Someone said: I’d love to see the Aurora Borealis, commonly known as the northern lights. These are caused by solar storms or flares and coronal mass ejections which interact with the earth’s magnetic field causing these colourful displays of celestial phantasmagoria. Sounded great. Who wouldn’t want to see this natural light show? 

When is the best time to see this? Not in the winter when it’s dark for twenty-three and a half hours. Not in the summer when it never gets dark. Not in the fall when it’s still nice and temperate, even in the Yukon. ‘No, it’s best in the middle of March, just before breakup,’ someone said. Who is breaking up? Nobody. It’s the time when the ice and snow melts and the rivers groan and heave when they break into large chunks of deadly ice, jamming and damming along the banks, under the bridges and also taking away the ice roads which connect the two shores of the Yukon and the Klondike rivers during the winter months. We wanted to be there before that happened. We agreed on the first week of March as the time when all of us would be around (some of us spend the winters in the sun) and before the gardens needed attention. Temps should be wintry but not too cold and the skies would be clear.

There were seven of us, two guys and five gals, all north of sixty, some more enthusiastic than others and three of whom had lived and worked in the Yukon for years and even decades. One brave soul volunteered to lead the group into the Yukon, often referred to as North of Normal. 

It took a lot of organizing: hotels, activities and flights. The days needed to be structured with things to do and places to see and even dinners had to be pre-arranged. Someone launched a WhatsApp group chat and there was a lot of information flow, chatter, questions, suggestions and alternatives posted almost daily. ‘More details than the Shackleton expedition,’ I said. 

Eventually we were booked with Air-North, had hotel rooms reserved in Whitehorse, Dawson Creek and Eagle Plains and a lodge at Fish Lake, 20 minutes outside of Whitehorse. We found out later that in exactly that week Whitehorse also hosted the Nordic Winter games which squeezed the available hotel rooms into a higher dollar cost and restaurants had to be reserved weeks ahead of time. We also had to arrange transportation that could fit all of us including the luggage. Our fearless leader booked a 2026 GMC Yukon XL which had all the bells and whistles and some buttons we could never figure out. It featured a large screen the size of a small TV and had three rows of heated seats and plenty of room for all our bags. 4wheel drive of course. 

The flight was pleasant in a trusty Boeing 737 which offered ample leg room. We were served drinks, a sandwich and a warm cookie. Not bad for a two-hour flight. As soon as the doors opened in Whitehorse the arctic air hit us like the ice claws of hell. It was a balmy -20 but for me who had just returned from the Caribbean this was indeed a shock to the system. I was dressed in jeans, Blundstones on my feet, a down ski jacket and a woolly took.  I knew we were closer to the North Pole then I’ve ever been. 

We got the keys for the truck which ironically was called a Yukon from the rental agency right at the airport. We shoved our bags into the back of it and drove on a packed icy surface along snowbanks – the size of small dunes – into town to our clapboard hotel, right in the middle of downtown. Whitehorse is not a pretty town. Wide roads, probably because of the mandatory snow removal every second day, lined by new and old buildings which were all featureless boxes, obviously built for utility. A school that looked like a prison, a couple of gas stations and fast-food joints. A square  road-grid with the frozen Yukon River on one side and steep clay cliffs on the other. Couldn’t get lost.

We bundled up and headed out into the wintry streets to the Railway Lounge for dinner. The dry, compact snow underfoot made a sound like walking on Styrofoam. Crunch, crunch, crunch. After a hearty dinner we walked towards the river where the opening ceremonies of the Nordic Winter Games were under way. We watched some of the presentation by delegations from Greenland and the Sami people from Finland. I still wore my city footwear and forgot my hat at the hotel. We didn’t last long and soon trekked back into town to the iconic 98 Pub, the oldest bar in town, for some warmth and drinks. Back in our hotel room I quickly went to bed and tried to get comfortable in the spongy matress that felt like it belonged in a pioneer museum. I couldn’t believe I was in the Yukon.

We made sure we got to ‘Burnt Toast’ for breakfast just when it opened at 8:30, before the games crowd claimed every seat. 

It was still dark and cold. It gets light later in the north and the sun finally crept over the horizon around 9AM, over an hour later then in balmy southern BC. Fortified with a hearty breakfast and plenty of coffee, we packed up and headed up the Alaska Highway until we turned onto the Klondike Highway toward Dawson City. We drove over 6 hours or about 530km straight north, through an unpopulated and sparsely wooded, white landscape. The temperature difference from inside the truck and outside was around 50 degrees Celsius. I felt like we were in a spaceship on wheels hurling towards the north pole.  

