Fireweed on Dempster HIghway Photo: Jay Armitage

The Dempster Highway—Canada’s first all-weather road to cross the Arctic Circle—was officially opened on Aug. 18th, 1979, at Flat Creek, Yukon. It was touted as a two-lane, gravel-surfaced, all-weather highway that ran 671 kilometres (417 miles) from the Klondike Highway near Dawson City to Fort McPherson and Arctic Red River in the Northwest Territories. It also linked with the Mackenzie Highway at a point 67 km south of Inuvik. The Canadian Armed Forces 1 Combat Engineer Regiment from Chilliwack, B.C., built the two major bridges over the Ogilvie and Eagle Rivers. Ferries handled the traffic at Fort McPherson and Arctic Red River.

The highway didn’t look like your average road then, and it doesn’t now. That’s because it’s unique in highway design and construction. It sits on top of a gravel berm to insulate the permafrost in the soil underneath. The thickness of the gravel pad ranges from 1.2 metres up to 2.4 metres in some places (four feet to eight feet). Without the pad, the permafrost would melt and the road would sink into the ground.

The name…