2004/08 Yukon trip - The road home - |
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Fort McPherson's handicraft centre contained little of interest, and we continued south and west, back down the Dempster.
We crossed the Peel River on the ferry, crossed the border into the Yukon again, and made one last 
stop at the Arctic Circle rest area . There were some big differences from our outward trip just
a week earlier. Firstly, fall had arrived. Many of the low growing shrubs had already turned red or purple, and the birches were now yellow or orange. The whole area had an orange tint whereas last week it was green. Secondly, it was getting very smoky. We were glad we’d taken all those pictures on the way north as now it was hard to see the mountains at all. Without the mountains as a reference point it was often difficult to establish where we were. Not that there was any danger of getting lost on a road that has no junctions.
It stayed that way all day, even into the mountains. It seemed as if the fire was somewhere off 
to the east. We thought it must be quite large to give us 300 miles of smoke. I’d hoped to get clear of the smoke before camping but we eventually had to give up and we parked on the edge of Red Creek, in one of the chutes the roadbuilders use for filling their tankers. Red Creek is a somewhat sulphurous stream fed by acid springs. It picks up a reddish-orange colour from iron oxides in the rock. From a distance the creek looks pretty with its colourful outline but up close that outline is a sticky gunge. This is not a place to fill your water bottles!
Thursday 12th August
In the morning we found a similar stream and pool, only this one was blue. Maybe these were copper bearing rocks and the pool was copper sulphate, another water source to avoid. We’d had some light rain overnight but not enough to clear the air of smoke. We continued down the Dempster Highway, enjoying the fall colours, and glad that we’d been able to see the mountains clearly on our trip up. We asked a few people along the way if they knew where the fire was. Everyone was vague and thought it was one or more of the season’s earlier fires that had rekindled in the heat. We got the impression that the Dempster is usually either smoky or wet. We’d been really lucky on our way north to see it in the brief clear period between “wet” and “smoky”.