Part Two: The Long Way Home.

Click here for Part One: Yukon, ho!

Click here to just see the gallery images from the trip.

Day 7 – Tuk to Inuvik (152km)
The weather did take a turn back for the worse overnight. The winds howled and the temperature dropped to around 3 degrees Celsius. But just after sunset, the weather was calm and I had the point to myself. I wandered around in the perpetual blue hour of the barely set midnight set, grinning like an idiot, snapping pics, and soaking it all in; exhausted but too excited to turn in. The worsening weather seemed to be preceded by a shelf cloud with Kelvin Helmholtz features, something I’d never seen before in all my years of stormchasing.

I was nestled in the back of the Jeep having realized earlier in the evening that sleeping in the rooftop tent was a no go due to the intense winds. I wiped the condensation from the windows to see my neighbours starting their day under the overcast skies. A few camps down was a couple in another rooftop tent. I asked how their night was and, as expected, they said they got little sleep due to the winds whipping around the tent. I spent the morning chatting with my new friends, Jason and Andrea and, as it turns out, they were planning to take a dip in the ocean before they got on the road. This was something I had also hoped to do before leaving Tuk so I asked if I could join them. Safety in numbers and all that. Before we knew it we were all standing in our swim suits on the shore of the ocean as 50kph winds blew against our skin, making it seem far colder than the balmy 5C temperature.

We each took our turns filming the other as we very quickly dunked ourselves in the frigid water! It was an exhilarating experience that I’m glad I partook in during my time there.

Click for video –> IMG_4578

After drying off, getting into some warm clothes and cranking the heat in the Jeep, I began to make preparations to leave Tuk. But there was something keeping me from leaving at that moment. I just felt I wasn’t ready to go, having made such a long journey to get there. So I drove back to the end of the road and wandered around the point as blue sky broke through the clouds. I made some peanut butter buns and chatted with a motorcyclist who had waved me over. His name was Pedro. He was from Mexico and riding all across the Americas and was joined by a few other solo travellers who had all arrived around the same time as I did the night before. I was introduced to AnneJulie and her sweet-as-pie pitty, Luna, who, as it turns out, was the other person watching the eagle at the graveyard the night before, and Heather who had helped Pedro and his road buddy, Rudy, out with an extra tent after Pedro’s had fallen off his bike earlier in their trip. We all went to Grandma’s Kitchen for lunch where I was surprised to learn that she had a secret veggie burger not listed on the menu. We all sat around the table for a couple of hours, chatting about our journeys; total strangers yet friends for that one moment. Grateful for the company, I realized it’s these encounters that make solo travelling so rewarding.

(Continued after photos. Click on each to view in full)

After lunch we all departed, hoping to reconnect somewhere else down the road.

I made my way back to Inuvik where I met up with Kevin Xu, another new photographer friend who I was introduced to through Jonathan Gillingham (check out their work at the posted links). Before I left Edmonton, Kevin was kind enough to sit down with me over Zoom to help me plot out my entire route, pointing out potential pitfalls and wildlife hotspots along the way. I was grateful for the kindness Kevin had shown me and was keen to meet up with him in person. But first things first…I needed to get a hotel room for the night because I had to charge up some gear, get some work done and I desperately needed a long, hot shower – my first of the entire trip!

Kevin picked me up, showed me around town and took me to the arena where I was able to get a very satisfying cheese pizza. After a great visit with Kevin, I retired to my room and ate my pizza on the bed while catching up on the newest episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Ah, modern conveniences.

Day 8 – Inuvik to Arctic Circle (329km)
After eight days on the road, a comfy night in a hotel and TWO exceptionally good showers, I was ready to take it easier on the road for the next while. Today would be a “short”, 330km, 5.5 hour drive back south to the Arctic Circle area that I enjoyed so much on the way up. I was a bit slower to start in the morning, having to reset the Jeep after the chaos of Jeep sleeping in Tuk. I hit the road around noon and just outside Inuvik, ran into Marc and Christine, who I had met earlier in the trip. I had a good catch up with Marc and got back on the road and although the distance was shorter, it was actually pretty hairy due to the intense precipitation the area had received over the past several days. I white-knuckled the greasy road for the next few hours until I made my destination, encountering yet more low lying cloud and rain at the NWT border. The Jeep was filthy but I rested a while, made some dinner, photographed some cool bugs and flew the drone for a bit before venturing out for what would be my best wildlife encounter on the trip thus far…the tundra grizzly!

