yukon – north to whitehorse

a day ago i got an e-mail from my aunt & uncle here in vancouver bluntly giving me hell because i’d been home for 24 hours and still hadn’t blogged ANYTHING from our camping trip. two weeks, one territory, 7000 kilometres, and a thousand photos later – this first post is just the start, but for you, BBC!
and i’ll say it is so much more fun to tell the stories of this trip with jen at my side, but for now you’ll have to make do with just me here. so a couple weeks ago i dropped everything, actually everything (it sounds like work thought i’d actually croaked – apparently i forgot to mention i was leaving without a phone or willingness use technology) and flew an hour north to prince george, bc where jen & i met up with her awesome friend, mel & her boyfriend josh, to collect our rental car.

this post sums up our first two days on the road, which is really a day and a half since we didn’t leave til late afternoon to get started. stacking five people, five 75 litre backpacks + a cooler in an ’09 dodge caliber took practice, folks – take it from me, your caring airline baggage handler. day one was just about getting us as far north as we could push (fortunately katie was able to join us for the first few days before she had to fly home from whitehorse) with the two driver system. about an hour outside fort nelson, i was tracking down the northern lights from the backseat window but as you’ll see below, by the time we’d pulled into town a little after 1am and set up our tents in a random baseball diamond, she was nearly gone for the evening.

our night consisted of bitterly freezing temperatures, a four hour sleep, katie climbing into the car for warmth at 4am and our alarm getting us up at 5:30a instead of 6:30a. not exactly the start we’d all envisioned, but the day ahead we were right on track. abundant amounts of wildlife within a stones throw through the entire way over the day was a highlight for me. (the bison was bigger than our car, and it was walking along the shoulder. i was fascinated and incredibly intimidated.) into the late morning it became routine to pull over for views that can only really be experienced through getting out of the car where the girls would break for yoga. back on the road we found and stayed hours at the fabulous & mesmerizing liard natural hot springs, which still wasn’t enough time. amazing. finally into the late evening we were chasing the sunset northwest into the yukon making a stop and adding to watson lake’s signpost forest before rolling into our only hostel of the trip in the yukon’s capital city, whitehorse.

katie ditching the driver seat for some roadside yoga during a stretch of construction along the alaska highway!

fuel in the back, the trunk overflowing into the back seat where three of us were already crammed into – do the math on the gas mileage.

look familiar? it should. similiar location, five weeks later.

pure. bliss. don’t just take my word for it though. go there. trust me. really… go!