To Find the Hand of Franklin

Climbing the World Mountain

Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak

The Best Laid Plans

…but I ask NOT for your understanding and forgiveness for what I’ve done in the past. I only ask for your understanding and forgiveness for what I’m about to do.
-Vince Mcmahon

I have some very patient and understanding subscribers. I try to keep a tempo of 1 piece a week going out, but this collapses regularly when I’m working on long projects or have other events happening in my life.

I haven’t been posting as much the later half of May and most of this June, and I really should apologize for that, especially to my paid subscribers who while acting as my patrons and supporters, are also my customers and have nominally purchased a product and/or service.

So I should apologize for the delay and promise I’ll shape up and post more consistently… Except I’m probably setting myself up to do it again this month (though I do have a plan to keep content going out, and I’ll have LOTS of content in the pipe by the end of the month if it’s not out)

Part of the reason for this delay has been the series of festivals I just attended… But a larger part has been the VERY intensive task of preparing for the next adventure:

Taking a little over one month and what will quickly add up to over 200 hours of travel time (of which at least 25 hours will be ferry time) this trip will be the biggest of my life so far.

Travelling from Toronto to Chicago to celebrate the 4th of July with friends. A friend and I will be travelling across the American high plains and northwest rockies to Portland, Oregon for a get together of old online friends. After picking up more friends, From there we will get the ferry from Port Angeles, Washington to Victoria, British Columbia, drive up the spine of Vancouver Island and set sail on the 17 hour ferry across open pacific ocean and narrow mountain Fjords from Port Hardy to Prince Rupert.

Once back on the mainland we will drive through 15 hours of the most remote mountain passes I’ve ever charted, across the permanently glaciated and snow capped mountains of the Coast Range to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory… and from here it gets a little tricky. There’s a reason I’m displaying all of this in Bing maps instead of Google. (which only manages to map it 10% of the time)

Depending on the course of wildfires currently raging we may have to chart different routes, (indeed if there are wildfires in BC we might need to take the EXTREME long way round, but fingers crossed) but hopefully we’ll be able to proceed as planned and take the Klondike highway further north towards Dawson City, however if the wildfires are raging we may need to swing around through Alaska along the Top of the World highway then catch the Ferry across the Yukon River to Dawson.

From there the challenging part begins: The Dempster Highway. From Dawson city the 926 kilometers (575 miles) are wholly unpaved, instead being a surface of coarse jagged shale gravel. With several connections only being possible via muddy ferry landings across the massive Peel River and mile wide Mackenzie…

And then finally, the last stretch only opened in 2017, along the final arctic stretch to the end of the road, and some might say the end of the earth.

Tuktoyaktuk on the Beaufort Sea. The Arctic Ocean.

And then of course we have to come back… down the dempster highway the exact same way we came, across the ferry at Dawson to the top of the world Highway in Alaska to Anchorage, where I can drop of several friends who have to get flights and get back to their day job….

And That’s the halfway point… Still have to drive back from Anchorage to Toronto.

Because it’s there

Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea
—Stan Rogers

Arctic expeditions have been a fascination of mine since I was a small child. There was a craze in the commonwealth for the Shackleton expedition when I was a kid and I remember in quick succession watching the Kenneth Branagh Miniseries, several documentaries, and the highlight of the school year, Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure in Imax OMNIMAX at the Ontario Science Center with the wrap around dome screen.

Surviving photo of Shackleton’s ship Endurance before it crushed in the Ice, 1915.

I might have seen various versions of Shackleton fail, watch his ship crushed, and then miraculously rescue his entire crew (not a man lost) across hundreds of miles of pack ice, hundreds more of stormy frigid southern ocean, and an, until then, unsummited mountain range… I might have seen that 6-10 times by the time I reached my teens.

Of course the spell Shackleton cast had a unique appeal to Canadians. Despite having ventured to the South pole, the stories of frigid hardship, toes lost to frostbite, and extraordinary miserable effort for the reward of bare survival… this spoke deeply to hearts of people in the great white north. In a way I doubt all these BBC productions did for their British and Australian audiences.

