Farewell to the Yukon

Saturday, August 11, 2007

JUNCTION 37, YUKON — We are in a campground at the junction of the Alaska Highway and Highway 37, which heads south into British Columbia. It’s not a town or anything, just a crossroad with a gas station, store and RV park, but it’s a pretty spot with plenty of trees and nice, long pull-through sites. We haven’t even unhitched from the truck tonight — it makes for a faster getaway in the morning, and there’s no reason for us to drive anywhere this evening anyway.
As soon as we head down the highway tomorrow, we’ll be leaving the Yukon. We have been hovering around the 60th parallel most of today, from our start in Atlin, BC when we headed back out the same highway we drove in (it’s a dead end road) and entered the Yukon again, to two more spots where the highway dipped into BC and back to the Yukon.
It has been a fantastic visit to this territory, and the place has cast its spell on us. Poet Robert Service, who lived in Dawson and drank in the grandeur and unforgiving ruggedness of this part of the world, expressed it wonderfully in his poem The Spell of the Yukon.
"There’s a land where the mountains are nameless,/ And rivers all run God knows where, / There are lives that are erring and aimless,/ And deaths that just hang by a hair;/ There are hardships that nobody reckons;/ There are valleys unpeopled and still;/ There’s a land — oh, it beckons and beckons,/ And I want to go back — and I will...." Just reading this poem gives me goosebumps.
Today we saw dozens of nameless mountains, some rounded and tree-covered, others sharp, rocky and bare, and still others distant, hazy and flecked with snow. We passed rivers — the Teslin, the Nisutlin, the Morley — and dozens of streams and creeks, some a mere trickle and others tumbling torrents. There were rock cuts and gravel slopes, ponds edged with soft green rushes and tall pillars of pine trees, and splashes of colour from the fireweed that, in this area at least, are still blooming.
All the while, the sky was constantly changing, from the perfect, clear blue of the morning to one swept with wisps of cloud, and then later filled with towering fluffy thunderheads that eventually splattered us with rain once or twice. We pulled in to the campground as more rain threatened, and got set up just before it really came down. Now the sun is shining once again and the sky is as clear and blue as it was this morning!
One thing we are seeing again after a long absence is night-time darkness. It took us a while to get used to going to bed in broad daylight, or being able to read at 11 o’clock at night without aid of lamps, but now the sun goes down around 10 and doesn’t return until about 5 in the morning, so we actually get night at night once again.
When we left Ottawa in early June, we found as we traveled west that the spring weather was moving with us. We saw lilacs still in bloom near Lake Laberge in early July. In Seward, Alaska, we enjoyed their fresh scent still in mid-July, compared to Ottawa where they are pretty well spent by the end of May. Conversely, the fireweed was mostly finished north of Whitehorse as autumn began to show signs of arriving, but along the roads today they still had more buds at the top yet to bloom. I expect we will be appreciating their beauty for some miles to come as we head south to warmer climes. That’s all relative, of course — there haven’t been more than three or four days in our whole holiday when Val put on shorts instead of jeans because of the heat. But I imagine before long we’ll be experiencing some summery temperatures once again.