Dempster Highway Travel Guide

Begun in 1959 to service northern oilfields, and completed over twenty years later - by which time all the accessible oil had been siphoned off - the 741-kilometre Dempster Highway between Dawson City and Inuvik in the Northwest Territories is the only road in Canada to cross the Arctic Circle , offering a tremendous journey through a superb spectrum of landscapes. An increasingly travelled route - which locals say means four cars an hour - it crosses the Ogilvie Mountains just north of Dawson before dropping down to Eagle Plains and almost unparalleled access to the subarctic tundra. Shortly before meeting the NWT border after 470km it rises through the Richardson Mountains and then drops to the drab low hills and plain of the Peel Plateau and Mackenzie River. For much of its course the road follows the path of the dog patrols operated by the Mounties in the first half of the twentieth century, taking its name from a Corporal W.J.D. Dempster, who in March 1922 was sent to look for a patrol lost between Fort McPherson (NWT) and Dawson. He found their frozen bodies just 26 miles from where they had set off. They were buried on the banks of the Peel River and there's a monument to their memory at Fort McPherson.