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Itinerary Take Four begins taking shape (sort of coagulating) with the debate over what will be our starting point: Anchorage or Edmonton. At last we settle on Edmonton and mark out another key element of the trip: the Kenai Peninsula and Denali. For those keeping track, that leaves The Alaska Highway and Inuvik / Tuktoyaktuk and the Arctic Circle. It is at this point that we add-in a burning need to make it to the newest Canadian territory of Nunavut. Honestly, at this point, I am open to suggestions about who to blame. There is just no way to reach Nunavut on this trip. There are flights to a smattering of the small towns that dot the landscape up there, but they all leave from Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, or Toronto, neither of which is on any of our itineraries. We decide to look into some charter flights that can get us into the more remote areas and end up speaking to a local guide in Inuvik. He is most gracious in his line of questioning, but basically ends by asking if we are independently wealthy, to which I must sadly confess the answer to be “no”. Apparently, it is a bit expensive to take charter flights to the more remote parts of the Arctic. How much could it possibly cost? Well, hold onto your seat cushion as a personal floatation device because the price we were quoted was $25,000.00 round-trip. Yeah, that is in Canadian dollars, but still! In summary, despite our best attempts to violate the laws of physics regarding time, distance, and money, we can only do so much. We are left with a merely staggeringly daunting trip, instead of something totally unfathomable. We are settled on a flight to Edmonton. In Edmonton, we rent a car and begin the big drive with a rapid push up the Alaska Highway. We turn off the main road to take the Campbell Highway through Faro to the junction with the Klondike Highway, which we take up to Dawson City. From Dawson we drive up to Inuvik, where we take some still-vague side trips to Tuktoyaktuk and Herschel Island, then drive back to Dawson City. From Dawson City, we take a detour through eastern Alaska, via Tok, then down through Haines Junction, Yukon Territory to Haines, Alaska. From Haines, we take the ferry to Skagway, back up through Carcross to the Alaska Highway, and back to Edmonton to catch our flight. On our flight, we sleep the whole way home. |
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All materials © 2004 Lea Ann Mawler & Stuart Mawler
