Shortly after this, the tow truck dude and I crossed the Mackenzie River. In wintertime, ferries are replaced with ice bridges in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon. (Imagine tractor trailers/articulated lorries driving over _ice_. (!!) That just weirds me out.) He was telling me about how, during an unusually warm winter, there was a foot of water on the ice the whole way across. -I asked him if his brakes worked all that well after driving that far with them under water, and he said not particularly.
The dude was really cool. But, as I have noticed, like most people from the far north, he had a particularly savage view of wolf-dudes--quite a bit out of tune with physical reality. However, wolf-dudes _do_ reasonably routinely EAT dog-dudes ( :( ), so I guess I can more than understand.
The southern shore of Great Slave (pronounced Slah-Vay) Lake. This was also a great moment for me. I was standing on the shore of a fixture in Jack London tales, which I had wanted to visit for over a decade. Incidentally, the water tasted most egregiously icky. :P
This is a really cool sunset I saw, travelling on Mackenzie Highway route 1, west of Fort Providence.
The road was positively awful.
_Eventually_, I reached "Checkpoint" (not really a real town), and headed south on the Liard (pronounced lee-ard) Highway, Mackenzie route 7. There, I saw one of the most amazing auroral displays I have ever seen--a bright, winding green ribbon, separating into wavy green curtains. It was awesome.
This is a *really* bad picture of Cowboy Jake at the access road to Fort Liard.
Getting here was purgatory; the trip out was hell. The road was SOO bad, that it was like a sick joke. In fact, I spoke with a construction worker in British Columbia, and even showed him the _bruises_ I got from riding the road @ 18 mpg (~27 km/hr.) He told me that he knew, and that they were paving it this year. The Liard Highway also sports the world's longest Acrow bridge in the world. (The picture for that didn't come out.)
I don't plan on complaining about much of anything else in my life, as I've driven the Liard Highway.