We decided to wait until the Dempster reopened before leaving Tombstone Territorial Park, so we settled down to wait. I took a nap in the afternoon and when I woke up around 5pm I decided to check the Government of Northwest Territories Dept. of Infrastructure Twitter account to see if there was any news:
Even though it was late in the day, it never gets dark this time of year up here so we decided to start driving up the Dempster and stop when we got tired.
Around 10pm we got to the Eagle Plains roadhouse (a combo hotel, restaurant, bar, gas station, mechanic, and campground), the only services in the 367 mile stretch between Dawson City and Fort McPherson. Everything but the bar was closed. The bartender said the Dempster was still open so we kept going.
We made a quick stop at the Arctic Circle around 11pm to take some pics but didn’t linger because the mosquitos were pretty bad. The Arctic Circle is the lowest latitude where the sun doesn’t set on the Summer Solstice (June 21)
Around 1am it was still light, but we decided we’d had enough and stopped at Rock River Territorial Campground. The mosquitos were much worse than at the Arctic Circle. The second any of us stepped outside swarms of mosquitos started feeding on us. Every time we opened the door for a second or two dozens of mosquitos got into the rig and we all had to spend a few minutes killing mosquitos. After we finished the last mosquito massacre we did our best to get a good night’s sleep despite the sun still being up.
