The Dempster Highway - Part I

Today we arrived in Inuvik, NWT after 2 days of driving the Dempster Highway. This is a 700 km dirt road winding through a pristine landscape of tundra, mountains and lakes which takes you past the Arctic Circle and through a few very northern communities, ending here in Inuvik.

Halfway up on the drive we climbed up out of the Ogilvie-Peel river basin, and up to an escarpment on the edge of the Ogilvie mountains, a striking geological feature. This area marked the edge of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. It strains the imagination to think that this far north, the land to the West was never glaciated. This unlikely situation arose because although it was cold, the area is so arid that not enough snow fell to accummulate into an icefield.

Although the midnight sun is no longer here, 'nighttime' is more or less a continuous twilight, a muted polychromatic delirium between dusk and dawn.