THE OVERLAND TRAIN

The Yukon is a new place.

It is odd really, as you drive across Canada you actually drive across time. Way back in the day Samuel Champlain and the bunch settled the East Coast for France. Wars ensued and British came. Famines ensued and Irish came. And eventually everyone moved West. And so with every kilometre travelled the towns were settled later and later.

It was not until the turn of the previous century that these Europeans, and in fact people from all over the world decided to brave the Chilkoot Pass and head North in search of Gold.

A few thousand years earlier it was the Tlingit who came from Russia in chasing Mastodon across Beringia.

People were not the natural inhabitants of the Yukon.

That gives you some pause. Africa has civilizations that stretch back tens of thousands of years, Europe looks more like 5,000. The Tlingit who did stay here, fishing and hunting, were few and far between - and it was not until the lure of Gold that people really began settling in.

To be fair, it is not easy to get from here to there when you are up North.

Dog sleds were probably the most effective means of winter transit for hundreds of years, and even dogs don't want to pull a sled when the temperatures go to -40.

The transit museum here in Whitehorse is a really interesting place to see how it went from dog sled and overland hiking, through canoe and steamship, onto rail and air, and finally cars began to be built that could withstand the conditions. But, as the museum explains, nothing built anywhere else worked effectively here. So even if you were rich enough and dumb enough to by a Ford truck back in the early 1900's - where were you going to get parts?

Besides, there was not a highway to be found until World War Two and some interesting territorial disputes over Alaska when the US sent in the Engineers.

One of my favourite vehicles was the Letourneau Land Train that the US engineers used to get stuff around up here. It is huge and unlike anything I had ever seen.

It all makes you think about how transportation is necessary for communication, for supplies, for life... I guess everyone knows this - but it is so easy and so taken for granted back in New Brunswick that one never stops and thinks - what if there were no way a truck could get through? What if there were no highways?

How quickly would society start to fall apart without a means of transportation? And how much is a place still defined as "wild" when what we really mean is that it is hard to get there.