Princess Street, Dawson Creek

At Dawson City, we’d met a man walking across Canada. Dana Meise is a forester from British Columbia. He became the first hiker to walk to all three of Canada’s oceans. He started in Cape Spear, Newfoundland and ended at Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories. It took him from 2008 to 2018.

My daughter Mary says it doesn’t count because he did it in small increments over time. “You’ve hiked much farther than that over the same period of time,” she said. (My current rate is about 1500 miles a year.)

I think she’s wrong, because none of my hiking was in Yukon Territory, although, come to think of it, Maine in February isn’t that pleasant, either.

Dana was stalled in Dawson City because his tent fly had been damaged and needed to be replaced; then he was heading north up the Dempster Highway to the Arctic. That last 800 miles was the end of his nine-year sojourn. Having just left the Arctic Circle ourselves, we knew it was snowing. “Oh, that doesn’t bother me,” he said. “I’m a forester; I’m prepared.”

Well, he wasn’t wrong: he survived.

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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.