Canada 150: Dempster Highway
If you’ve already driven some 2500 kilometres to get from Edmonton to Dawson City, what’s another 800 klicks to go to Inuvik for lunch?
That’s what we thought.
The above photo is of the Dempster Highway, the only road from Dawson to Inuvik. It’s also the only all-weather road in Canada to cross the Arctic Circle. Because of the permafrost, it is surfaced with gravel. When we returned to Dawson City, we were surprised to learn it was rare not to pop a tire or two driving the Dempster Highway to Inuvik and back.
I guess we got lucky.
There’s one place to stop for service along the Dempster Highway and that’s at Eagle Plains, which is the halfway point between Dawson and Inuvik. We filled up with gas there, but camped overnight closer to Inuvik simply by pitching our tents on the shoulder of the highway.
It wasn’t like there was much traffic to keep us awake.
Canada 150: Dawson City
On leg three of my cross-Canada road trip, I drove from Edmonton to Dawson City with a friend. And it was on this trip that I learned a valuable lesson about travelling that has stuck with me ever since.
Always (always, always!!) do your research before you leave home.
My friend and I, both living in Toronto at the time, decided to drive to Dawson City from Edmonton instead of Whitehorse because we both had people we wanted to visit in Edmonton. We flew separately, a few days apart, and I booked us a rental car at the Edmonton International Airport where I would meet her.
I still remember the exact moment the sinking feeling formed in the pit of my stomach. Spread out on the floor of my brother’s living room was a road map that I had been using to calculate how long it would take us to drive to Dawson City. (This was back in the olden days, folks, long before Google Maps.) I started at it in disbelief. Turns out that, even after flying across four provinces, my friend and I were only halfway to the Yukon from Toronto. We had a 36-hour drive ahead of us.
Oops.
But you know what? It was a stunning road trip. We spent our first night with an aunt of mine who lived on a farm in northern Alberta, stopped for a minute the next day in Dawson Creek, BC, to take our obligatory photos at Mile 0 of the Alaska Highway, and camped that night near the BC–Yukon border where we soaked our weary bodies in Canada’s second-largest hot springs at Liard River.
On our third day, we pushed on until we finally arrived at Dawson City around 1 a.m. My sister, who was working in Dawson for the summer, was up and waiting for us.
I was running on adrenalin by that point and nowhere near ready for bed, so my sister took me to the top of Midnight Dome for my first view of the town. It was early July and at that hour it was dusky, but light enough to understand why they call it Land of the Midnight Sun. I took this photo of the view of Dawson City and the Yukon River from Midnight Dome the next day.
Dawson City was the epicentre of the Klondike Gold Rush. After gold was discovered in 1896, an estimated 100,000 people poured into the area, hoping to make their fortune. Almost overnight, Dawson became the largest city west of Winnipeg and north of Seattle.
It was over as quickly as it started. The miners moved on to Alaska after gold was discovered there in 1899. Gold mining still goes on in Dawson today, but most of the town’s economy is based on tourism, which celebrates its Klondike past.
The Klondike Gold Rush transformed all of Western Canada, however. The population of Vancouver doubled and Edmonton’s tripled in those few short years as both cities served as gateways to the Klondike.
Just as Edmonton did for my friend and I.
Happy Arizona Statehood Day!
Yup, it’s that day again. The day we celebrate all things Arizona.
But you knew that, right?
Exactly 105 years ago today, Arizona became the 48th state of the United States of America. And so, to celebrate, here is a photo of Arizona’s Painted Desert. I took this in late 2006 while on a short road trip through the northeastern part of the state.
Stunning country, isn’t it?
Happy Birthday, Laura Ingalls Wilder!
This week was the 150th anniversary of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s birth on February 7, 1867, and the 60th anniversary of her death on February 10, 1957. I’m a few days late, but I couldn’t let both dates pass by without acknowledging them.
That’s because I owe Laura Ingalls Wilder an enormous debt of gratitude. She is the author of the Little House books that I devoured as a child and that had a lot to do with shaping who I am today.
