Yahoo Autos We Take Off to Canada's Arctic in the Mazda CX-3, CX-5, and CX-9
"First time in the North?" The indigenous gentleman's tone was at once friendly, accusatory, sympathetic, and decidedly not. I racked my brain for an eternal second, but there was simply nothing this California flatlander had experienced that was remotely like Canada's Dempster Highway. Sure, I'd tobogganed vehicles on summer tires through Colorado blizzards. Against my better judgment, I'd ridden motorcycles through sudden snowstorms when the other option was to stop and freeze solid. Staring down at the Mazda CX-5 I'd just dumped off the side of the Dempster as my interlocutor and his co-worker were hooking it up to his big Ford dually flatbed via a tow strap, I realized he'd done me in with five crisp words. I had little alternative but to force a grin and reply, "Yep! First time in the North!"
Mazda Crossovers under the Influencers
Mazda cooked up an ambitious and quite possibly harebrained scheme to show off the freshly turbocharged 2019 CX-5 alongside the C/D favorite CX-9 and the almost-a-car CX-3 on a drive to the northernmost settlement on the Canadian mainland. In a nontraditional move, a group of hired "influencers" were to accompany the quartet of journalists on this trek. Automakers have been hiring influencers for years, but not when there's this much driving involved, and blending them with journalists while attempting to meet the varying needs of both groups is highly unusual.
The presence of an additional film crew brought in by Mazda didn't seem initially odd, as manufacturers occasionally bring crews along to shoot B-roll footage of the cars. Then they asked me and Matthew de Paula of Road & Track to have a casual on-camera sit-down conversation about our impending journey. Were we the unwitting subjects of a snowbound version of Hearts of Darkness, Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper's documentary on the troubled genesis of Francis Ford Coppola's landmark Apocalypse Now?
If so, our bizarro Colonel Kurtz could be none other than Southern California's Sidney Diongzon, an impossibly cheery YouTuber willing to do pretty much anything for a laugh, including a poorly timed face-heel-turn gag in front of a couple of well-wishing Dawson City locals who were simply and rightly concerned for our safety on the following day's drive to Inuvik. The joke landed with a thud. Sidney bounced merrily away, leaving me to be embarrassed for both of us. I wasn't convinced our group was doing anything to improve strained Canadian-American relations. Beyond Sidney's gaffe, de Paula and I had begun impersonating SCTV's Bob and Doug McKenzie characters on long stints behind the wheel. Sometimes we failed to shake the extremely Canadian accents upon re-entering the public sphere. Meanwhile, the young influencers missed our Gen X touchstone references and assumed we were insulting our host country. I'm certain they had no idea why we'd taken to calling each other “hoser.”
Ice Road Crossover-ers
Forty-eight years after John Marshall found a gold nugget in a California millrace, a new gold rush gripped the Klondike region of the Yukon and Alaska. At the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers, Dawson City stood as the Sacramento of the North during the scramble for Klondike gold, its population in 1898 numbering 40,000 gold-hungry souls. Today, its inhabitants add up to little more than one-quarter of 1 percent of the California city's population. It is, however, home to some astonishing survivor automobiles.
I caught a shockingly clean first-generation Mercury Sable parked on the street, showing not a hint of rust. In the Yukon, they keep the salt for their potatoes and use coarse gravel for traction on the roads, which has its own deleterious and sometimes violent side effects. While you might conceivably get 30 years out of a car up there, you'll likely replace a whole mess of windshields over the machine's life span. In fact, after our 1700-mile convoy from Fort Saint John in northeastern British Columbia to the Inuvialuit hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic Ocean, each and every vehicle required new forward glass.
With our windshields already pitted and cracking from rocks kicked up on the largely dry roads of B.C. and the southern Yukon, we rolled out of Dawson and headed for the Dempster Highway, hoping to make it to the Eagle Plains road-closure gate when it opened at 1 p.m., as it would likely close again an hour later and stay shut until the next day, meaning we might never make it north of the Yukon.
As dawn arrived at midmorning, the sky was overcast and the road surface bridal white. Everything within sight carried at least a light dusting of snow. With next to no road signage and nothing in the way of billboards, the world had turned entirely monochrome, save for the taillights of the cars ahead of us. While I was contemplating the emotional effect a sudden global absence of color has on a person, a call came in over the radio. Sidney calmly announced that his vehicle was off the road. An all-stop order went out, and the crew CX-9s outfitted with racks, light bars, and recovery equipment trundled back to retrieve the fallen crossover.
Much of the Dempster appears to ride atop a low levee, trapezoidal in shape. The roadbed itself consists of dirt and rock laid over permafrost, while the compacted snow and ice on the surface act as a binder, as asphalt does for blacktop aggregate. Crews periodically come along with a serrated dozer blade and cut into the ice, leaving a surface akin to that of a grooved-concrete roadway. With winter-hero Bridgestone Blizzaks installed on the all-wheel-drive Mazdas, the grooved ice offered a surprising amount of lateral grip-as long as the tires stayed in firm contact with the ice. The only time we'd begin to slide was if we clipped a midcorner snow drift.
