Freeze frame in Canada

With temperatures registering minus 40 degrees, ED O'LOUGHLINcrosses a thousand miles of icy wonder on his way to the frozen Arctic Ocean

THERE AREN’T many frontiers left on this earth, and those that remain are not easy to reach. Where can you go that is wild and mysterious and a little bit dangerous, without having to charter a plane, or pay a bribe, or package yourself with trust-fund adventurers?

For four months of the year, winter creates a series of ice-roads and bridges in northern Canada, allowing ordinary vehicles to drive all the way up to the frozen Arctic Ocean.

Few outsiders care or dare to go north in the winter months, but to those who do, the Klondike and Dempster highways reveal a thousand miles of icy wonder, some of the most wild and beautiful scenery on the planet.

From the sprawling town of Whitehorse, the Klondike Highway heads north along the Yukon river valley, a two-lane blacktop winding through hills and valleys thick with spruce and aspen, their crowns bowed under masses of snow.

This is a storied country, thanks to the Klondike gold rush of 1896-1898. Just north of Whitehorse, the road passes the southern verge of Lake Laberge, or as Robert Service inaccurately described it in The Cremation of Sam McGee, “the marge of Lake Lebarge”.

A day’s drive north of Whitehorse, where the gold-bearing Klondike River joins the Yukon, Dawson City is a living monument to one of the strangest episodes in modern history.

Most of the 100,000 stampeders who set out for the Klondike goldfields were defeated by the natural obstacles guarding the way. Many – enthused amateurs from all continents and walks of life – bankrupted themselves in the process. Hundreds died. And those who did reach Dawson found out what most had half-known from the start: that the good claims had already been staked by local prospectors, long before news of the strike even reached the outside world.

AT THE HEIGHT of the boom Dawson was the third biggest city in western Canada, but by the 1960s it had become little more than a ghost town. It has since made an unlikely come-back as a tourist attraction and artists’ colony, trading on its gimcrack legacy of restored saloons, casinos and hotels.

Leaving the Klondike Highway near Dawson City, the Dempster Highway crosses 736km of largely uninhabited wilderness to reach the most northerly town in mainland Canada, Inuvik on the Mackenzie delta. Completed in 1979 and still unpaved, the Dempster is the only road in north America to cross the Arctic Circle.

The scenery here is a danger: it is hard to keep your eyes on the road. For the first third of its length the road passes through the stunning Ogilvie Mountains, climbing through high desert uplands with snow instead of dust. In one three-hour stretch we met only one vehicle. The dashboard thermometer touched minus 40 degrees.

Twenty kilometres past the lonely half-way stop at Eagle Plains, two wolves ran out from the snow-encrusted spruce trees. We would also glimpse a marten, a rather fluffy red fox, and numerous ptarmigan. But the much-promised moose and caribou were nowhere to be seen, and the bears – black and grizzly – were deep in hibernation.

Dividing the Yukon from the North West Territories, the Richardson Mountains are the northernmost extension of the vast trans-American cordillera, which stretches all the way south to Patagonia. A roaring wind, funnelled through the passes, blasted froths of stinging snow across the road.

Inuvik is by some way the largest settlement in Canada’s Western Arctic, a government town of 3,400 souls. Raised on piles to avoid melting the permafrost, its buildings are linked by overground “utilidors”, insulated corridors which prevent sewage and water pipes from freezing.

The town looks like a moon-base, thanks not least to two of its most prominent buildings: the famous igloo-shaped Catholic church in the middle of town, and a geodesic dome, salvaged from a decommissioned Distant Early Warning radar station, now housing a local telephone company.

The Canadian government is keen to settle the far north, and uses low taxes and high wages to entice “southerners” and recent immigrants to join the Mackenzie delta’s indigenous Inuvialuit (“eskimos”) and Gwich’in “indians”.

