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.