Calgary to Whitehorse, Part 1
Everyone tried to tell me that it was too dangerous to hitchhike, but I wouldn’t listen. I guess I just like learning things the hard way, but I do learn from my mistakes and I’m never going to hitchhike again. We almost didn’t make it to Yellowknife alive—but we did, and I’m here to tell the tale.
It was the summer of 1985 and I was in Calgary and was trying to convince my best friend, Cindy, to move back to Yellowknife with me.
“It’s the land of opportunity,” I told her. “You’ll get a journalist job, easy, and be editor before you know it. There are so few people there that it’s easy to move up the ranks.”
Cindy had lived a safer life than me, so I was surprised and ecstatic when she told me that she was going to quit her job, dump her boyfriend and hitchhike to Yellowknife with me. Then we decided that we would first hitch to Whitehorse, just so Cindy could see it.
We told our parents that we were taking the Greyhound bus (and did, but just to Peace River). We stayed there for a few days with a friend of mine I had met while working in Norman Wells. Sue tried hard to convince us not to hitch out of Peace River because a few people had disappeared that way, lately. But we didn’t listen. We were 24 and bulletproof.
I had just got back from an epic hitchhiking trip from Whitehorse to Texas, with my friend Jessie. We got rides in big trucks the whole way. It was an awesome way to travel.
The best way to get a lift, in a semi, is to sit and drink coffee at a truck stop and chat to the drivers when they come in to eat. Since there was no truck stop near where we started, we stuck our thumbs out the old-fashioned way. It took four days to get from Peace River to Whitehorse, all in small vehicles. Not bad for 1,585 kilometres.
Our first ride was from a young couple who dropped us off in Fort St. John. Our second was a guy going to work on a road crew at Pink Mountain. I’ll never forget the first time I saw Pink Mountain. After driving through miles of wilderness, the big motel and store, perched all by itself at the top of the hill, looked so out of place.
It was June 21, summer solstice—still light enough to keep hitching, but we decided to pitch our tent and have an early night. That was until we discovered the bar in the motel and met the rest of the guys from the road crew. They invited us to come celebrate solstice with them at a cabin in the bush nearby. It was Cindy’s first solstice in the Land of the Midnight Sun, so we jumped at the chance to celebrate it. We partied late into the night and slept in the cabin. The boys woke us up early and gave us a lift back out to the highway on their way to work. In my rush to leave, I couldn’t find one of my shoes, so I put on my bald eagle slippers and hit the road! I figured I’d find it later in my bag.
I had to laugh at myself, standing on the side of the Alaska Highway, wearing my cloth slippers with a stuffed bald eagle head on them. I wondered if the drivers noticed them when they passed us.
It wasn’t long before a young guy, driving a 1940s Chevy truck, picked us up. He seemed a bit overwhelmed by his whole adventure up the Alaska Highway and his unexpected company, but we kept him entertained for two days—all the way to Watson Lake. After camping at Muncho Lake, the first night, he pulled out and started going south instead of north. Luckily, Cindy’s super sense of direction saved us from driving all the way back to Fort Nelson before we realized it!
It only takes five hours to drive from Watson Lake to Whitehorse, but it took us twice as long to hitch it. All nice rides, but just too short. Our last ride was kind enough to drive us right to my friend’s house. It took a bit of finding. All I knew was that it was an old log cabin in the bush, behind the Airline Inn. By the time we found it, my eagle slippers were covered in burrs and horsetails (I never did find my shoe).
