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It's taken me awhile to get this post together, but here it is! The trip north on the Dempster highway! I tried something new and mounted my camera to the windshield so I could film the full drive, this is the result.

Enjoy 17 hours of driving, in 6 minutes.

On the way north I only stopped for 1 hike in Tombstone, and that was Rake Ridge. This hike blew me away, and definitely made me fall in love with Tombstone. I got really lucky on the way up and there were no mosquitos, once I was on the ridge it did start to rain a little and the wind was wild, but that just added to the magical ambiance :D On the way down when I got off the ridge, the mosquitos seemed to all come out at once and it was a pretty brutal hike the rest of the way to the van, but still totally worth it!

I spent quite a bit of time at different spots a long the ridge, including a stop to do some knitting :)

After the hike, I worked for awhile at this beautiful boondocking spot. I ended up staying here for a few days during the week to work because the starlink was working pretty well.

I continued on to Eagle Plains which is the first gas station after getting on the Dempster after 370km.

There were a few overnights before getting to Eagle Plains, and at the last one while I was packing up a fella came over because he had gotten stuck in some fairly soft ground. He was pretty far out there so I couldn't get that close, but we gave it our best to tow him out. After a few attempts, we gave up and I headed out to send a tow truck from Eagle Plains. When I got there I found out they stopped doing towing at all and the next place would be Fort McPherson, which is where I was heading the next day. After I got back into cell reception the next day to contact him, he had messaged me because a work crew had come back and gotten him out with a back hoe, so everything worked out!

Eagle Plains is also extremely close to the Arctic circle, so the sun doesn't really set. This second photo was taken at midnight

I made it, The Arctic Circle! The weather was something else this day, these two photos were take about 15 minutes apart, and it kept changing like this all day.

One of my favourite boondocking spots along the Dempster was this radio tower. Radio towers are always great because they are high up, clear views and theres an access road for bringing fuel up, though those roads are normally pretty rough, steep, and winding. I saw this radio tower while I was driving so I was on the lookout for the access road, when I came across the road for it, I took it up to see if I could stay there.

When I got there (and all night) the wind was strong enough to the point where I spent some time googling "How strong does wind need to be to blow over a van".

But I soon decided I was fine, and made cookies instead of worrying.

There aren't a lot of hiking opportunities once you're in the Arctic circle, but there was one along the way so I had to stop. It was a nice little hike, but this was by far the worst the mosquitos had been on my trip. People always talk about how bad they are and up to this point I had thought "Sure theres a bunch of mosquitos, but nothing abnormal", but getting out of the van here changed that, immediately me and my backpack were absolutely swarmed, once I returned to the van it took forever to get all the ones that got in with me.

Inuvik was a quick stop because when I got there, a heatwave was forecast and I thought the farther north I could get the more comfortable I would be.

The main thing I needed to do before leaving was laundry. Bob's welding was the place to do it, with a small 4 machine laundromat, but when I got there all of the machines were out of order. I knew the campground in town at least use to have machines so I went over there to ask, but they were still closed. The kid working made a phone call, and told me to wait and someone would be here to help me. Then his parents showed up (neither of them had any association with the campground or the laundromat) but they took me over to Bob's welding to see if they could sort it out. After we decided the machines were definitely down and he talked to a few people, they offered to let me do laundry at their place even though they had just gotten back from a road trip to Edmonton. We went over to their place, and chatted while my laundry was in, turned out he had worked on the construction of the highway to tuk that I was about to be driving on!

I was about to leave, and then they came out and said they were heading over to the community garden to check out their lot and said I should come. So I went to see it, it's a giant greenhouse that use to be Inuvik's stadium before they built a new one, and now was repurposed in the summer as a community garden.

I made it! Tuktoyaktuk! When I started thinking about this whole van thing, I didn't have many destinations in mind, but Tuktoyaktuk was always one of them.

There is a campground right at the end of the road on the Arctic ocean, so of course I stayed here and worked for a few days. Now fully in the 24hr sunlight, I also made my self stay up till 3am to see the sun not set and just turn around and start going up.

While I was here, I took my typewriter out to write letters to some people, it seemed like a pretty good landmark in the van adventure to write from :)