Dempster Highway

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Dempster Highway
map
Basic data
Operator:	Yukon Department of Highways and Public Works
Start of the street:	25 miles east of Dawson ( 63 ° 59 ′  N , 138 ° 45 ′  W )
End of street:	Inuvik ( 68 ° 21 ′  N , 133 ° 42 ′  W )
Overall length:	736 km
Region :
The highway in the Richardson Mountains

The Dempster Highway , often referred to as Yukon Highway 5 and Northwest Territories Highway 8 , is a Canadian highway that begins about 40 kilometers east of Dawson City in Yukon on the Klondike Highway and ends 736 kilometers later in Inuvik , Northwest Territories .

The extension, the Inuvik – Tuktoyaktuk Highway (Northwest Territories Highway 10), as a year-round drivable road 138 kilometers further north to the settlement of Tuktoyaktuk on the north coast of Canada, began in January 2014 and opened in November 2017. This section was previously known as the Tuktoyaktuk Winter Road and, as an ice road, was only passable in winter. The connection there ran over the frozen Mackenzie River Delta . He crossed the Peel Rivers and the Mackenzie Rivers using a combination of seasonal ferry service and ice bridges.

history

The Dempster Highway near the Yukon-NWT border. Image taken on Wright Pass heading south to the Richardson Mountains

Road sign on the Dempster Highway

Large parts of the highway follow an old dog sled trail. The highway is named after Inspector William John Duncan Dempster of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police , a young police officer who frequently used the route between Dawson City and Fort McPherson (Northwest Territories) with his sled dogs . Dempster and two other police officers were assigned a rescue mission in March 1911 to find Inspector Francis Joseph Fitzgerald and three of his men, as they had never arrived on their scheduled winter patrol in Dawson City. Dempster and his colleagues finally found the people who had died in early February on March 21, 1911 just a few miles from Fort McPherson and buried them on March 28, 1911.

In 1958 the Canadian government made the decision to build a 671 km long road through the arctic wilderness from Dawson City to Inuvik. Large oil and gas reserves were found in the Mackenzie Delta, and the town of Inuvik was under construction.

On August 17, 1959, the Canadian government announced that oil had been found in the Eagle Plains and granted concessions to the oil industry to discover even larger reserves in the region. It has been noticed that a highway across the Arctic Circle was necessary to transport material and infrastructure to the oil deposits. As a consequence, construction began in Dawson City in January 1959. The high construction costs and discussions between the Canadian government and that of the Yukon Territory meant that construction progressed very slowly until 1961. At this point the construction was stopped. Only 115 km of the road had been built by then. The highway was known as Highway 11 until 1978.

No progress was made until 1968 when huge oil and gas reserves were found in Prudhoe Bay , Alaska . This led to increased racing between Canada and the United States . The Canadian government feared that the US could develop the oil field without considering its neighbors. The government wanted to preserve Canadian sovereignty off the Yukon coast in the Beaufort Sea .

construction

The Dempster Highway, the only Canadian all-weather road north of the Arctic Circle until 2017, was officially opened on August 18, 1979 in Flat Creek, Yukon. The road was a two-lane, weatherproof gravel road, which led over a distance of 671 kilometers from the Klondike Highway near Dawson City to Fort McPherson and Tsiigehtchic . The 1st Engineering Troop of the Canadian military built the two most important bridges over the Ogilvie River and the Eagle River.

Web links

Commons : Dempster Highway  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Detailed information on the Highway (Engl.)
• map

Individual evidence

1. ^ Inuvik Tuktoyaktuk - Official Opening Ceremonies. In: Communications and Public Affairs - Infrastructure. Government of Northwest Territories, accessed October 6, 2019 . 
2. ↑ WJD Dempster (1876-1964). (PDF; 1.4 MB) Arctic Institute of North America, p. 1 , accessed on January 20, 2013 (English).