During my visit with Kevin the day before he suggested I go for an evening drive near the Arctic Circle to look for grizzlies. So around 730pm I left camp and drove back north through the incredible landscape, peepers peeled for any sign of movement. By 9 I had had no luck and decided to turn back in the hope of seeing something before dark. And sure enough, just a few kms after turning around, I spotted something far off in the distance; a speck on the edge of a ridge well over a km away. I pulled out the 180-600mm, zoomed all the way in and my suspicions were confirmed, there was a beautiful grizzly making its way across the tundra. I watched through the 800mm as it got closer and closer over the next 30 minutes and soon it was close enough to swap back and photograph it at 300mm. The light was fading fast. There was a gorgeous sunset in the opposite direction and I took turns between it and the bear. And then, in the ambient, post-sunset glow the bear looked at me and posed for an incredible set of portraits in the colourful autumn tundra.

I returned to camp and turned in, thrilled with this encounter; one that more than made up for the previous week of little to no wildlife activity.

Day 9 – Arctic Circle to Tombstone Territorial Park (334km)
I awoke to a beautiful bluebird morning, something rare on this trip which seemed plagued by rain and miserable weather. I laid around in the tent far longer than I should have, enjoying the warmth of the sun, the cool breeze blowing through the screens and the incredible view outside my window. I needed a lazy morning like this and it was the precursor to a few more lazy days ahead. I was headed back to the Tombstones for some relaxing photography and it would be another “easy” day on the road where my distance was nearly identical to the previous day’s mileage: 330km over 5.5 hours. But bear in mind that this is not a relaxing 5.5 hours. It’s still the Dempster and after 5.5 hours, you’re checking to see if you still have all your fillings.

During one of my rest stops a guy in his 60s pulled up on his pedal bike asking if I could spare some water to fill his water bottles. Without hesitation I said yes and he filled and downed three bottles worth of hydration as we talked. His name was Dean and he had come up from San Jose to ride from Tuk to Dawson City. I felt pretty hardcore for driving the Dempster and the ITH but man, doing those 925km on a bike, in all kinds of gnarly weather and road conditions, takes a special kind of intestinal fortitude. I would have loved to sit down with Dean after he’d finished to have a longer chat about it.

Just outside the Tombstones I found a little pullout, made some lunch and checked in with loved ones back home via Starlink. I spent a little time here doing some impromptu macro photography of a longhorn beetle and some wispy flowers and was keen to get back into the park to keep those creative juices flowing.

Here’s the thing about the Tombstones…virtually all of the photos you see of it are from the Grizzly/Divide/Talus Lakes hike which is a 20km+, backcountry hike, which I definitely wasn’t doing. So over the next couple of days I made a point to try to take some really compelling photos of the easily accessible parts of the park that don’t seem to be photographed often and came away with some keepers I’m pretty happy with.

Day 10 – Tombstone Territorial Park
The next day was fairly uneventful as I spent time sleeping in, napping and doing some photography. I ran into Pedro, Heather and Rudy again and had a quick visit before they got back on the road. I met a dog named Winslow, Arizona at the visitor centre and ventured up and down the park road looking for wildlife, only finding some swans and shorebirds at Two Moose Lake, all while being mindful of my fuel consumption as I still needed enough make the trip back down to Klondike Corner the next day. I photographed the sunset and turned in around 1030pm, keen to get back on the road the following morning.

Day 11 – Tombstones to Swift River (858km)
Today was the day I said goodbye to the Dempster! 2070 teeth rattling, bone jarring, life changing kilometers over 6 days finally wrapped up when I hit the tarmac back at Klondike Corner around 10am. The Jeep was absolutely filthy and both it and I were running on fumes. I gassed up but had little time to waste as I was keen to head south and start the last leg of my journey, although I still wasn’t entirely sure what that leg was going to look like. My options included staying in Whitehorse, checking out Kluane National Park, venturing to Carcross or a multi-day combination of all three.

I figured I’d decide how I felt when I got to Whitehorse. I made it there in decent time and after getting groceries and oil, eating a delicious veggie bowl at the Big Bear Eatery (which was amazing after a week and a half of boil in bag meals) and washing El Jeepo, I made the decision to skip Kluane and push south a little further to Carcross where I’d likely spend the night.

And that didn’t exactly go as planned.

Have you ever had a location you’ve been so excited to visit so completely disappoint you when you finally got there?

Yeah, that was the Carcross Desert for me. For years I’d dreamt of visiting this unique micro-biome, finding it completely fascinating and full of photographic potential. And then I arrived to find it covered in OHV tracks, under bluebird skies, realizing why you just don’t see many great photos from there. Soured, I decided to push on and get as far east as I could before I was too exhausted to drive anymore.

