When you get to the Arctic Circle, it really feels like you’re way up far away. It’s a dramatic place along this road. And then it just gets more so. The ferryboats across the rivers are smallish, not like the ones around Seattle.

It’s a long drive. I needed gas. I started filling up at Eagle Plains, and then they told me that their internet was down, so they couldn’t take credit cards. “Will you take US dollars?” I asked. Turns out they did and gave a good exchange rate too. So I bought US 20 dollars of gas. It was about $8/gallon in Canada at the time. So I got about 2-1/2 gallons. That just barely got me into Ft McPherson. The gas stations there were closed till the next morning. When I filled up, I also filled up the 2 five gallon gas cans I had strapped to the top of the cab of the truck. But I never used the gas in those cans in Canada.

The road is made of dirt, well gravel really. And it would be really dusty, but they have built ponds or borrowing pits along the way. They get dirt and gravel from the pits to make and repair the road, and the pits fill in with water. Then the tank trucks show up, fill up on water, and they spray the roads day after day to keep the dust down. It’s pretty impressive how well it works out.

I hadn’t expected to enjoy the scenery so much, but I did. And then you come to the coastal plain that Tuk sits on the end of. And out the top, on a little peninsula sticking into the Arctic Ocean is where they put their tourist campers. Tuk is a native fishing village. Coming into town you see this big huge black metal structure that kind of looked like Darth Vader’s castle. Asking about it, they told me it’s an oil drilling platform that was abandoned years ago and embedded itself in the shore. Teenagers go there to explore it and get away from their folks.

All the hills in the area are giant frost heaves called Pingos. They have names. You can tell where you are by the arrangements of pingos in the area. That way you can kayak back home when you need to go there.

One thing I noticed about businesses in the hospitality industry of smaller communities in the Northwest Territories, Yukon, and even Alaska: they don’t have a lot of signage. You don’t know it’s a gas station unless you look closely and recognize that pump handle hanging off the side of a shed. That other pump handle on that building over there is the drinking water hose, so don’t get them confused. You don’t know that a building is a store or a restaurant. But everybody else does and it’s really obvious to them.

Anyway, there’s an unmarked building in Tuk where you can buy whale blubber snacks. According to my Garmin GPS, I was parked at its front door. But it looked like somebody’s house to me, and I didn’t want to disturb them. And while you might get me to chew on some seal blubber, I just don’t feel good about eating an animal that is probably smarter than me. Oh, who am I kidding? Probably MUCH smarter than me!

Camped next to us was some sort of Ranger. She’d flown up from Dawson, I guess. Grabbed a tent from the supply room. Got the wrong kind of tent. It was more of a screen room and a sleeping tent. But she made the most of it, and it really looked like a good idea to maximize those sea breezes.

Met some folks from the Netherlands and from Australia. The camaraderie of fellow travelers is pleasant, if shallow and transient. What really amazes me is how little we know of where we are. And yet we stick together, instead of sticking with the locals to learn how things go here. Of course, as a local, I really wouldn’t want tourists hanging out with me all the time. There has to be some kind of boundaries. And it was daylight around the clock here, so time was no longer measurable.

Driving back down the road, I went a little faster than I had on the way up. Oh, the credit card worked at Eagle Plains this time. Somewhere in about the middle of nowhere the tire pressure monitoring system told me, “Your back left tire is going flat.” Pulling over and taking a look, I found the tire to be treadless. All the tread had just worn off from driving on the gravelly road. Once I got the tire off I found one big piece of gravel poking thru the tire. I tried to remove the stone, but it was in there real good. It took a while to unpack the truck enough to get the spare out. Put it on without a hassle. The Dutch folks and the Australians both stopped to see if I needed any help. I told them “No” out of pride, and besides, they were already too late to keep me from getting covered with dust.

“Better keep an eye on the other tire’s pressure,” said Mary. “You don’t want to lose another tire.” Oh, sure, I thought, like we’re going to have TWO flats on this trip. Besides, what could I do about it? We only carried the one spare. And then the tire pressure monitoring system told me, “Dude, your back right tire is going flat now.” Not surprisingly, there was no tread on that tire either any more. And another rock was embedded. I tried jacking up the truck, but the side of the road was all made of dust. The jack kept slipping. Luckily, yet stupidly, my head had the opportunity to get all squished, and missed it by *that* much. Not a lot of vehicles are passing by. It’s early in the season for this road. I have some tire plugs that I have never successfully used before in my life. So I get the pliers and manage to work out the piece of gravel. I reamed out the hole OK with the reaming tool, but I just didn’t have the leverage to jam the plug in and pull the jamming tool back out. There wasn’t room in that part of the wheel well for me. So I backed up the truck about a foot or so, and there was room. The plug went in; the tool came out. I hooked up the air compressor and… the seal between the tire and where had broken when I rolled the truck back. The air is pumping into the tire and escaping from the unsealed rim. So at this point I’m hot and sweaty and kind of disgusted. I’d checked all the tires before we left Glacier and they all had brand new-looking tread, and now both of these tires are bald, but the front ones are fine. The back tires are only a year older than the front tires. This isn’t fair. Why me? Gurgle!! So for no good reason, I started kicking the tire, you know just to relieve my anger and sense of injustice. I kicked it maybe three times before my toes really started hurting, but on that third kick, somehow the seal caught back up. Air was going into the tire, and not coming out anywhere else. Even more unlikely, my plug was holding. So I finished airing up the tire, and we continued driving down the road, a little slower than I had been. I was driving at about the same speed now as I had been on the trip up. The Tombstone campground had room, so we stayed there. It was OK if you like camping among a bunch of people. But it had bathrooms, unlike the borrow pit pull-off we’d spent the previous night at. Didn’t have potable water, though! I took water from the Klondike River and zapped it with my ozoneator. Mmm-mmm good! Bzzzt!!!!

The next day, back in Dawson, I went to the tire store. I got 2 new Yokohamas, mounted and balanced, for less than I could get to el cheapos back in Oklahoma. They said the Yukon roads are hard on tires.

Then we caught the ferry over the Yukon River. Our first crossing of the Yukon so far, I think. We were supposed to be on some kind of skyline drive, where you feel really high up there, but smoke had been accumulating in the sky for the last couple of days. “Alaska and the Yukon are on fire!” they told me. Anyway, couldn’t see far enough to see down to be scared of the heights. That’s probably for the better….