Hello to our family and friends! Though a few of you have recieved regular emails I'm sure many of you have been wondering just what in the hell Scott and Lynne are doing. We figure this is a most effective way of filling you in. You'll have to be patient with us though, we're new to this whole 'blogging' business.

Things are really good here. We've been moved into our new house almost a month now and are nearly unpacked. This is a beautiful place and we wish we could share it with you all in person.

I hope you all take the time to send us your thoughts and comments on the stories and articles we post. We are most interested in hearing from you all.

Scott and Lynne's Journey to the Klondike

Written October 26, 2005

Thought you all might be interested in what we've been up to since we left Alberta. To start here's a picture of us to remind you what we look like:

If you all recall, we left Edmonton at the end of July, when we detoured through Lumsden, Saskatchewan for Scott’s grandpa Art’s birthday and his brother Dean’s birthday, too. We had a wonderful time and they even threw us a little going away party complete with gifts to help make our transition to the north a little easier.

Then we headed back to Devon where we picked up

our cats, Scott's Beetle, and our canoe.

And off we went towards our new life...making friends along the way...

If you look close you can see Artie in the background of this pic. We named our van Artie shortly after departing Lumsden, in honour of Scott’s grandpa (and a little bit for laughs, too).

We saw some beautiful sights in northern BC but we were pretty excited about arriving at the Yukon border:

After arriving in Whitehorse we decided to kill the weekend in Kluane National Park, a world heritage site and home to grizzly bears but the bridge was out…

…just kidding. Kluane was beautiful and relaxing but we saw no grizzly bears…yet

The remainder of our journey to our new home was beautiful. There isn’t much except mountains and fireweed to look at along the way but here is Montague House.

When you come to visit us do not use the pit toilets here. I repeat: DO NOT PEE HERE! Very scary.

And then we arrived at our new home

And lived happily ever after?

Our View

Here is the view from our deck. We see the same view from our couch and our hot tub, too.

Heading North Up the Dempster

It didn’t take us long to get moved in. All we really wanted to do was go camping! So, up the Dempster highway we went. First we passed through the Tombstone mountain range:

Then we got to the Arctic Circle…

...and decided to keep on going. We passed the NWT border and continued on to Inuvik. If you look at a map you all can see just how far north we went. We stayed in Inuvik for about an hour and ate fast food (we don't have any here) and then turned around to head back home.

The arctic looked like this pic below about half the time, the other half was spectacular mountains like above.

That night at the campsite where we stayed (between the arctic circle and the NWT border) we finally had our first close encounter with the wild kind.

If you look really close you will see the bear in this pic-behind the lone bush on the left. After we picked our site and had our dinner we went for a walk and got much much closer than the pic when he came around the corner about 20 feet from us or less. We hightailed it back to the camper where he walked by again not 5 minutes later. It’s noteworthy that the night before we had been the only ones staying at this same campground and we had spent some time frolicking at the river at sunset. Since then we’ve seen 4 or 5 bears, grizzly and black, several moose-one with a calf right in the road up the Midnight Dome, a fox, a lynx, several beaver, a couple of bald eagles, a porcupine, and some Caribou. And several weeks ago we saw a pack of wolves cross the road-picture proof to come soon.

Our View at Sunset

We've had a fair bit of this lately...

Our First Visitor

Moe came for her first visit to Dawson on November 05.

It's always a long and beautiful drive to Whitehorse but this time it was dark and snowy and a little precarious. On the way down we saw a giant moose with an amazing rack, then on the way back we got to see a small herd of maybe 20 Caribou. It was quite late when we arrived home and all went straight to bed. When we woke up the next morning it was -35...Welcome to the Yukon Moe!

Our visit was too short but we found time to go up the Dempster to the Tombstones and back where Moe got some wonderful pictures and we got to see 3 Porcupine Caribou. While she was here Moe came down and volunteered with me for the Breakfast for Learning program at the school a couple of times, which was great but the second time we arrived to flooded halls. They had to close the school for the first time in 25 years and you can imagine the mayhem of trying to send 240 kids home. Moe got to keep all the kids there for breakfast in the Home Ec room while all of the parents were called. Not an easy task you can imagine when some of the kids have to pee and we have to tell them the toilets are out of order. Luckily we came through the morning mostly unscathed and quite well fed. When it was time for Moe to depart Dawson she got a taste of what they mean by 'Yukon time' when her plane was running an hour and a half behind and there was no one at the airport to let us know. We ended up keeping her for another day since she would have missed her connecting flight. Thanks for coming to visit Moe! Let us know what you thought.

Picture: 'Ultimate Blue' taken by Moe Fezatte