Off On An Alaskan Adventure

As the season finished at Lazy Bear in Churchill, we packed up all our well worn clothes and assorted compulsary selection of Beluga memorabilia and jumped into our trusty Plymouth Voyager and hit the open road once more.

We have both always been drawn by the allure of Alaska, the wide open skys, towering glaciers and prolific wildlife is displayed tantalisingly on documentaries every year. It seemed a perfect time to see it for ourselves, I mean being so close and all - only 5 provinces and at least 4000km to the border. We needed to get there fast as well, the salmon spawn in the rivers throughout August and begin to slow down substantially at the start of September. The grizzly bears that the slamon attract will also start to leave the rivers where they can be most easily viewed catching and eating the fish. We desperately want to see the beautiful wild grizzilies in their natural habitat so Brad put the pedal to the metal and we scorched off across Manitoba.

I love watching the landscape changing around us, the huge golden plains of the prairies giving way to rolling hills and farms in Saskatoon and Alberta, more and more trees springing up through BC until we were whizzing through atmospheric miles and miles of Boreal forest. Ordinarily we would have been travelling slowly jumping out at every opportunity to climb hills and track down moose, meander through museums and soak up the culture, but we were on a time schedule, so we stayed strapped in and went on by each tempting detour. Apart from the odd crazy giant beaver or giant easter egg.

Breaking through into the Yukon was fabulous, having grown up on Robert Services poetry and the gritty unforgiving country and people his rhythms envoked. I had always been absorbed by the tales of the goldrush, the things men were willing to do to get hold of coloured dust - how fast they then spent the money they had risked their lives to obtain. A crazy world of money, women, gambling and hardship.

From Whitehorse this world came to life - seeing the S.S Klondike, the steam ship that ferried the thousands of gold hungry prospectors up the river to Dawson City, along with the supplies to sustain them and the making of the boom town that sprang up around them. They have renovated the paddle-steamer and it now sits high and dry next to the river with a flow of tourists rather than miners walking the gangplank.

Dawson City itself is a quirky little place - I liked it a lot, it has retained enough of the genuine buildings, leaning over from the pushy effects of the permafrost to compensate for the slightly less genuine 'Olde Writing' and simulated fronted buildings. The season was tailing off so we were lucky to be there without what I imagine are usually hoards of happy tourists , soaking up the atmosphere, panning for gold and generally having a grande olde time. We merrily joined in and went along to what is billed as the yukon's number one attratction - 'Diamond Toothed Gerties Casino', where you are encouraged to part with all your money as you watch some remarkbly limber dancers shake their ruffled skirts and flash their garters - all rather jolly fun. We left only $3 short from the sneeky money eating machines, but when $3 is a big chunk of our daily food budget, I still resented it, I really am very Scottish.

Another money saving ploy was to camp our way North, only resorting to a cheap motel when we began to smell really bad. This plan had relied; rather optimistically I admit; on the nights being above zero, so we did not become sleeping bag popsicles. The Yukon was not playing fair and our hours of sleep were decreasing every night as we shook and shivered under our three blankets, sleeping bags and new zealand polypros. Ahh well, no one said that budget travel was going to be easy.