But this is not a book blog. It’s a travel blog, and you would do well to wonder what the connection is between the books I read as a little girl and the travelling I do today. It’s quite simple, really. The Little House books ignited my fascination with the past and made me the history geek that I am today. And I think I’ve mentioned once or twice on this blog how it is my interest in history that often dictates where I go or what I’m interested in seeing when I’m off on walkabout.
So that’s the connection. Like I said: simple.
I was introduced to the Little House books by family friends from Iowa. (Like Laura, I also spent part of my childhood living in the American Midwest.) For the first few years after our move to Canada, these friends would send my sisters and me a birthday box. (My two sisters and I share a birth month.) Inside that box one year, along with socks that were far too small, were two books: Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie. I claimed one, my sister took the other, and my future as a lifelong booklover and history geek was sealed.
My mother used to tell us how, when we lived in Iowa, she could feed us kids platefuls of buttered corn on the cob for dinner and nothing but and we would eat it all. Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family lived in Iowa for a short time and so, based on that shared connection, here is a photo of Iowa corn, taken on the same farm where the family who introduced me to her books lived. I visited those friends with my parents some years ago, giving me the unique opportunity to reflect as an adult on what living in that community must have been like for my Canadian parents.
For the record: those stalks of corn are almost half as tall as me again. Which puts them at about ten feet high.
Now that’s fertile country. Corn Belt, indeed.
Snow Day in Vancouver
Wait, what?
Yup. Snow Day in Vancouver. Normally in February, I’m posting photos of crocuses. Or gloating about how spring is right around the corner.
Not this year. We’ve had one of the snowiest, coldest winters I can remember, and I’ve lived here off and on for a good chunk of my life. This winter we had a white Christmas for the first time in almost a decade, and for the first time ever in my memory, the snow stuck around for an entire month. It arrived in early December and it didn’t leave until after New Year’s when the temperature finally warmed up and the rain washed it all away.
I expected we would have a normal winter going forward. But no.
We got another record dump of the white stuff this past weekend. Because we don’t usually get snow, what most Canadians take for granted, like snow plows and snow tires, we do not have enough of. And without plowed roads or snow tires, you are not going to get very far. Ever been in an articulated bus that was sliding backwards down a hill? I have. It was not pleasant.
So today was a snow day for a lot of people in this town.
And there is more snow in the forecast.
Canada 150: Somewhere Near McBride
Update: My friend tells me this field is along Barrett Station Road near Houston. The mountains are the Telkwa Range. Oops! I was only off by some 500 kilometres.
On the Travel Bucket List of every Canadian should be two trips: (1) a road trip across Canada and (2) the same by train. I’ve almost completed both.
The train trip I’ll save for another post; the road trip was done in several legs, several years apart. (Since Canada is such a vast country, it is my opinion that it is not cheating if you break these trips down into manageable chunks.)
Leg one of my cross-Canada road trip was completed the summer I moved from Vancouver to Toronto. I packed as many of my meager belongings as I could fit into the back of my Honda Civic hatchback, kissed my parents good-bye, got into my car and headed … north.
North? Why not? (What’s a 24-hour detour when you’re about to spend days driving across Canada?)
Yes, I started my trek east by driving north to the Bulkley Valley where some friends of mine were living, and it was only after that visit that I pointed my trusty little car east towards the Rockies.
I took this photo somewhere along the Yellowhead. My foggy memory tells me it was near McBride, but, truthfully, it could have been anywhere between Houston and Jasper. The hay bales are what made me pull over to take a photo.
I love hay bales.
Canada 150: Kamloops Lake
It’s not often that I travel to Alberta by car, but when I do, I am always struck by the diverse landscape of the province where I live. In just one day’s travel, you drive through the flat delta of the Fraser River, head up the narrow gorges of the Fraser Canyon or the steep incline of the Coquihalla Pass (depending on which route you take), then it’s through the grasslands and forests of the Interior before crossing a mountain range or three.
This photo, which I took from the Trans-Canada Highway during the summer of 2009, is of Kamloops Lake. I love the landscape around Kamloops. It’s got mountains, it’s got valleys, it’s got deserts.
