I didn’t even know I had a bucket list, let alone that painting above the Arctic Circle was on it. But as I crossed the Yukon River, I realized that no amount of bad road was going to stop me from seizing this opportunity. My daughter asked me whether the Dalton Highway or the one-lane roads in the Hebrides were more terrifying to drive. It’s a draw.
Northerners know that 25° F and damp feels colder than below 0° F and dry. It hovered in the freezing range all day, with bands of snow. It was beautiful, but not that comfortable.
We followed the Alaska Pipeline north from Fairbanks into the Arctic. It snakes from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, and it’s a beautiful companion. It appears to be meticulously maintained; not only the pipe itself but the property surrounding it.
As we approached the Arctic Circle, it got snowier and more desolate. The birch forests dwindled, leaving stunted black spruce forests and low shrubs on the higher elevations. The deep red of blueberry bushes covered the slopes.
A Mercedes people-mover played tag with us. That’s a top-heavy vehicle and it worried me to see it slip-sliding in the deep mud at reckless speeds. We stopped at the Arctic Circle for the requisite photo op; it followed us in.
We waited patiently while its Chinese tourists took every possible photo—the sign with each person, the sign with a hand puppet, calisthenics in front of the sign. A woman posed for a photo with our mud-spattered Maine license plate as a prop.
We didn’t get much farther north; I’d promised my husband we’d call once a day and there was no cell reception that far north. After making a cup of hot coffee on our cook stove, we headed back south, intending to camp near Manley Hot Springs. The visibility was poor, so we stopped where we were for the night, in a roadside lay-by. Everything in our truck was frozen when we woke up.
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In 2016, my daughter Mary and I set off across Alaska and Canada on a Great White North Adventure, which you can read about starting here. We arrived in Anchorage at the beginning of September and got home in mid-October. In between, we visited every province but PEI (been there, done that), and Yukon Territory. In retrospect, it might have made more sense to do this during the summer, since Alaska and Canada threw a mess of strange weather at us.