Dawson City is a much prettier and friendlier looking town than the industrial city of Whitehorse. Dawson City feels more like a western movie set than a real town. The streets are not paved, except for Front Street, parallel to the Yukon River. Wooden boardwalks run alongside all the buildings making it look like a frontier town. Colourful facades, leaning or ‘kissing’ buildings – due to melting permafrost under the foundations – are next to new and renovated heritage buildings. No aluminium sided box stores, no fast- food joints and only one gas station. Right in the middle of the town sits the bright orange and yellow painted new school. Apparently, the kids decided on the colours. We stayed at the Aurora hotel which looked like a Swiss alpine inn with all the pinewood wainscoting and kitchen cabinets. 

The sky was a bright blue, the air was dry and cold, like -38 degrees. I was afraid my eyeballs would freeze. The roads were covered in compact frozen snow but many of the wooden boardwalks were exposed and waist high snowbanks flanked all the streets. This seemed like a good time to don my forty years old felt lined boots, a pair of Merino wool hiking socks, two pairs of underwear, then several layers of inner wear, starting with a T-shirt, then a polyester sports pullover, a fleece and finally my down-filled ski jacket, a woolen took and Gore-Tex ski gloves. A woolen neck-warmer that I could pull over my face and a pair of sunglasses completed my Nordic attire. Out into the cold I stepped, looking like the Michelin man.

One afternoon we rented snow mobiles and skidooed up the Yukon River to a sternwheeler graveyard, a native village and the cave man who wasn’t home in his cave which is literally built into the side of the rocky cliff. I enjoyed riding the snowmobile along a track over the frozen, snow-covered river on this clear, cold winter’s day.

We cancelled the long drive up to Eagle Plains just for a group photo at the artic circle. It would have meant another 6 hours in the space truck along the icy, lonely road. We were all happy with the decision and instead drove 60km up the Dempster Highway to the Tombstone campground to get a taste of the big, white north. Every time a semitruck roared by on the other side of the road we were forced into an icy cloud of whirling snow with zero visibility. All good if the road is straight and true. The Dempster Highway is the main artery to Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk on the Artic Ocean.  

The sky was a metallic blue and the gnarly spruce trees got smaller and gnarlier and eventually disappeared altogether. We had reached the northern treeline. From here on in it’s a blinding white snow-covered gentle, rolling landscape as far as the eye can see. In the summer it’s a colourful palette of red, green and yellow amongst the grey rocky exposures. A stunning and beautiful vista. I saw some fantastic photos. 

We only saw a fox and some birds but apparently there are Cariboo, Moose and wolf wandering around, maybe the odd lynx or bobcat but not for us to see. We built a roaring fire in the stove inside the round camping enclosure in the park. We brought along snowshoes and staggered around for about ten minutes but it was just too frigging cold. Instead, we huddled around the woodstove and ate a picnic lunch we brought along. 

Tombstone is as far north as I’ve ever been and ever will be, especially in the winter. It’s not a climate fit for human beings.

We took some nice walks around Dawson City and since we were the only tourists the town was basically empty. Our leader ran into people that he knew when he worked here and for him it was like a homecoming. For the rest of us it was a one-time experience. Too bad the Jack London Museum and the log shack he stayed in were closed as was the Robert Service cabin where he lived and wrote some of his famous poems like The Cremation of Sam McGee.

We visited a German woman, across the river, in the log home she built with her own hands and lives with her four dogs, a wood stove, a root cellar, a generator and some solar cells to charge a cell phone. For water she melted snow in 5gallon buckets behind the stove.  The out-house was somewhere out back. She served us coffee and cookies and I was just fascinated by this cabin in the woods that was lined from floor to ceiling with books, many of them about the 2^ndWorld war and in German. This pioneer woman had a PhD in Literature and a master’s degree in Samuel Becket. Go figure. I was just amazed by her off-the-grid lifestyle and tenacity. 

After dinner we drove up to the Midnight Dome, outside of town, hoping to see some Northern Lights. It was a cloudless sky and there was some colour in the ski but not enough to get excited about. I stayed in the warm truck and watched from there.

We left Dawson City after breakfast and drove the 6 hours back to Whitehorse. One gal dropped from the gang to pursue her own agenda for a couple of days. The rest of us went shopping for groceries for the two-day adventure at the Lodge in Fish Lake, about 20 min from downtown. We bought a take-out dinner at an Indian Restaurant. It was a balmy minus 20 with outlooks for colder nights. 

