Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories

MADE IT north to Tuktoyaktuk a few days ago, an indigenous outpost on the Beaufort Sea. Camped on the beach that night and beat a hasty retreat south ahead of the weather. The forecast was for rain and snow, certain to turn the Dempster to a slippery mess.

I opted for one long day getting out on a dry road instead of four or five wet days struggling for every mile.

I had the wet Dempster on my way up, that was plenty. Good way to get hurt out in the middle of nowhere.

Yesterday, back in Dawson City, the Yukon. We got a bit of the rain the Dempster was getting heavy up north. They closed the road north of Eagle Plains a few hours after I got out.

Been thinking of my old pal Johnny Danger lately. Today would have been the 25th anniversary of his marriage to Kathy.

The first anniversary of his death passed this week.

Danger and Kathy in 1994 or ’95, on the Kobuk River in Alaska.

In a few days, Kathy’s headed up here to the Arctic from California, to spread my friend’s ashes in the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes.

Two days ago it took me 21 hours to ride 500 miles of gravel south to Dawson City. I dumped the bike once, wasn’t hurt. Other riders weren’t so fortunate.

Riders hit loose, deep gravel at speed, find themselves in the wrong gear, out of the powerband, unprepared to gas their way out when the wheels go sideways. Or afraid to gas it. Your brain’s saying too fast too fast too fast!! but chopping the throttle or braking will get you unseated. Give the throttle a good twist instead; for if you fail to act on the road the road will absolutely act on you.

I heard reports of two riders—separate wrecks—who were airlifted to the trauma center at Yellowknife. At Eagle Plains I talked with a couple of riders who were turning back because their buddy was on one of those flights.

To put things in perspective and take us so-called badass bikers down a peg, dig it, here’s a guy doing what we do on a bicycle. I always find it remarkable and truly humbling to see one of these tough-as-nails travelers pedaling through a wild place.

More than the pedaling power I think it’s their mental toughness I respect the most.

Pierre flew into Anchorage from Paris and rode 1,600 miles to Tuktoyaktuk. He headed north out of Inuvik a few hours before I did. I passed him at mile 23, stopped up ahead and snapped these pics as he went by.

I have good legs today, he said, I will see you there.

He covered the 90 miles from Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk in 11 hours. We camped on the same beach that night.

Lots of lakes and ponds as you go north from Inuvik. The land’s starting to play out, nothing but water at the end of the road.

You get a good sense of that from the map.

Found a beluga vertebrae when I got to the ends of the Earth. Indigenous people hunt the whales for meat, called muktuk. Imagine beef gristle that chews easily; that’s the mouth feel of Muktuk. You’re not missing anything.

I’d be happy to eat muktuk again if I were hungry. But it’s no Fig Newton.

File this one under the inexplicable kismet of the road: Last Thursday, an hour after I rode into Tuktoyaktuk, I met George Versloot, a friend of a friend from Fredericton, New Brunswick. Scott Patterson, a police inspector in that city, had sent me an email on June 16 to say that George, too, would be up here in the Arctic, keep an eye out for a red Beemer, the big GS.

Scott had described my bike to George, too: gray DR650, Rhode Island tag, long-range fuel tank.

George recognized the piglet parked by a lunch trailer in Tuktoyaktuk.

We camped on the beach that night and rode together south to Inuvik the next day. I camped in Inuvik but George kept rolling. He’s headed for the North Slope of Alaska next, as am I.

Here’s George in Tuktoyaktuk, with iron man Pierre.

The last I saw Pierre, he was hitching a ride to Whitehorse to meet a friend of his at the airport, then setting out to ride his bike from the Yukon to South America.

He’s making a movie of his travels. Which I hate to show you, because now you’ll wonder why I’m not making movies while riding the iron piggy or the piglet. Geez, if a guy traveling bicycle-light can lug a drone and an action cam and learn to edit film out in the weeds…

George, Pierre and I camped in Tuktoyaktuk, but that’s not typical. It seems most people who get there—on two wheels, or four, or six—snap a photo at the Arctic Ocean sign, turn around and ride south. They’re working a checklist; doing the toe touch.

That’s not my style. I won’t say I’ve been somewhere until I’ve camped there and talked to people, found out what they know, learned a little bit about how they live.

But with Tuktoyaktuk, I can almost see the case for getting there and getting gone. It can put you off at first.

The very first thing you see riding into town: an open pit dump.

Then come the rusty fuel tanks, and street after street of rough housing stock that could use a sprucing up with the fine touch of a bulldozer.

Life is difficult for many people there, I think. They just don’t have much, and are still coping with the effects of the government- and church-sanctioned assault on their language and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries.

This is only the second year the road up from Invuik has been open, so there’s no tourist industry yet; not much money coming up the new road. I found the only place where you can buy a meal, and by that I mean take-out fare from a lunch trailer.

Grandma invited me to sit on the sunporch of her home after I ordered. Her husband gave me a free beer. That’s where George found me after spotting the piglet parked out there in the dirt.

Grandma returns a tub of beluga blubber to the sea, to feed the gulls.

Our camp.

This is about as dark as it gets this time of year.

Not very.

In the wee hours, our little corner of Tuktoyaktuk sounded an awful lot like the inner city. I’m from Philly, ask me how I know.