“It’s a mini-Canada, a cultural melting-pot,” says Inuvik mayor Denny Rodgers, himself a native of Newfoundland. “We had a cultural festival in the Recreation Hall recently, and there were Sudanese, Lebanese, Ethiopians, a big Newfie booth in the corner, and of course Inuvialuit and Gwich’in. There was a booth there for Nepal, and I didn’t even know there were any Nepalese here.”

Several business hotels cater for passing officials and oil-men, but the Arctic Chalets is alone in flying the flag for year-round tourism.

In summer – when most of the delta’s few thousand visitors come – owners Olaf and Judi Falsnes offer a variety of tours by boat, road and light aircraft. But Judi, who keeps a pack of white huskies, reckons winter is the best.

“I’m an outdoors person, and there’s so much to do. I can snowmobile, I can ski, I can dog-sled – I get a lot of my business from dog-sledding. Inuvik is not a place where a lot of people come, and those who do want something special. It’s tough to keep going, but if more people knew about it, more people would come up.”

Some attractions are free. On any clear night, visitors can expect to see, at the least, a smudge of green light arching across the sky. On some nights, the aurora borealis puts on more of a show.

Out camping one night with the Aklavik patrol of the Canadian Rangers defence reserve, a particularly bright aurora drew several rangers – local Inuvialuit and Gwich’in hunters – from our neighbouring tent. Impressed, they began whistling at the sky.

“Ever since I was a little boy I was told that if you whistle at them the lights’ll start dancing,” explained ranger corporal Larry Koe.

And dance they did, shimmering and pulsing, streamers of bright green light furling and unfurling like weeds in a fast-running stream, with a purple sheen along the shifting edges.

Three years ago, Inuvik was the base for the second season of a popular reality series, Iceroad Truckers, which followed burly truckers as they serviced exploration rigs around the frozen delta. Now the trucks and rigs sit idle in lots around the town, mothballed due to lack of government approval for a proposed gas pipeline.

These days, the 187km ice-road – said to be the world’s longest – serves mainly the winter traffic between Inuvik and the Inuvialuit settlement of Tuktoyaktuk (population 870), on the edge of the Arctic Ocean.

In summer, “Tuk” is reach-able only by boat or light aircraft, but in winter the river ice provides a swift and smooth passage, with traction no worse than a wet road in Ireland. It comes as a surprise to see navigation markers high on the bluffs above the road, set there to guide summer barges.

A FEW KILOMETRES north of Inuvik, the last stunted spruce trees vanish and the ice road crosses the westernmost stretch of Canada’s Barren Lands, more than a thousand miles of featureless tundra. Leaving the river mouth, the route turns east across a 35km-wide arm of the Beaufort Sea.

Here great cracks appeared in the wind-swept ice, caused by tides and distant waves. The surface was broken by hummocks and ridges, and slicks of greasy green new sea-ice appear on the margins, seeping from under the snow.

To the left, stretching level and stark to the northern horizon, was the Arctic Ocean, a hundred miles of fast-ice so thick and solid that seals and polar bears have forsaken it.

It was towards this white void that the lemming was headed, when it dashed from a snow bank in front of us.

Braking just short of it, we watched the tiny rodent try and hide beneath the thin film of snow on the ice road. It lay there, quivering, until the photographer picked it up. After a token struggle to escape, it clung to the warmth of his glove, reluctant to depart as he steered it back towards the mainland.

Later, asked about the lemming’s rush towards oblivion, an Inuvialuit elder smiled and shrugged.

“A lemming just starts going in one direction and never stops,” said Peter Esau, a retired hunter and trapper from remote Banks Island. “When I was out hunting seals on the ice, far out from shore, sometimes I’d see one out there and they’d just jump in the water and swim out and then they were gone. There’s nothing for them to eat on the ice, and they don’t last too long in the big ocean. Nobody knows why they do it.”

The last time we saw it, the lemming was still heading safely southward. Far ahead, bright blobs on a white smudge of land turned into the wooden houses and trailer homes of Tuktoyaktuk. There, above a desolate iced-up harbour, a marker proudly proclaimed the most northerly point on the American road-network – in winter.

* Ed O’Loughlin is an author and journalist