Whitehorse to Fort Providence Part
After hitchhiking from Peace River to Whitehorse, Cindy and I were looking forward to a quiet week at my friend, Jessie’s, before continuing to Yellowknife.
We spent the first 3 days helping her chink her cabin. It was an abandoned, hand-hewed log cabin that she planned to spend the winter in. The squirrels had pulled out a lot of the original chinking, so we re-stuffed all the spaces between the logs with fresh moss. You could buy artificial chinking, in 1985, but Jessie wanted to play pioneer, so we played along. We gathered moss from the forest, mixing it with water and dirt and shoving it in between the logs. Jessie made bannock and oatmeal cookies on the woodstove and that kept us working for many hours.
On Thursday, we ran into my friend, Rick, from Norman Wells. He was on his way to Dawson City and invited us to come. Cindy and I grabbed our tent and packs and headed for the Klondike! The campground at Dawson City was full, so we ended up camping in the bush beside the dump. We checked out all the bars, watched the can-can dancers at Diamond Tooth Gerties, and danced with locals at the Pit. It was a fun, unexpected side trip.
Rick drove us back to Whitehorse and a few days later we set out for Yellowknife. We were in front of the Airline Inn, with our thumbs in the air, when a guy stopped and offered us a ride as far as Watson Lake.
“I’ll fly you there,” he said.
We threw our backpacks in the back of his small truck and jumped in, hoping he wouldn’t speed too fast. About 500 metres down the Alaska Highway, he turned left towards the airport. Cindy and I looked at each other in puzzlement. When he pulled up to a little Cessna, we couldn’t believe our luck! Not only did we get to ride in a small plane, but we got to Watson in just over an hour!
As unbelievably good the start of this adventure was, the ending was even harder to imagine.
Over breakfast, in Watson Lake, we asked two truckers for a lift and they took us all the way down the Alaska Highway to Mile Zero in Dawson Creek, B.C. It was Cindy’s first ride in a big rig with a sleeper. It was a new one, with all the bells and whistles, including 2 bunks, a fridge and a TV! The truckers took turns sleeping so Cindy and I did as well, taking turns talking to the driver and helping him watch out for wildlife on the road. I love riding in big trucks. You are so high up and can see way farther than in a car. They were continuing on down south but we had to head back up north on the Mackenzie Highway to Yellowknife.
It is 1880 km from Whitehorse to Yellowknife if you drive down to Fort Nelson and then up to Yellowknife. But our truckers convinced us that we would have a better chance of connecting with other truckers if we went all the way to Dawson Creek before heading back up. This added 727 km to our trip, but it worked. Our truckers had a ride lined up for us, before we even got there. The new person drove us all the way to Hay River.
This trucker only had a small bunk in the back but since he drove the whole way, Cindy and I still got to take turns sleeping and keeping him awake. We got to Hay River early enough to catch Cindy’s friends, Doug and Judy before they left for work. Their place was easy enough to find as they lived in the only high-rise in town!
We hung out there for a few days and didn’t get back on the road until Sunday at 3pm.
Since it only takes five hours to drive from Hay River to Yellowknife, we thought we had lots of time. Doug drove us the half hour to Enterprise, to get us back on the Mackenzie Highway. We stood there for three hours, with barely a car going by. Finally, an elderly couple from Fort Providence picked us up and dropped us at the Big River truck stop, just after the ferry crossing over the Mackenzie River.
We only had 300 km left to get to Yellowknife but had no idea how perilous it would be.
To be continued…
