Driving the Dempster Hwy

We came off the Dempster on Wednesday, June 26. We started back from Inuvik to Eagle Plains on Tuesday morning (the 25th). It had been raining all night, from Inuvik to Eagle Pains and maybe further south. Long stretches were extremely slick; in fact, the road was closed from Eagle Plains to the NWT border from sometime early in the morning until about 11 am or so (NWT time), and we were one of the first ones to cross south on the Peel River ferry when it reopened. It was slow going and downright treacherous in spots, and every vehicle was coated with the black goo that the highway kicks up when it's really wet. I was very happy that we had decided not to tow our travel trailer on our Dempster trip, not only because of the slippery sections, but also because the frequent rough, washboard and pothole stretches of road would have been hard on the trailer. Truck campers and truck body campers do okay -- we saw a lot of them, but many fewer trailers and no big rig RV's. But I knew that the rough sections of the Dempster would bounce and twist a heavy towed vehicle such as a travel trailer with the exaggerated effect of a teeter-totter, because this was our experience towing over the Labrador Highway two years ago, and I did not want to replicate that experience on the Dempster, which is just an up-and-back trip to destinations that have decent places to stay -- a bit pricey, but decent. Having said this, the Dempster and Tuk roads are, as others have noted, excellent unpaved roads for some very long stretches -- certainly for more than a majority of their combined length of 500+ miles -- and the trip as a whole is absolutely worth it -- an adventure to a couple of very interesting towns, with some of the most outstanding scenery in the world along the way, if it's sunny, which it was for us the entire way up to Tuktoyaktuk and from Eagle Plains to Dawson coming home.