Nature is breathtaking and overwhelming in the Yukon
The Yukon is an unbelievably beautiful and wild landscape - one of the last largely untouched wilderness areas in North America.
It’s so big, it makes you feel small. Stand on high ground off the Dempster Highway – the two-lane Arctic-bound passage over tundra nicknamed the Goat Trail – and look over a wild True North landscape that likely doesn’t include another human as far as the eye can see.
Caribou far outnumber people in this Idaho-shaped Canadian Territory, which shares its western border with Alaska. Moose outnumber people, too, by about two to one. Only 43,000 people call the Yukon home, and three out of four Yukon residents live in the territorial capital of Whitehorse.
Dawson City, the site of the gold discovery that ignited the Klondike Gold Rush in the 1890s is Yukon’s second largest settlement – and it has a population of only 1,300 people. The mystique is accentuated by the echoes of the Klondike Gold Rush.
Dawson City still has the ambience of the Gold Rush Days. At the end of town, cancan dancers perform on stage at Diamond Gertie’s while players buzz games of chance tables. View the city from a seat in the Eldorado Hotel’s Bonanza Dining Room, watching tourists pass by on plank walkways a step above the narrow dirt streets. Up and down the streets, storefronts sport colorful hand-painted period facades. By default and design, Dawson City looks for all the world like something straight out of the 1890s, which, of course, it is.
Looming above Dawson City is Midnight Dome, a must-visit mountain sentinel that offers a breathtaking view of the wild sprawling Yukon River Valley against a backdrop of the remote Ogilvie Mountains. Visit on the longest day of the year when a crowd gathers on the Dome to celebrate the solstice, culminating with a look at the Midnight Sun.
Vehicles can choose among several ways out of Dawson City, all of them scenic and natural. To the north, the Dempster Highway slashes a nearly 500-mile adventure road to the Arctic Circle and beyond to Inuvik in the Northwest Territories.
It’s a wonderfully beautifully desolate landscape – sanctuary for grizzlies, caribou and more – with only a small halfway-point enclave at Eagle Plains just south of the Arctic Circle for fuel, food, and limited lodging. If you’re feeling daring or aren’t bothered by driving a route that reduces some drivers to tears and paralyzing fears, cross the Yukon River and head west on the Top of the World Highway to Alaska’s Taylor Highway, then swing south and east to Whitehorse.
It’s a very different, sometimes quirky life in the Yukon, seemingly on the edge of civilization.
Take for example the Sourdough Saloon in Dawson’s Downtown Hotel. The Sourdough is famous for its swinging doors and turn-of the-19th century décor. There, visitors will find good atmosphere and drink, and a little thing known as the Sourtoe Cocktail. The Sourtoe isn’t normal. It’s famous precisely because it’s not normal – the kind of thing that can only happen at the edge of the earth. It’s served with a human toe lost to frostbite.
Follow the simple, straightforward rules and you’ll become a member of the Sourtoe Club. “You can drink it fast; you can drink it slow – but the lips have gotta touch the toe.”
And so it is in the Yukon, where humans take a back seat to nature. Nature is everywhere, overwhelming, breathtaking. People cluster in enclaves where nature often makes raids. It’s part of the magic long cherished by writers including Jack London and the Bard of the Yukon, Robert Service.
Consider these words by Robert Service excerpted from “The Spell of the Yukon.”
“There’s gold and it’s haunting and haunting;
It’s luring me as of old;
Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting so much as just finding the gold.
It’s the great, big, broad land way up yonder;
It’s the forest where silence has lease;
It’s the beauty that fills me with wonder;
It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.”
If you hope to visit, make sure to have a plan. Get started by visiting TravelYukon.com. Remember to stay abreast of current COVID regulations and restrictions.
The distant Ogilvie Mountains as seen from an overlook along the Dempster Highway, which head northward over permafrost to the Arctic Circle and beyond to Inuvik in Canada’s Northwest Territories. (Photo by Art Weber)