And push on I did. Perhaps a little too hard.

I left Carcross just after 8pm and drove another 269km over the next three hours to make it back to the Swift River wild camping spot I stayed at on night three. It was dark by the time I arrived at camp and I was both completely knackered and insanely wired from the road. Aside from my two hour stop in Whitehorse, I had been driving for over 15 hours.

I was so ready for bed but the sky was clear and the stars were absolutely incredible under the unpolluted Bortle 1 skies. Reluctantly, I pulled out a tripod and camera and shot a few frames of the autumn milky way and while the final photos were nothing to write home about, they serve as a lovely memento of the moment. After putting away my camera I sat on the edge of my rooftop tent, watching the stars like a kid in a treehouse before finally falling asleep around midnight.

Day 12 – Swift River to Kinaskan Lake Provincial Park (490km)
The next stage of my multi-stage round trip begins – the Stewart-Cassiar highway! Not much to say about the day as it was a non-stop drive, and I’ll admit, I didn’t particularly care for the road. The northern end is a skinny, twisty mountain road with trees right up to the edge, which felt borderline oppressive and claustrophobic after the wide open spaces of the Dempster and Alaska Highways. In hindsight, I can see how it would be beautiful to many but at the time, I just wanted off it. And despite stories from my good friend Mark Jinks about the road teeming with wildlife, my poor luck continued with zero sightings. I took the detour to Cassiar and stopped in Dease for fuel, lunch and to borrow a little power from a roadside church to recharge my Ecoflow battery.

With a max speed limit of 80-90kph on the highway, I only made it about 400km in before finding a spot to camp along a forestry trunk road, just south of Kinaskin Lake Provincial Park. It was beautiful, nestled right beside a little lake filled with lily pads. I watched as dragonflies hunted the plentiful mosquitos and had visions of waking up to find a moose in misty water. I turned in after a short walk and heard wolves howling in the distance as I fell asleep.

Day 13 – Kinsaskin Lake PP to Stewart (258km)
No moose and no mist but still a lovely morning! I made it to Stewart in short order and enjoyed the stunning coastal mountains on the drive in, stopping briefly at the Bear Glacier for a few quick photos. My first stop in town was the Rainey River Campground for a hot shower, only my second on the whole trip. I had planned to eat lunch at El Tostador, a highly recommended Mexican restaurant with vegetarian options, but alas, Google Maps erred in saying they were open at 1. So I grabbed a quick grilled cheese at Trudy’s before wandering around the estuary, killing time until El Tostador opened at 4. It was pricey but good, especially after all the bagged meals I’d been eating.

Now nourished, my next stop was one I’d been anticipating the whole trip: the bear viewing platform in the Tongass National Forest near Hyder, Alaska! And listen, I know better than to get overhyped for an overhyped wildlife experience, but I’m not gonna lie, after the wildlife drought I’d experienced over the trip thus far, I admit I drove there with visions of salmon-plump bears dancing in my head. Instead I arrived to the stench of thousands of rotting salmon carcasses and dozens of people bored out of their minds, waiting for bears to arrive. Would they?

I had a three day pass to find out.

In the meantime, I too, joined the waiting throngs. After 13 days of being starved of connection and conversation, it didn’t take me long to start chatting with the other photographers on the platform and visiting with them all was an absolute highlight of my trip and had me seriously reconsidering heading back home the following day.

Once the light got too low for any wildlife photography, I realized I was going to be skunked by the bears and decided to make my way up to my other highly anticipated location in this area: the Salmon Glacier! I drove up the winding, bumpy, forestry trunk road (very reminiscent of the Dempster!), stopping from time to time as the glacier slowly came into view. I was surprised to see so many other vehicles boondocking at the viewpoint but it made perfect sense after seeing the expansive view. The glacier was massive, originating between two mountain peaks and expanding in all directions as it moved down the slope. Massive, curvy striations of icy blues and dirty snow lines, the distance between belying the sheer scale of it all.

I found a spot to camp a little further down the hill and crossed my fingers for the clouds to clear out. If Photopills was right, the milky way core should line up directly with the head of the glacier. As the clouds cleared and the core moved into position, I walked back up to the viewpoint to capture the scene. Success! Well, mostly. There was still just a hint of cloud in the shots. I turned in around 2am really reconsidering my plan to go home the next day.

