53 - South and Back to Eagle Plains and Off the Dusty Dempster and onto Some Paved Roads to Carmacks

We sadly left Inuvik and the Arctic Circle bound for Eagle Plains, YK, for one night and on to Carmacks the next day.

Don't forget, you can see our Garmin InReach real-time location anytime here.

View on Google Maps

After a trip to the Inuvik library for wifi, we finally pulled out of Inuvik, headed for Eagle Plains for the night.

Evidence of an old forest fire

We spent the night at Eagle Plains and got a late start to our drive to Carmacks.

We took some photos of the landslide area that washed out the road on our way north.

More beautiful scenery

So on our way north, the Dempster was terribly muddy and our little RV was caked with it when we arrived. On our way back south, we had had dry weather for a week and now dust was our enemy. The road itself was great. We could actually drive 40 - 50 mph. But the dust... it got up and into every nook and cranny of our little home. You could see it billowing around the interior as we drove.

We didn't arrive into Carmacks (not to be confused with the used car dealer, Carmax) until around midnight but full sun still, of course.

We pulled into our site at the Hotel Carmacks Campground and just started taking everything out of the RV and dumping it onto the ground and onto our picnic table. Everything was covered in dust. A very fine and powdery dust that got into EVERYTHING. You could pretty much write your name in the dust anywhere inside of our RV.

We wiped down the entire inside at least 3 times with wet tshirts, including the floor. We wiped down all of our stuff and put it back inside. We didn't crawl into bed until about 2:30am, exhausted. A nice feature of being further south is that it does get a little dark starting at around 2am or so. The showers in the campground are expensive! We worked it out that if each of us had a 10 minute shower, it would cost as much as it did for our campsite. We have found that pay showers are the norm here in Canada and into Alaska. Not sure why, plenty of water here. That's ok, we have a little shower and full hookups. So we both had a hot 10 minute shower in our RV.