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In the Yukon, visitors seek the elusive mammoth
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By Ed Readicker-Henderson
Florida Sun-Sentinal
Posted February 6 2005
Travel is always a learning experience, and here's what I learned today: If I had been a caveman, I would have died young and hungry.
In Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, I find myself with an atl-atl in my hand.
"Hold it like this," the museum guide from the Beringia Centre says. The Centre is dedicated to showing that during the last ice age, this upper left corner of Canada was actually quite warm and toasty. It was part of a vast steppe -- think Wyoming plains -- called Beringia, which also covered most of Alaska, stretching into Siberia. It was a region of giant steppe bison, beavers the size of ottomans and sloths the size of Volkswagens; hunting them were the first North Americans, who'd just come across the Bering land bridge.
And so the atl-atl, the height of caveman technology: They could bring down a woolly mammoth with these things. The guide shows an elderly lady how to hold the yard-long throwing stick part of the atl-atl. Together, they knock an arrow into its base. "Now -- just like you were throwing a baseball."
The lady uncoils, the arrow flies 40 feet and whacks the cutout of a cave bear.
After my turn, while I check for blood on my feet and on the arrow that hit them, the lady has the manners not to laugh. "I used to play a lot of softball," she explains.
Despite my utter failure at being a caveman, I'm undeterred. I have come to the Yukon because I need a mammoth. Maybe needing a mammoth is an urge that doesn't make a lot of sense, but there it is. I live in the desert, it was summer, I was hot. Then I read a 1901 report of the discovery of a mammoth carcass frozen in the Siberian steppe. When they dug it out -- "Some time before the mammoth body came in view I smelt its anything but pleasant odor."-- they discovered it had a mouth full of buttercups, which had been perfectly preserved for more than 25,000 years.
I needed to find me one of those.
And so I went north with a simple itinerary in mind: from Whitehorse to Dawson City, where the great Klondike gold rush was centered, and then north on the Dempster Highway, which leads straight up to the small town of Inuvik, Northwest Territories, right at the mouth of the Mackenzie River, 150 miles above the Arctic Circle.
I'm only a couple hours out of Whitehorse before I have to slam on the brakes. A sign tells me that the village of Carmacks has the world's only working mammoth trap, which is apparently a series of huge rabbit snares strung between thin spruce trees.
According to the sign, "The mammoths, as they were nearing extinction, became a threat to people. ... The Northern Tuchtone devised this elaborate snare system to rid their land of this most feared predator."
Let's get serious. When woolly mammoths roamed this land, there were no trees for hundreds of miles; the ice age glaciers were actually to the south, leaving the north full of low, yummy plants perfect for furry elephants. Mammoths had only four teeth, each shaped something like a brick -- not exactly threatening. They could grind down a couple hundred pounds of plants a day, but being a "feared predator"? Only if they stepped on you.
Back in the car, I'm thinking, woolly mammoth trap or tourist trap? Hey, it caught me.
It isn't exactly what catches most people, though, because even today, they're here for the gold. In 1898, upward of 100,000 people came to Dawson City, hiking the Chilkoot Trail, then building boats and floating the Yukon River north, because they'd heard rumors of nuggets the size of eggs, laying on the ground.
Official estimates are that fewer than 50 prospectors actually got rich in the Klondike; the rest got cold and hungry.
Dawson City is false-front buildings, mud streets, tourists buying gold jewelry as if they weren't a hundred years too late. The old requirements -- all miners had to bring a ton of supplies with them, enough to last a year -- seem to be echoed in the RVs parked along the banks of the Yukon.
The town has an end-of-the-world vibe; everybody genuinely wants to be here, and even if not many of them go to the museum to see the piece of dried woolly mammoth
Mammoth finds were actually a side effect of the gold rush. It was inevitable, with all those people digging. In fact, there were so many tusks around that miners built cabins with them.
But by now, every inch of soil within miles of Dawson has been turned over a hundred times; the landscape looks churned, blended, and you get the idea that before another blade of grass can grow, somebody will be digging again.
There can't possibly be anything left, so I light out for the Northwest Territories.
The Dempster Highway is Canada's northernmost road, stretching more than 450 miles from Dawson to the road's end in Inuvik, NWT; the pavement gives out after only a few miles, but it's smooth dirt and gravel, and as long as I occasionally get out and clean mud off the rear window, I'm OK.
The road is quickly surrounded by mountains that look like they were drawn by kids who just discovered a full and very sharp crayon box. At the Tombstone Mountain Visitor's Center, I'm apparently the first person to ask the ranger about mammoths.
"Most people just want to know about the mosquitoes," she says.
Ah, OK, the mosquitoes. Imagine ground fog so thick your headlights can't cut through it. Up here, that would be swarms of mosquitoes.
The forest gives way to tundra, and tundra, as always, makes me happy. It's just like a forest, but in miniature: berries larger than the bushes they grow on -- I've seen a couple grizzly bears contentedly munching away -- and willow trees an inch tall and a hundred years old. "Saxifrage," I say, with utter contentment, looking at a square foot of tundra that has, as best I can count, 40 species of plants.
At sunset, which this time of year is right around midnight, the tundra glows like a bowl of cereal, all marshmallows and sugar color.
It's time to go mammoth hunting. I'd gotten instructions from experts: "Walk a streambed, and look at the high-water mark. Spring floods expose the tusks and bones."
I stop at a likely looking river, scramble down the banks. The mosquitoes hit instantly; from a distance, I must look like one of those guys wearing a bee beard, but I haven't seen another car in hours, so there's nobody I can check with. Most people turn back south at the Arctic Circle, contented with crossing an imaginary line.
We move together, the mosquitoes and I, searching for mammoth bits. And this is when I realize there's a slight flaw in my plan: I have no idea exactly what I'm looking for. Unless it looks like a prop from The Flintstones, would I even recognize a mammoth bone if I saw one?
I pick up a couple rocks, hopeful. Pretty sure they're rocks. Probably they're rocks. I pick a couple tiny flowers, a delicate white, and press them in my notebook. Then the mosquitoes and I get back in the truck to try another river. And another. There's a stream, a river, another wide swath of tundra around every bend in the road; between them are arctic vistas that knock me back in sheer glee: top of the world, Ma!
And here at the top of the world, me and the mosquitoes are having a really good time. They have a willing bloody supply. I have the Red River, which is startlingly red. The Peel River braids and twists like a nest of very large snakes. I stop at a pass in the Richardson Mountains, and the land below drops away into clouds; I drive away with no idea what the Richardsons look like, because they, too, were in cloud, and for a while I drive between layers of white, the road ahead cutting through a landscape that looks newly hatched.
I have it all to myself, except for a porcupine the size of a sheepdog waddling across the road.
Late in the day, I stand beside the grandest of arctic rivers, the MacKenzie. No mammoth bones conveniently present themselves, but I'm not all that disappointed.
I can hear the hissing of silt -- First Nations people called this sound the "voices of the ancestors" -- in the river, but what the sound points out to me is that after all that tundra, the Mackenzie warms the land here, and its banks are lined with Canada's northernmost trees.
The landscape is so surprising that nothing can be surprising.
I think about setting up some giant rabbit slings, just in case there's still a mammoth or two out there. |
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