We got to the lodge which was a log-house, 2 storeys with several bedrooms, a dining-room/kitchen and a living room upstairs. I looked for the toilet but couldn’t find it. ‘It’s over yonder, down by those trees,’ somebody said. There was no electricity, no connectivity and no running water but there was a monster woodstove that took 3 foot logs and gas lanterns for lights. 

The outside temperature was dropping. We were in for a long, cold night. At about 10PM the cry went out that there was action in the sky. I reluctantly crawled out of bed and went upstairs to the deck and lo and behold there were green lights flickering across the dark sky. I didn’t think it was that spectacular but the cameras saw a lot more than the human eye and we got some great shots of the Aurora Borealis. We reached the Apex of our journey.

We only got up once during the night, like at 2AM. I went for the nearby snowbank but the girls had to scurry down to the outhouse with a f ash light. Nobody lingered. Now we all knew what ‘freezing your ass off’ means.

The second day we went for a morning hike along the river, then back to the fire for a picnic lunch. At 1 o’clock we all trundled up to the office to get suited up and signed in for our adventure: dog sledding or mushing with our own team of canines. We had a 10 minute education session amongst the barking, howling and whining mutts. Over 100 dogs we were told. All with their own small dog house with their name on it, and a tether with a 10ft chain. It was a regular dog cacophony. We all had a team of four dogs except one of us who rode like a princess in the sled.  

Cardinal rule # 1: never, ever to let go of the sled, no matter what. The dogs would just take off. They knew only one speed: GO, as fast and hard they were able and they always followed the lead team. Our job on the sled was to apply the break, a rubber pad between the skis and a more aggressive stomp down metal rake that would stop the dogs in their harnesses. We also had to make sure we were close to the team ahead of us. My team took off the wrong way because one dog didn’t want to play and headed for home. We had to swap it out and off we were again along a narrow sled trail through pristine, white, cold wilderness. The virgin snow beside the trail was 3ft deep. 

It was a lot more physical than I expected and I held on for dear life when the sled whipped by trees and around corners. Uphill we had to assist the dogs by either getting off the sled and pushing or kicking with one leg to help them out but most of the time they were pulling as hard as they could and I braked as much as I could. We sledded for about two hours and we were all exhausted. Dogs and humans. It was certainly a unique experience and I’m glad I was able to do it. Once.

Back at the lodge for a celebratory drink and the nwe were off to the Takhini Hot Springs and the Eclipse Nordic Centre. This is a brand new swanky and tony facility with three hot pools surrounded by boulders and 3 feet of snow, saunas, relaxing rooms and a café. 

It was getting late so we opted for a Chinese restaurant next to the gas station on the way back to the lodge. Orange lemon chicken glue, a glob of chicken noodles and overcooked broccoli. We all had the same so nobody’s was better than the next one. The bathroom was also out of order but the girls didn’t see the sign. 

Back to the lodge for one more night, which at least was somewhat warm because we had stoked the fire before we left. Nobody wanted to stay up and have a drink. We were all exhausted from a very active day and called it a night. The beds were comfortable and nobody got up to look for the northern lights.

We all slept in until 8 am. Eggs, toast and coffee got us going. We packed up and headed back to civilisation in Whitehorse. We took a walk along the Yukon River up to the ice-trapped sternwheeler until our rooms were ready to check in to. After we wandered around looking for a place to have lunch. We found a great Mexican restaurant right on Main Street. After a hearty tortilla soup and tacos it was time for shopping. Happiness all around and souvenirs were purchased. Then it was Happy Hour in one of our hotel rooms to drink and eat the left-over wine and junk food from the lodge. 

For our last night’s dinner, we went to Tony’s restaurant in the Sternwheeler hotel where we regaled ourselves with tall tales from the North that we lived, loved and survived.

We met up with the daughter of a good friend who has lived here for several years and even owns a small house in Dawson City. I asked her what made her chose the Yukon of all places. ‘Community,’ she said without hesitation. ‘Everybody looks out for everybody else and we have opportunities here that don’t exist everywhere, like good jobs, a university and we live at the edge of a beautiful wilderness. I tried living in Vancouver and Victoria but everybody is on their own with their little group and I didn’t feel any sense of belonging like I do here.’

Back at the clapboard hotel we retreated to our overheated rooms with the sponge mattress – betraying years of active history. Yes, there was an en-suite bathroom with all the fixtures and hot water. We dove into the synthetic sheets but despite being dead tired I kept waking up. I blamed a noisy fridge, so I unplugged it and finally I fell asleep and dreamt of white beaches but when I walked on it, it turned out to be snow.