The Dempster, The Arctic Circle, Inuvik

Greetings from north of the Arctic Circle, where its sunny and 80 degrees!

No, I'm not kidding.

We're checked into our cabin in Inuvik, and looking forward to a couple of days without driving. The cabin is really nice, with a full kitchen and even a grill – and it was one of the cheapest places to stay in Inuvik. Win! (A special shout out to my parents who are helping out with the budget. Thank you guys!)

When you first start on the Dempster, there's a very large sign that says “NO EMERGENCY MEDICAL SERVICES FOR THE NEXT 460 KM.” Just so you know that you're getting into something serious. (When the Dempster crosses the Yukon/NWT border you get emergency services again.

The Dempster turned out to be much less scary than I was concerned about. We got a couple of nice dings in the windshield from semis driving past us too fast, and the car is really dirty, but otherwise it escaped any severe damage. There are parts of the road that are so smooth and great that you wouldn't think it was gravel; there are other parts where you're going 30kph (yes, we've switched over completely to metric while in Canada – that's about 17mph). We drove about 7 hours on the first day and about 5 hours today.

The Dempster is mind-blowing. There is SO MUCH LAND up here, and so few people... its absolutely crazy. We've seen lots of different birds (which I will figure out the names of when I've got faster internet), many ground squirrels, an arctic hare in its summer phase, innumerable mosquitoes, and what looked like the torn remnants of a caribou. Sadly we haven't seen any real live musk ox, caribou, or grizzly bears. Well, maybe we're not so torn up about the last... The views have been so wonderful tho. There were places where you could see for hundreds of miles. And we've had the best weather... no more rain!

We got to the the Arctic Circle near the end of the day yesterday. It is a little surreal being where the sun literally never sets. Our camp last night was in a very nice but crazy buggy campground called Rock River. The site was right next to the river – I touched the water, and it was beautifully clear, and COLD.

So the next two days we're just going to be tramping around Inuvik, checking out the local scene, maybe doing some hiking, hopefully not getting eaten by polar bears.