And look. It’s got trains, too.
Robbie Burns in Central Park
Look who I bumped into during my walk through Central Park last month. It’s the Scottish Bard himself, Robbie Burns. And seeing that today is Robbie Burns Day, I thought I would share the photo with you.
This bronze statue has stood on Central Park’s Literary Walk since 1880. The reason the poet looks so anguished is he is portrayed while writing a poem to one of his loves, Mary Campbell.
Apparently Robbie Burns had quite a few loves. Some of them at the same time.
Through My Lens: The Whitney
This photo shows some more of the art you can see in New York. At left is a photo by Richard Avedon and to the right is a painting by Guy Pène Du Bois. The sculpture in between is by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, an American sculptor and art collector.
When Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney offered her collection of work by American artists to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was refused. So she turned around and opened her own museum. The Whitney Museum of Art, which focuses on American art, opened in 1931 in Greenwich Village. It has had a number of homes since then, but its latest, a purpose-built building at the south end of the High Line, opened in 2015.
The Met, the Frick, and the Guggenheim
The real reason I went to New York last month had more to do with me wanting to visit another Met.
That would be the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I’ve written before about my love–hate relationship with the Vancouver Art Gallery. Which is why, after a rather trying visit to a popular exhibition at the VAG late last summer, I lamented to the friend I was with that I needed a proper art fix at a proper world class art gallery. Preferably in a city like Paris. Or London.
Or New York.
A few hours later, as I was pondering my meltdown outside the VAG, I suddenly remembered that (1) I had enough points for a plane ticket to New York and (2) it had been far too long since I had visited my friend in Brooklyn.
A few emails back and forth, a few online bookings, and, within a few days, a few plans were in place.
And a few months later, just a few hours after touchdown at JFK, I was standing at the entrance to what most people rate as one of the top art galleries in the world.
The first time I walked into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on an earlier visit to New York, I did have a wee bit of a momentary breakdown. Its size almost did me in. I knew the Met was big ― I just didn’t realize it was that big. But within seconds, I shrugged off my frustrations. When you’re playing art tourist and you’re in the largest art gallery in the Western Hemisphere, there is no time to waste.
The trick to large art galleries is to get a map, and quickly zero in on what you want to see, picking a floor or wing to focus on. Don’t even thinking of trying to see it all. And don’t be afraid to ask for directions. Those gallery guards know their way around.
I tend to gravitate towards European Painting no matter what art gallery I am in. But if the Old Masters put you to sleep, not to worry. The Met has everything from Greek, Roman, and Islamic art all the way to present-day contemporary art. And if you’re there in good weather, don’t skip the roof garden. It has an amazing bird’s eye view of Central Park.
If oversized galleries aren’t your thing at all, then go to the Frick. The Frick was the perfect antidote to my morning at the Met. It’s so small you can see the entire gallery in a little more than an hour depending on long you linger in each room. Which is what makes it so delightful. The Frick is my idea of a perfect art museum, actually, as I truly believe art should be consumed in small doses before it all becomes a blur.
Henry Clay Frick, an industrialist who made his money in Pittsburgh steel, built the museum in 1914 as a private home for his family, although he fully intended it to be turned into a museum after his death. Many of the rooms remain furnished and decorated as they were when the Fricks lived there, including how and where the paintings are hung.
The collection focuses on European paintings, and has an entire room of Limoges enamels ― something I knew nothing about, but they are quite impressive. Old man Frick was quite the collector. How on earth did he get his hands on three Vermeers is what I’d like to know, given there are only about 35 in existence?
The Met and the Frick are both located on Fifth Avenue (aka Museum Mile). Still on Fifth Avenue, but further north, is the Guggenheim. This museum is worth a visit even if it is just to have a look at Frank Lloyd Wright’s amazing architectural design that is as much sculpture as it is building.
The Guggenheim focuses mainly on art from the last 150 years or so. I enjoy the Impressionist works and there are always interesting temporary exhibits.
Spending a long weekend zipping from art gallery to art gallery may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is mine, and I can’t wait to get back to New York for another art fix.
There and Back Again 