Detour #93: Dempster Highway, Canadian Arctic
Following in the wheeltracks of the Ice Road Truckers, Gavin Conway tackles one of the most extreme drives on the planet: the Yukon’s Dempster Highway.
When the hotel receptionist at our Dawson, Yukon hotel tells us to go around back to plug in our block heaters, we know we are in trouble. We explain that our Jaguar is California-spec and that doesn’t include a block heater, crucial to keeping vital fluids from freezing. She replies: “It’s 43 below zero and plunging. So where do you want us to tow your car to tomorrow morning?”
I grew up in Ontario, which can be punishingly cold. But nothing has prepared me for this. We are 2,000 miles north of Vancouver in a frozen landscape where the average temperature is about 30 degrees below zero but in the last few days, it’s been even colder. Much colder. It’s been so brutally frigid that a lot local of motorists don't even turn their engines off at night to stop them from freezing dead.
Indeed, in the next few days Dawson will earn the distinction as being the coldest city on the entire planet. And during our week in this walk-in freezer (times two), the sun will stop rising above the horizon as the whole place falls into a gloomy funk that will last at least a month.
Our mission is to drive a bog-standard Jaguar XJ saloon into the depths of a brutal winter, ending up at the Arctic Circle. We’ll be taking a route more usually traveled by massive 18-wheel tractor trailers, specially prepared rigs that carry chains for their tyres to tackle steeper parts of the road. These monsters often sport their own onboard generators for when their drivers are trapped by bad weather (not to worry, our Jag has a heated steering wheel). We’ll be going via the Dempster Highway, a torturous route made famous by the Ice Road Truckers television series. In that programme, grizzled truck drivers bravely tackle one of the world’s most extreme roads. We, however, will have 14 fewer wheels and a lot less grizzle.
One concession: our Jaguar isn’t exactly a bog standard European production car – it’s a four-wheel drive model, something that markets such as Canada, Russia and the snow belt of America had been demanding for years.
The following morning the temperature plunges to 49 degrees below zero. But I’m optimistic right up until I see the Jag sitting low on its frozen air suspension like, ironically, a California low-rider. I know then what will happen next when I crank the starter.
Nothing. We get frozen jumper cable out of the boot and they promptly crack in half like a child’s candy cane. Some bodging with the wires and a solid ten minutes revving from a helpful trucker finally gets us going, but the car’s suspension is still frozen.
Side note: This is how cold minus 49 is: I throw a cup of hot water in the air and it instantly turns into a mini blizzard, actually freezing before it hits the ground.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, as they always do, ride to the rescue. Ahead of our Dempster highway run, the local police chief allows us to thaw the car in his heated garage. And Detachment Commander Dave Wallace also has some words of advice. “Listen, anything less than 45 below and you really notice it, there's a huge difference. Even below 40, what you'll find after driving for a while, your power steering will start to freeze up, your brakes will get really stiff and it’ll be hard to push on the pedal. At 50 below, it’s really hard to stop and steer and power steering hoses start to blow off.”
After a good thaw, the Jag seems to have found its sub-zero mojo – it’s just flying, 49 below be damned. Amusingly, though, the Jaguar is unprepared to countenance any temperature less than 40 degrees below on its display. The dashboard temperature readout goes blank at anything less.
The Dempster highway to Eagle Plains, which is just 25 miles short of the Arctic Circle is phenomenal – and madly counter-intuitive. The ice on the road is so cold that it has become ‘sticky', or in other words, the usual thin film of moisture that makes ice slippery isn't there. And the Dempster is far from flat and straight road that it appears in film – it snakes, dips and rises in a way that any petrol head would find massively entertaining.
This is the best rally stage that the world has yet to discover. Using the flappy paddles to manipulate the Jag’s eight-speed gearbox, I'm flying around long constant radius curves at 75mph (at night, you can see trucks coming from a long, long way). On long, flat, open stretches, we touch 90mph and beyond. The all-wheel drive powertrain gives the Jag stability that made me feel I should have a Finnish rally-god handle – you can call me Gavinen Convatenen.
And, belying its rather dumpy title, the Dempster highway is a simply stunning landscape. Forget what you might have seen on telly, this is a place where you’ll round a bend and be smacked in the face with a mountainous big-sky vista of limitless proportion, a white-coated wonderland looking like a Hollywood set imagined up by the likes of Tim Burton.
Step outside of the car and the extreme cold daggers through your coat, freezes the hairs in your nostrils, numbs your feet and reminds you that without shelter, this beautiful landscape will kill you in frighteningly short order. Get back in the car. Now.
We get a little taste of what this cold can do when photographer Daniel Byrne (a Brit and hence, not fluent in ‘cold’) finishes a round of tracking photography. He’s only exposed his camera hand for a few minutes, but his fingers have already gone a telltale snow white. We rush him to the nearest hospital, where the medics give him a bollocking for such a basic mis-step. And lots of painkiller (his fingers survive).
We make it to the ‘Circle and what a fantastic feeling it is when we finally park up beside the official monument marking the Arctic Circle. Driving much of it in pitch-black darkness – this is one of the shortest days of the year – in temperatures as low as minus 50.
And to all our intrepid readers, one word of advice. Go there by all means, but just not in a California-spec car.
Words Gavin Conway Twitter | Instagram
Photography Daniel Byrne Instagram