Lots of bad interpersonal drama going on. People of all ages, intoxicated or high, arguing, screaming, crying, recriminating about this and that. To my ear, it made the town seem a place where much pain and unhappiness is just under the surface, ever awaiting release.

Take this with a grain of salt. I wasn’t everywhere in Tuktoyaktuk, and wasn’t there for any length of time. It was one night, on one beach, no basis for judging what a community may be like at its core. I’m told that four out of five residents wanted the road built, thinking the connection might better their lives in many ways. I hope it will.

The road south, to Inuvik. I camped there for two nights before the weather report started looking dicey. Time to go.

On my way south ahead of the rain, I kept running into three riders from Alberta: Martin, Ed and Peter. We had stayed in the same campground in Inuvik. I left out of there while they were still asleep. I was up early and so were the mosquitoes; better to await the day’s first ferry across the Mackenzie down by the river. Lots of wind there.

I rode out of Inuvik at 4:30 a.m., covered the 80 miles to the river without seeing another vehicle. Two hours after I got there the guys arrived, just in time to catch the first ferry across.

Martin’s bike had electrical problems, wouldn’t start on the other side of the river. I hung around while he sorted that out. Peter whipped up an oatmeal breakfast for the four of us.

We generally kept track of one another as we rode south, often quite a few miles apart but all headed to Dawson City and mindful that any one of us could have a problem getting there.

Ed did. Late in the day he picked up a sharp piece of shale in his rear tire. The repair kept spitting out plugs. Twice it deflated instantly just as he pulled over. Lucky guy.

I followed him to use my air compressor to pump the tire back up whenever it went too low to ride. Martin had a compressor, too, but mine was easier to dig out of the gear.

Here are the guys taking a break. Ever tried eating soup through a mosquito net?

I had get-off #3 when we were pretty close to putting the Dempster in our mirrors, only about 50 miles to go. Can’t cite the extra-heavy fuel tank this time, it was two-thirds empty. This was more a combination of double-shift fatigue and dehydration, which invariably leads to fuzzy thinking. In the Arctic midnight sun it can be tough to keep enough fluids going in. I know I haven’t been. I’ve been fairly toasted in recent weeks. It’s safe to say I’m down a quart and as brown as a nut.

This mishap had to do with figuring out what had happened to Peter and Ed when they didn’t show up farther south. I picked maybe the worst place on the Dempster to pull a u-turn, a place where the road’s banked high like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. I went off the right side when the bike hit, over the right side of the handlebars, landed on my shoulder blades, somersaulted into the ditch. Oops…

We four were invited to crash (so to speak) at a church in Dawson City. Martin knows the people here. He’s a sort of pastor to pastors in the Yukon and most of British Columbia, so he’s up here in Dawson City at least once a year. He laughed when I dubbed him the capo di tutti i capi in the subarctic Canadian evangelical scene.

Martin, Peter and Ed slept on the floor of the sanctuary; I set up my tent on the porch, so as not to break my streak of consecutive nights not spent under a roof. And to prevent the Christians from discovering that I have no reflection in a mirror.

Martin on the left. The morning after we pulled in to Dawson City he and Ed made a permanent repair to Ed’s punctured tire, a patch on the inside.

Ed’s the road warrior of the bunch. He’s got more biker scars than I ever hope to collect.

Peter’s bike. He’s the fastest rider among us.

He described himself to me as a country lawyer. As a young man he survived a 3,000 foot fall off Mount Logan, the highest peak in Canada. A fellow climber fell first—he was roped to Peter on a technical ascent—it started an avalanche that carried the both of them more than half a mile down the mountain. Serious injuries all around, that hardly needs to be said.

I’m goofing around town today, restocked the bear can with grub, I was mostly out.  I’ll get headed west in a few minutes, as soon as I push the button on this latest report. Will make for the Alaskan border on the Top of the World Highway. Then it’s on to Tok, where I’ll change oil and mount the new rear tire I’ve been lugging around ever since Whitehorse.

From Tok, I’m likely headed up through Fairbanks and back north to the Arctic Ocean, this time at Deadhorse, on Prudhoe Bay. Will let you know whether the piglet and I have another 1,000 miles of gravel in us.

It would be nice to have a rear shock that works. The Dempster killed mine, it’s leaking oil. The spring’s still springy, I’ll get there on that. Motorcycles didn’t always have shock absorbers, you know.

The road to Alaska starts here with a ferry ride across the fast-moving Yukon River. I was up at the landing this afternoon. Made a pot of noodles for lunch, had a few bites of cheese, pepperoni, a peach, and watched the vessel mightily churn its way across.

Back and forth it runs at all hours of the day and night. I can’t tell one from the other anymore.

My only misgiving about heading up to Deadhorse is this: I’ve been on the road for five weeks and haven’t accomplished one bit of the work I came up here to do. It takes so much effort just to keep moving there’s literally no time left for anything else.

I wonder if I always knew it would turn out this way; that I’d never get any work done on the road. Was I was just making an excuse to come up here and ride?

Nah, that wouldn’t be at all like me. Yeah it would.

Tony DePaul, June 25, 2019, Dawson City, the Yukon, Canada