I have weeks of stories to tell, so naturally I’m going to start backwards, skip all the good stuff, and start with today 😉
In the last 3 weeks I’ve been back to Ontario to visit family, and then to Utah for Automattic’s Grand Meetup.
I’m pretty sure I’ve never been on more flights in such a short time period. Look at the list!
- Dawson City -> Whitehorse
- Whitehorse -> Vancouver
- Vancouver -> Edmonton
- Edmonton -> Toronto
- Toronto -> Chicago
- Chicago -> Salt Lake City
- Salt Lake City -> Vancouver
- Vancouver -> Whitehorse
- Whitehorse -> Old Crow
- Old Crow -> Inuvik
- Inuvik -> Dawson City
Whew! Jeff had been warning me for days that he didn’t think my flight would make it into Dawson because the clouds have been so low in the morning. He was right!
All Dawson City passengers were paged this morning in Whitehorse to let us know there was a slim chance of us landing in Dawson. We had the option to risk it, knowing we may have to carry on to Old Crow and Inuvik before trying again, or we could spend another day and night in Whitehorse and wait to board tomorrow. We all boarded!
Dawson City’s airport is in a valley, surrounded by hills and mountains, so I really didn’t mind that much that the pilots would prefer to not attempt the landing blind 😉
Air North is the airline that services Dawson City. It is a nice little service airline, and possibly quite a bit different than what you’d be used to elsewhere. The planes are small and aged and you can select your own seat. The flight attendant serves snacks, and baking, and sandwiches, and beverages. I sampled most of them after spending a day touring with them today 🙂
The visibility was too low to land in Dawson, so we went on to Old Crow, Yukon, somewhere I was always curious about, but never thought I’d visit! It is the Yukon’s only fly-in community, north of the Arctic Circle.
We all got off the plane to wait in the terminal while they unloaded some cargo from the plane. Here are a few pictures of Old Crow from my phone:
Old Crow has a nice new little terminal building to wait in. And a 3G signal! The lakes were all frozen in the area, but the Porcupine River still has some flowing water. It looked frozen on the sides with big ice chunks floating in the center.
After Old Crow, we boarded again and headed to Inuvik, Northwest Territories. Inuvik is also north of the Arctic Circle. It is the north end of the Dempster Highway, that Jeff and I visited a year and a half ago on our vacation up here.
Unlike Old Crow, I couldn’t see the town of Inuvik from the airport. It was cold, and snowing, and the tarmac was super icy to walk across.
The airport is pretty big! Complete with a stuffed polar bear!
We all got off the plane for a bit while they unloaded more cargo and fueled it up. I found an adequate 3G signal along one wall of the airport so I could update the world with my latest coordinates 🙂
Before too long we were off again, with optimism that the ceiling would lift in Dawson so I could go home! The rivers weren’t as frozen here around Inuvik, but all the lakes were long frozen.
Close to Dawson City, I saw through the clouds! We were ‘a go’ for landing!
Home! I had been gone so long, it was starting to feel like just a dream that I lived in Dawson City. Jeff and I got to reunite for just 5 minutes because he had to get on the plane I got off of, to go to Whitehorse for a few days for work.