We made it to Inuvik! This is the end of the Dempster Highway! We are going to continue a bit further north to the Arctic Ocean at Tuktoyaktuk. But first we’re going to take a rest day here in Inuvik. It’s by far the biggest metropolis we’ve seen in quite a while. It’s even got at least one traffic signal! More importantly we’re sleeping in a nice hotel, have showered, done laundry, and had a fantastic dinner! And dessert! Then we stopped for snacks at the grocery store!
The terrain has changed markedly over the past few days. First, we left the mountain ridges behind for small hills dotted by lakes and ponds. Now we’re in an almost completely flat landscape. We’ve also entered the land of mosquitoes and biting flies. This is what we signed up for.
It’s also been very hot the past few days, above 80 degrees. This isn’t exactly what we thought it would be like north of the Arctic Circle! Not much use for all these warm layers we’re lugging around yet.
People are continuing to surprise us with little acts of kindness. We’ve taken a few more ferries. We also got a ride across a river with a friendly man in a motorboat who offered to get us across faster rather than waiting for the ferry to come back. People have offered us water, showers, and lots of encouragement.
It’s also still very bright at night! We both woke up last night at 10:45pm, looked at Bill’s watch and were so disoriented because it was so bright outside the tent. We both thought we had somehow slept through the night and it was already 10:45 AM! Bill woke up again at midnight and tried to take a follow-up video showing that the sun doesn’t actually set now that we’re so far north, but it was pretty cloudy:
Today is July 16th. The sun won’t set in Inuvik until July 19th. And even then, it won’t get anywhere close to dark, just kind of a bright dusk. We’ll see if we can get a better video.
We also took drone footage of a great informal campsite we happily stumbled upon a few nights ago, and also footage showing the vastly different landscape we entered as we moved north — flat as a pancake and the road is as straight as can be!
Updated stats:
1,460 miles pedaled
66,200 feet climbed
Days Bill has worn padded shorts: zero
Tomorrow: rest day in Inuvik, our dot won’t move
Link to our tracker map (you can click “view all” to see our entire trip, and click the “i” to change map types)