doug had only lost a pint of gas, and we divided the rest of it between his and my tanks. We were lucky that we were stopped by that Construction stop…..and did I say that we still weren’t getting any warmer.

I was shrugging my shoulders for a better seal under my helmet, and clenching my legs to my gas tank. In fact, I needed to relax those muscles to get an ache to go away……and we noticed some darkening clouds in the distance. Hummmm, I wonder if we will be going that way. We put our rubber boots and gloves on just in case. Note how clean Doug's rain gear is.

It wasn’t more than another 15miles, and we were riding in rain. Not a hard rain, but the road was wet as hell. It wasn’t really slippery to my bike, but it made Doug all the more uneasy, and he slowed his pace to about 20 mph.

The wet made things even colder. At one point, we stopped and put the rest of the fuel in our tanks. We didn’t want to run out, and have to do it under stress later somewhere in a bad situation. That got us to Eagle Plains at about 2:30 pm. That was about 7 hours instead of 5.

We both were cold and miserable. It was sure nice to get into the warm gas station office just to pay the bill. Eagle Plains is a lodge/resort. There is a convenience store, a restaurant, and a motel. It seemed like an oasis to me. I could have stayed there for the next week.

Other drivers came in and said that it was snowing at the 4000 ft pass that lay ahead of us. We thought about that as we had a burger, and warmed up. We weren’t in any hurry to leave the comfort of the lodge.

A fellow on a 650cc BMW was there, who had left earlier than us that morning. His bike was parked down the way like he had gotten a room. We tried to look him up, but couldn’t get a rise out of him when we knocked on his door. The last thing he had said, yesterday, was that he might do the whole ride both ways if he felt good. My guess was that he didn’t feel 'that' good.

Doug was bent on continuing. I was going if he was going. We suited up and hit the road at about 4pm. The rain had stopped, but the road was sloppy. Mostly there was grit under the tires that provided traction. The waitress gal said that she heard that the next few miles was the only slippery part.

Apparently, they lose some trucks and campers off the side of the road a few times a year when its raining. We didn’t really see any slippery clay type mud….for a couple miles. One time when I looked up the road, Doug and his bike were lying down in the right hand track. I rode up in relative security, because I was in the left track. That was the whole difference as to whether it was Doug or me lying there in the mud. It was clay type of slippery in the right track and not the left track.

We pulled his bike up and straighten his gear shift a bit. There was no real damage as it had been a slow speed drop. That made Doug all the more cautious, as he should have been. He had mud everywhere. It was all over his gloves. He couldn’t wipe his faceshield. He couldn’t even hold onto the throttle very well.

The rain had started up again lightly, and we rose into a cloud as we climbed to that pass where it had been snowing. We stopped at the Arctic Circle for a couple of money shots. Note that Doug’s suit is a bit soiled.

After a bit of a warm up, we drove on. We drove into a cloud up at the pass, and the temperature dropped at least 5 more degrees. Doug couldn’t close his faceshield, because the fog/sprinkles couldn’t be wiped off with his muddy gloves. Doug spent at least 30 miles freezing his lips off. Before we got back down to lower altitudes.

At about 10pm we drove into Fort Mcpherson where we could gas up. Of course it was still very light outside, so that we didn’t know how tired we were. We hit the last river at about 11pm. The last ferry is at midnight. We were about 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle at 12pm, so we truly got to see the ‘midnight sun’. We both had gone a whole lifetime, until now, without that pleasure.

Inuvik was a little over 100 miles of good road from here. We had had sunshine in Dawson City when we left, and there was sunshine in Inuvik when we arrived. The only problem was the cold front and the two storm systems that we went through on the way. I had never gotten over the hunching of my shoulders or the clenching of my legs from the cold. My groins were aching, and my neck was stiff. Doug and I could hardly get our legs over the bike when necessary.

We had spent most of the day at sub 40degree temps, and me with electrics back in the van. I had reasoned that it would be so warm that electrics would just get in the way. What a dumbass.

We arrived at the hotel in Inuvik at 1pm Yukon time. It was 2pm Northwest Territory time. Hey, that was our first time for being in the NWT. The trip had taken us about 17 hours….and check out time of 11am was just 9 hrs away.

Oh, yeah, it was worth it, and the hotel room, at 134 dollars for the night, was worth it too…I think. I might have paid that $134 just for the hot shower.

If you want to compare the road to Prudhoe Bay to this road to Inuvik, I would say it all depends on the weather, but in the end the Dempster Hwy is more challenging.