Day 32 – Now, How Do We Cross That River?

Growing up in Seattle, I am very familiar with the open-ended ferries that regularly transport vehicles and passengers to different ports along the Puget Sound. However, ferry travel up north is a much different prospect. For example, the Yukon River (Well, all the rivers up there) freezes every year.  After it has frozen solid, they grade an “ice road” across the river to access the far shore all winter. In the spring, when the ice begins to soften, they must stop using the ice road and the ferry can’t begin to run until the river is completely open again. There is a similar situation in the fall after the river begins to freeze but is not solid enough for the road. During those intermediate times, to travel to the far shore people must go by air or land using snow mobiles, dog sleds, or sometimes a 4-wheel drive vehicle can make the difficult journey on land. It is pretty restrictive for the folks who live on the far side of the river during fall and spring.

 The ferry at Dawson has an open car deck and it is small. They run 24 hours a day 7 days a week. It is quite the experience riding on this ferry because there is no dock to land on! After the river breaks up in the spring, the workers grade a slope to the river for the ferry to land at. When the ferry arrives at the landing, the crew lower a metal ramp onto the dirt while the ferry has its engines running to keep it secure to the bank. Although it is small, this ferry can take a semi-truck across the river, and those huge RVs regularly go across. Sometimes for the bigger RV’s the ferry workers throw down a couple of boards on the dirt to adjust the slope so the rigs don’t scrape the shore.

Now, the Dawson ferry is fairly small, but little did we know that traveling to the Arctic Ocean we would ride on two ferries that were smaller still! Part way up the Dempster Highway, to get across the Peel River you go on a tiny ferry that is pulled across with a cable. This ferry has specific times a day to run 9:30 to 12:45 AM. While we were there, a worker was fixing the landing site.

The next ferry crosses the Mackenzie River which is a larger river than the Peel. Although small, it was bigger than the cable ferry and a fairly new boat with the bridge spanning the deck. The crew for this ferry, and all of the others that we rode, were all very friendly and obviously experienced at their jobs. The schedule for this boat is 8:30 to 11:30 PM.

These two ferries are scheduled to allow the drive time between them heading south at the end of the day. However, the speed for those roads was 100 kph (about 62 mph) and while these were actually better roads than other parts of the Dempster, most of the time there were so many bumps, dips, and ruts that we were lucky to go 50 to 80 kph (about 35 mph to 55 mph). The locals would fly by us, but they were very polite. Typically, they would wave or honk, and then turn on their turn signals as they sped down the road. We think that they spent more of their time above the road surface bouncing from bump to bump.  Or maybe they have hover cars? Regardless, our progress was much slower, and needless to say, we never tried to time it to ride on that last ferry of the day!

In contrast to the ferries in the Yukon and Northern Territories, the Alaska State Ferry that took us from Haines, AK, to Skagway, AK,was a giant! In reality, it is smaller than our Puget Sound Ferries, but it did hold many more vehicles than any of the other ferries we rode. One main difference for this ferry is that the vehicles load from the side into an enclosed car deck. The Alaska ferries sail to many ports on the Inside Passage and can encounter much rougher water than the relatively protected Puget Sound.

Whether big or small, we enjoyed each boat experience and we appreciate the ingenuity of the early travelers to this region who answered the question “Now, how do we cross that river?”