Day 14 – Tongass National Forest and Salmon Glacier
After a scant four hours of sleep, I begrudgingly acknowledged my alarm, slowly packed up the tent and made my way down the winding road back to the viewing platform in hopes of some morning bear action.

There was none.

Nor was there any afternoon or evening bear action, either. I spent most of the day on the platform, waiting, getting eaten alive by no-see-ums and trying to decide if I should just start driving home on four hours sleep while simultaneously envisioning the bears coming out to party as soon as I got on the road. By mid-afternoon I had decided I was staying. FOMO (fear of missing out) is real. The lack of sleep and forecasted clear skies over the glacier that night made the decision easier. As did my new friends. And, as it would turn out, old ones too.

Earlier in the afternoon I randomly ran into Aaron Von Hagan, a friend and attendee of the first Lightchasers conference and later in the day I met another solo traveler named Vicky. We all decided to stay up on the glacier and we were treated to a next level sunset when we arrived. We sat through blue hour, overlooking the incredible landscape below and chatted about life and adventure as the clouds parted and the stars slowly revealed themselves one by one. I love how open strangers can be, especially those prone to solo travel.

When it got dark enough, we brought out the cameras. I spent a little time teaching Vicky some astro photography basics and lent her one of my tripods and plates so she could try it for the first time. We turned in while Aaron sat up doing star trails. I set my alarm for 215am so I could capture the core in exactly the right position; the great thing about having tried the night before was that I knew exactly when things would be perfect.

I got up, took my cameras down to where I had left my tripods only to realize one of my plates was still attached to Vicky’s camera! Doh! But I made due and got the shots, turning in again around 3am. It took a bit to fall asleep, mostly due to worrying if Vicky would leave before me with my plate!

Day 15 Salmon Glacier to Fraser Lake (576km)
I needn’t have worried. When I woke up around 7, I saw my tripod plate by the tripods I’d left out overnight. Vicky realized that she still had it when she woke up at 4am to join us for the shoot, only to discover that her alarm was set to the wrong time and she missed the best of the milky way.

I made my way down the mountain and bypassed the bear viewing platform, having been given a tip by friends the night before about where the bears might be spending their time instead. I found their location and made my way to the edge of the river and there they sat with some other folks I hadn’t met yet. The bears were up river, just around a bend so we made the decision to don our rubber boots (pro tip: never leave home without rubber boots!) and cross the river to get a better vantage point. Over time a mom and her 2-3 year old cub came out and we got some great shots of them fishing and feeding on dead salmon! Finally my wildlife drought had come to an end!

We were soon joined by another photographer and all just enjoyed this incredible experience. The coastal mountains were bathed in gorgeous morning light, the bears were active and we all appreciated one another’s company and conversation. It was a perfect way to start what would be my last day here. We parted ways around 11am and I’ll admit, it was hard to say goodbye to everyone; I was reluctant to leave the area and start back on the road alone.

I popped back to the platform to say goodbye to Vicky and we decided to head into town for what was fast turning into brunch. Unfortunately, everything was closed for the holiday so we just went to the park and made something from our reserves. While sitting there we met Wendy, a wonderful older lady solo travelling with her dog and having the time of her life. She has a popular YouTube channel, Wendy Outdoors, and it was great chatting with her about her adventures.

I finally got on the road home around 2 and drove east until 9, stopping at the White Swan campground in Fraser Lake for the night. The drive was fairly uneventful, save for the haunting realization that I was on the notorious Highway of Tears, where hundreds of women have disappeared over the decades.

Day 16 – Fraser Lake to Edmonton (907km)
The. Last. Day.

Up at 7. On the road by 815. I had a long drive home and I was determined to make it. Because at this point, all I wanted was to get back, have a shower and sleep in my own bed. I pushed hard through the day, bypassing some waterfalls I’d hoped to see and made plans in my head to return to this area another day to explore. I walked through my door at 930pm, exhausted but so incredibly grateful for all of the experiences I had, the sights I’d seen, the people I’d met, the dogs I’d pet, and the kindness I’d encountered.

Travelling on your own isn’t easy. It’s incredibly rewarding, yes, but it can sometimes take just as much as it gives. For all the symbolism I’d concocted about the trip, I also realized that life isn’t really about huge chapters beginning and ending. It’s more about the small moments. All of them. The good. The bad. And everything in between. They’re what make up the chapters. And we should try to live life in a way that makes every small moment as exceptional as possible.

So take that trip. Step out of your comfort zone. Forego societal expectations and social norms. You’ll never know just how much doing so can change the course of your moments and lead you to a brand new chapter.