On to Inuvik
All photos link to large versions
The Peel River Ferry runs continuously from 7 am through midnight. It can handle two semis, or about 6 or 8 cars and trucks.
Once across the Peel River, you drive past Fort McPerson, and on to the even larger MacKenzie River, where a larger ferry runs on the same schedule. The MacKenzie river empties something like 20% of Canada and is the second largest river in North America (after the Mississippi.)
That debris in the foreground is logs that the ferry just plows through. This is the only place on the trip where the horseflies and mosquitoes were bad.
This is the Inuit community of Tsigehtchic. It is on the same side of the MacKenzie as Fort MacPerson, but across the Artic Red River, which enters the MacKenzie at this point. So the ferry makes a stop here, too.
I arrived at Inuvik at about 10 pm on June 20 - a 16 hour drive from Whitehorse (1650 kilometers.) I checked into my hotel (which cost $130 but is kinda like a big, rundown Motel 6) and asked what time the sun got closest to the horizon. I was told 4 am, which turned out to be wrong. Anyway, I wandered around town looking for a beer, trying The Mad Trapper Pub, which had live music but seemed way too rough, and ended up at the lounge of the MacKenzie Hotel just at last call (midnight) for an $8 beer.
I set my clock for 3:30 am and drove north on the road to Tuktoyuktuk, which is closed in the summer becasue it is an ice road. Still, I got a little way out of town so I could photograph the sun moving horizontally across the horizon. I took a few pictures but then realized it was already on its way up. Here's what I got.
This is looking back towards town - Inuvik at 4 am on June 21, 2009.
All the buildings are built above ground.
The Mad Trapper Pub at 4 am. The place was crawling with teenagers in Tshirts at midnight. Of course, it was broad daylight then. There is a whole lore about the Mad Trapper, a guy who showed up in Fort McPerson in 1931 and got himself into trouble with the RCMP, killing one, and making a rather incredible escape across 150 miles in the dead of winter, where he was finally tracked down and killed. You can read about it here.