I remember on cold winter nights as a kid my mother reading for me haunting northern stories like Robert Service’s Cremation of Sam Mcgee and Jack London’s To Build a Fire, and my dad recounting the history of the Mad Trapper of Rat River, WW1 fighter Ace Wop May’s adventures in the Arctic, and watching the barely related, completely fictionalized, filmic BANGER, the Charles Bronson/Lee Marvin Rambo-clone Death Hunt. And then back to Antartica maybe my favourite horror film as a teen was John Carpenter’s The Thing

Aside from that I must have watched or read dozens if not hundreds of expedition retellings, pioneer stories, and northern tales of survival and wilderness justice as a kid.

And of course like almost every “old-stock” Canadian I followed the discovery of the Franklin Expedition’s lost ships with keen interest.

The doomed expedition is of course mythologized as can be… any story that ends with “And none of them were found” inherently lends itself to every kind of speculation and fictionalization… There’s a reason the “Lost Legions” of rome have inspired so many books and stories, yet the ones we have detailed accounts of inspire little such regiment specific interest.

I really dug the miniseries The Terror which in spite of it’s supernatural elements (or were they psychological?) includes an impressive amount of historical detail and texture.

Most people from most normal cultures might think it’s weird how much of Canadian nationalism and anglo-Canadian culture celebrates a Doomed expedition… but remember Franklin was a Veteran of the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812, and had had other successful polar expeditions, and one notorious one marked by rumours of murder and cannibalism, leading to Franklin’s epithet “The man who ate his boot”.

This was the 19th century equivalent of space exploration, even with all the northern horrors you aren’t going to take the shine off a Veteran war hero of the British Empire who ventured 4 times into the great white unknown before romantically disappearing off the edge of the earth.

Even after all the grisly discoveries, and the uninterning of the Expeditions mummified remains, the popular imagination in Canada is still driven by the Stan Rogers song rather than by the John Carpenter inspired miniseries.

And, indeed i intend to inflict a great deal of obscure Canadian folk music on my expedition partners over the course of my trip.

Are you going to Freeze to Death?

Doubtful.

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We’re heading out in the high summer and while the temperature does regularly snap down below freezing at night, and while we COULD hypothetically get stranded for a day or so in a freak blizzard (especially in the mountains)… I expect to be wearing shorts a good number of the days we’re up north.

The real hazard to the trip are the already alluded wildfires, which while unlikely to get us, could certainly shut down roads and make a nightmare of navigation in a region where there is regular only 1 road connecting anything to anything.

Another hazzard is Rain. because of the little vegetation resulting from the extreme cold and lack of sunlight throughout the year, the Arctic can behave a lot like the desert and flash floods and sudden bogging down in mud can make messes of a trip and render unpaved routes unpassable (think of what happened at Burning Man 2023).

Not to mention the rivers large and small are wild and unpredictable, so there is risk that low lying sections of paved roads might become impassible or ferries might be delayed or not running due to weather.

On the extremely hypothetical there are active volcanoes in the Coastal Range… so you could hypothetically get a St Helena type event that disrupts a lot.

But realistically the greatest hazard, and the one that involves risks greater than a few days delays, is the hazard of travelling that many hour via road on highways where conditions can quickly deteriorate.

I’m not going to eat my boot, and I’m quite keen to avoid eating my airbag.

Beyond that there’s the psychological hazard of journeying somewhere where the sun does not set for 24 hours straight (we are going to get several nightless days) and I’m makin sure to bring additional sleeping masks to avoid a groggy sleep deprived misery overtaking my crew.

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Originally I had planned to make this trip by Motorcycle, and I’ve met a few people who’ve done it on adventure bikes not dissimilar to the one I had… but a combination of lockdowns and a motorcycle accident rendered that legally and then physically impossible at the time.

The Next Month of my Life…

So ya, for the next month I’m going to be travelling, and hopefully getting lots of travel writing done.

I’ll be updating regularly and writing small pieces on the progress of the trip, and hopefully finally finish a long piece I’ve been planning on Car Prepping (now complete with experience).

I’ll also be reading and commenting on Sir John Franklin’s account of his earlier, ever so slightly less doomed 1819-1822 overland expedition: Journey to the Polar Sea. (when he ate his boot)

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I’m really looking forward to it!

And again I really want to thank my paid subscribers.

All of this would be impossible if I were dependent on a normal 9 to 5 to keep the lights on. The fact that this venture is now just barely “Ramen profitable” is a real game changer for me.

Thank you all so much!

Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak

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Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak