Midway festival

Saturday, August 4, 2007

EAGLE PLAINS, YUKON — Once again we’re at the halfway point of the Dempster Highway, this time heading south. The Eagle Plains Lodge calls itself "an oasis in the wilderness", and it does resemble that, in that shelter, warmth, good food and fuel are all available here, where there is nothing north or south of it for hundreds of kilometres.
It’s also a crossroads for anyone traveling the Dempster. In the dining room we heard people with American accents, and on the benches out front there was a team of young cyclists conversing excitedly in Spanish, and out behind the building in the RV park we heard travelers speaking in German! We chatted with the young man at the reception desk and he said a couple of weeks ago he met a guest who was taking two years to travel from Inuvik to the southern tip of South America on his bicycle. Natasha, the young man’s girlfriend, was our server in the dining room, and she’s heading for Brazil for a year as part of her degree program in international affairs, and she also happens to be the great-granddaughter of L.H. Nicholson, former Commissioner of the RCMP!
Along the highway were other interesting people as well — that is, when we weren’t out on the tundra with a whole world of natural beauty surrounding us and no sign for miles of any human beings.
We were glad to find, when we got to the first ferry crossing at Fort McPherson, the same two employees who had spotted our oil leak on the way north. Val got out of the truck to tell them how we had fared, and presented each of them with a nice pocket knife we’d picked up for them in Inuvik as a thank you. One of them is from Yugoslavia, and the other from New Brunswick. The easterner had come 13 years ago to relieve the ferry staff for a month or two and decided to stay.
A little further along, we came to Midway Lake, where every August long weekend there is a music festival. Our timing was impeccable. We turned off to see what it was all about, and found a huge gathering of Aboriginal people who had made a tent city there for the weekend. They had cooking fires going, and we saw people preparing a communal meal and kids scampering about.
On the stage we could see drums and instruments, but there was no music being performed when we arrived. We stopped the truck to speak to the young RCMP constable standing by the road — he sure stuck out with his carrot-red hair and freckles! He had just transferred to Fort McPherson Detachment from Depot two weeks ago and was very pleased with his interesting assignment in a place so different from his home town of Victoria, BC.
A short distance further along the highway we could see some of the festival participants wandering through the tundra gathering berries — they had bags full of the orange-coloured fruit, so a bit further along we pulled over to see what this was growing by the roadside. The berries were quite ripe and fell softly off the plants like raspberries, and their taste was an interesting mixture of sweet and spicy. I think they may have been huckleberries, but I’ve never seen one, so I could be wrong! It was a whole new taste to us, though!
Val made good time today, driving with greater confidence — and therefore speed — knowing that our oil problem had been taken care of. Nevertheless, he did look closely under the truck on several occasions to make sure. So far, so good.
We arrived quite early at the lodge, so it was a leisurely afternoon. There are historic photographs on the walls all through the building, telling the story of the Lost Patrol and the pursuit of the Mad Trapper. One of them, in the dining room, is a photo of Inspector J.G. Fitzgerald’s handwritten will, leaving everything to his mother, which he wrote in desperation before he and his companions died of starvation and exposure, only a few miles from safety. There are also pictures of Dempster and other NWMP scenes of the early days. It’s fascinating to see these pictures of real events and places that are so close by.