Aside from the rough weather, unpredictable wildlife, lack of cell signal, and a nigh-unfathomable dearth of civilization, the Dempster Highway features a persistent, built-in winter hazard that may trump the others. For a few feet on either side, the highway has an illusory shoulder made of soft snow that has been pushed off onto the slope of the roadbed and then leveled by passing plows. It looks just like a hard road shoulder, but put a single wheel wrong and it's as good as driving into a pit of blanched quicksand. The better part of an hour passed while the crew towed the influencers' CX-5 back up the embankment, an ordeal from which it emerged surprisingly unscathed.
My own "journey beyond the Dempster," as it quickly became known, was less spectacular. Despite the CX-5's fine cabin materials, driver-centric ergonomics, and excellent chassis, I was exhausted from the 250-mile run to Eagle Plains. It demands strict concentration to stay in the center of what's essentially a 1.5-lane, drift-strewn path lined with tiger traps for hours on end. Relaxed upon encountering better conditions on the far side of the gate and offline without realizing it, due to the white roostertail behind the car ahead, I put my left-front wheel onto the false shoulder at the exit of a corner. Although carrying a speed that guaranteed a trip down into the white depths, I was moving slowly enough that there was absolutely no sensation of impact in the soft, dry snow. It was like settling rapidly into a down pillow. From outside the car, the shunt must have resembled Derp: the Textbook Illustration. It sure felt like it from inside.
Handily, the aboriginal gentleman and his partner happened by within seconds of the incident, and within the span of a couple of cigarettes, I was back on the road to Inuvik with nary a scratch on the Mazda. We paused at a barren rest stop marking the intersection of the Dempster Highway and the Arctic Circle. To defend against the tundra's merciless winds, the two wooden outhouses featured industrial-strength hinge springs. I wedged into the door's crack, using my core to pop it open and subsequently tumble in. I suspect the Canadians chose the Kodiak-grade springs to ensure that reliable hilarity ensues whenever folks gotta go.
Of Hosers and Holy Folk
Out of the blue dusk and into the snowblown black with de Paula at the helm, we rolled into the Northwest Territories. At the Mackenzie River ice bridge, I burst into an abrupt, intense fit of laughter. Across the road, two men in orange exposure suits were drawing water from a pond and spraying it high into the Arctic darkness, presumably in a bid to reinforce the frozen river we'd just traversed. They sprayed wantonly, they sprayed purposefully-they were honest-to-god Canadian Hosers. Our days of ongoing, mildly disrespectful idiocy had just been validated by beautiful happenstance.
Although our trip now was complete from my perspective (freaking Hosers! in Canada!), we drove on to Inuvik and up to Tuktoyaktuk the next day, stopping at a house next to a quaint little church and the now landborne boat that ferried the first Catholic priest to Tuk. Upon removing our boots, we were greeted by Sister Fay Trombley, a nun who'd elected to finish out her career up on the wintry edge of nowhere, giving children a safe place to go when things get rough at home, running a food bank, and offering sundry assistance and spiritual counsel to what is fundamentally a very poor community. I'm a little anxious around nuns and priests, although not for a particularly common reason. Before they met and married, those were the jobs my mother and father held. "Oh, Sister Fay! Yeah, nice to meet you! Y'know, my mom used to do what you do, but then she met my dad and they largely bailed on the church." It's all just a little . . . uncomfortable.
I stayed quiet, ate my caribou-and-macaroni soup with homemade bread, clicked away with my Canon, and missed my late parents while quietly basking in the generalized warmth emanating from the old nun. Down in Inuvik, they run the entire town on diesel generators, but they could just as easily power the place with Sister Fay.
Standing Still in Ice-Cold Ice
Back outside, I stood atop the Arctic Ocean for a brief moment. Hailing from a valley where all ice is thin ice meant fighting decades of accumulated subconscious impulses suggesting that standing on top of an ocean was a stupid idea. This despite the fact that we'd driven across a river the night before. Laugh at the 'fraidy Californian, Mr. Minnesota. It doesn't make you people any less bonkers.
With my gloves insufficient for more than a few minutes outdoors in a top-of-the-world winter climate where the sun can't struggle over the horizon, I clambered into the back of a Mazda to warm up. I spent some time talking to a girl I like as the outside world fell back into darkness. Then, in what was the clear fundamental inverse of Brando's classic "the horror . . ." speech in Apocalypse Now, Sidney built up a head of steam, dove onto the hard-packed snow of the parking lot, and let loose with a hearty and well-practiced "Woohoo!" while sliding along on his belly. It was dark, but this was no heart of darkness.
That final night, we made a failed attempt to see the Northern Lights. My long exposures weren't picking up the characteristic cascading green ribbons of light. I wasn't really quite sure just what I was seeing in the sky. Tired and foiled again by cold hands, I got into the CX-9 I'd driven out there, hit the steering-wheel heater, plugged my phone into the stereo, and cued up a YouTube Bob and Doug McKenzie playlist.
As the influencers chattered into their cameras in the cold, the three other journalists joined me, and we passed the rest of our time parked out on the icy, empty Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk Highway by bingeing clips of The Great White North in the wide-open expanses of same. Somehow, it seemed a more appropriate coda to the journey than waiting around for a dirt-common aurora that's visible even to those puffin-plucking Icelanders.
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