It’s not much fun contemplating leaving your wife and four year old son stranded in a broken down van in the middle of nowhere in near-freezing temperatures.

Ron, the guy with the stuck transmission, and I, arrived in Eagle Plains at around 9pm, courtesy of a German couple in a rented truck camper. We first inquired about a tow truck at the service station, where we were told to go ask for Stan in the lounge. Stan had already retired for the evening. It was quickly looking like we weren’t going to be getting our trucks (and our families) off the road until morning. Worse yet, they would be stranded out there without us for the night. Ron suggested getting a room in the lodge, but I quickly had visions of explaining to Jen how it came to be that I spent the evening in a warm hotel drinking beer with my new Canadian friend while she slept in a cold van parked on an angle in the middle of the road while trying to keep Quinn warm.

A couple of travelers in a minivan took pity on us and were filling up with gas to take us back to our vehicles when we were told that there was a mechanic on site who had driven down from Inuvik to repair a broken-down semi truck. When we found him, he generously offered to drive us south and try to get us on the road again.

When we finally arrived back at the van, Robert the mechanic threw a piece of cardboard down in the muck and started to poke around trying to find the problem. Keep in mind that underside of the van (okay the entire van except maybe the hood) was completely coated in mud. He didn’t find anything immediately wrong, so he and Ron continued on down the road to Ron’s truck, thinking that the stuck transmission would be a quick repair. In the meantime, I set up the tow rope so that Robert could tow us back to town with his pickup when he returned.

While I’d been gone, Jen had tried to start up our diesel heater, but it would not start – the error code said that there was no fuel. So when we started thinking about it I realized that I had run our rear tank down to about 1/4 full, then switched to the front tank. The gauge read full, but we suspected that the tank selector hadn’t actually switched over and that we’d run the rear tank out of fuel.

When Robert returned (he’d been able to get Ron moving by clearing away the mud that had gotten into the transmission shift linkages), he put some fuel in our rear tank and the van started right up!. Once the diesel heater runs out of fuel it’s a bit of work to get it started again, and since it was after 11pm when we arrived in Eagle Plains, we decided to conserve heat in the van by not popping the top up in our usual sleeping configuration. So with Quinn and Jen on the dinette bed and me on the floor, we did our best to make ourselves comfortable in our makeshift sleeping arrangement and called it a night.

The next morning we filled the rear fuel tank (the only one we could use since the fuel tank selector still didn’t work) and continued our drive north to Inuvik. Fortunately there is a fuel stop mid-way so we could cover the distance using only the rear tank.

A couple of hours after leaving Eagle Plains we crossed the Arctic Circle – the first time any of us have been this far north.

Crossing the arctic circle!

We were fortunate to see part of one of the small caribou herds that calls the area home year around. The world’s largest caribou herd lives here in the winter.

Finally some real caribou wih the classic antlers

As we crossed over Windy pass on our way down to the Mackenzie delta region, we could see that it had snowed on the road the day before. We dropped about 700 meters to Fort McPherson for the final leg into Inuvik.

Snow on Windy Pass

On the ferry across the Mackenzie river

We arrived in Inuvik tired and muddy at about 9pm. Since we couldn’t open any of the doors on the van without getting ourselves muddy and it would take awhile to get our heater started again to ward off the cold, we opted for two nights in the luxury of a hotel – our first since staying with my parents in Worland Wyoming in mid-July. We all got hot showers, and Quinn enjoyed playing in the bathtub!

In Inuvik after the muddy trip up the Dempster.