Whitehorse to Dawson City is 533 km on the Klondike Highway, and for most of it the road has the Yukon River somewhere on its left, sometimes in view, sometimes a rumour behind the spruce. Allow six hours with stops, more if the pull-off at Five Finger Rapids or the bakery at Carmacks detains you. By the time the highway drops off the last ridge into Dawson, with the Klondike River joining the Yukon below and the scarred hillside of the Midnight Dome above, the sense of having arrived at the end of something is very strong. It is not the end. The Dempster Highway begins 40 km back down the road, and it goes another 736 km north.
We think of this as a single trip: the gold rush town, the gravel highway and the mountain park at its start. Together they can be done from Whitehorse in five or six days.
Dawson City
The Klondike gold rush of 1896 to 1899 built Dawson from nothing to a city of some 30,000 people in two years, then emptied it almost as fast when the easy gold was gone. Roughly 1,500 people live here now, on the traditional territory of the Tr’ondek Hwech’in, and the town has kept its dirt streets, boardwalks and false-front buildings, many of them restored and interpreted as a national historic site. The effect is not a theme park: buildings lean because the permafrost beneath them shifts, and the mud is real.
Out along Bonanza Creek Road, about 15 km from town, the discovery claim where the rush began is marked, and the enormous wooden hull of Dredge No. 4, which chewed through the valley floor until 1959, sits where it stopped. Back in town, a free ferry crosses the Yukon River to the campground on the west bank and to the Top of the World Highway, which runs to the Alaska border. The road up the Midnight Dome, 887 m above sea level, is the place to be at midnight in June, when the sun slides along the northern horizon and the whole valley stays lit in gold.
The midnight sun
Dawson is at 64 degrees north, roughly 270 km south of the Arctic Circle, so the sun does technically set around the solstice, at about half past midnight, and rise again before four. In between, it never gets darker than twilight. From late May to late July there is no real night at all, and the town’s rhythm adjusts: people garden at 11 p.m., children are on bicycles at midnight, and curtains are the most important feature of any accommodation. Drive the Dempster to the Arctic Circle around June 21 and the sun does not set at all.
Tombstone Territorial Park
The Dempster starts at kilometre 0 on the Klondike Highway and climbs almost immediately into the Ogilvie Mountains. At kilometre 71 the Tombstone interpretive centre and campground sit in a broad valley of tundra and dwarf birch, ringed by dark, jagged peaks of syenite that look like nothing else in the Yukon. Tombstone Mountain itself, 2,192 m and shaped like its name, stands at the head of the North Klondike valley, visible from a roadside viewpoint a few kilometres further on. The park covers about 2,200 square kilometres and protects the calving and wintering grounds of caribou, as well as Dall sheep, grizzlies, moose and, on the ponds, nesting waterfowl.
The campground has 36 sites and no hookups, and it is often full by early afternoon in July and August. The Goldensides trail, about 4 km return from a trailhead just north of the centre, climbs to a shoulder with a view down the whole valley and is the best short walk on the highway. The backcountry route to Grizzly Lake, 11 km one way with a long climb, leads to designated campsites at Grizzly, Divide and Talus lakes that must be reserved through the territorial park system months ahead; the walk between them is one of the finest alpine routes in northern Canada and one of the hardest to book.
The Dempster to the Arctic Circle and beyond
The highway is gravel for its entire length, built on a raised pad of crushed rock to insulate the permafrost beneath. It is well graded in summer but hard on tires, and there are no services between the junction near Dawson and Eagle Plains at kilometre 369, which has fuel, a garage and a place to sleep. Two full-size spares, a jerry can and a windshield that has already been chipped are the standard equipment. The Arctic Circle is at kilometre 405, marked by a sign and a pullout; the drive from Dawson takes six to eight hours with a stop at Tombstone.
Beyond the circle the road crosses into the Northwest Territories over the Richardson Mountains, crosses the Peel and Mackenzie rivers by free cable ferry in summer and ice bridge in winter, and reaches Inuvik at kilometre 736. Since 2017 an all-season road continues another 138 km to Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic Ocean. The full run from Dawson to the ocean and back is roughly 1,800 km of gravel; most people give it four or five days.
Fall on the tundra
The Dempster’s most beautiful weeks are its shortest. From the third week of August into early September, the dwarf birch and bearberry on the tundra turn scarlet, the willows go yellow and the higher slopes take on a rust that runs right up to the first snow on the summits. Tombstone in late August is astonishing, and the bugs, which are serious in July, are mostly gone. The trade is that nights are already below freezing, the campground closes in mid-September and the light is shortening fast. We would take the first week of September over any week in July.
Distances and planning from Whitehorse
- Whitehorse to Dawson City: 533 km, about 6 hours.
- Dawson to the Dempster junction: 40 km; junction to Tombstone campground: 71 km.
- Dawson to the Arctic Circle: about 445 km one way, 6 to 8 hours on gravel.
- Dawson to Inuvik: 776 km including the junction; to Tuktoyaktuk, 914 km.
- Fuel: Whitehorse, Carmacks, Pelly Crossing, Stewart Crossing, Dawson, Eagle Plains, Fort McPherson, Inuvik.
- Season: the highway is open all year, but Tombstone’s centre and campground and Dawson’s historic sites operate from late May to mid-September.
The Yukon has a way of recalibrating a traveller’s sense of distance. Five hundred kilometres becomes a morning; a town of 1,500 becomes a metropolis; a gravel road becomes the most important thing in your life for a week. Go north on the Dempster with time to spare and a spare to spare, and it will give you the tundra, the circle and the sun that refuses to set.