Why the Yukon Feels Different From Every Other Place I've Travelled

People ask me why I keep going back to the Yukon. I've been to forty countries and most of the interesting corners of Canada, and I still find myself planning another trip north. I've been trying to explain it for years, and I'm not sure I've ever done it well — but here's my best attempt. ## The scale is the first thing The landscape argument is the easy one. The Yukon is enormous and dramatic: mountains that run past the horizon, valleys with no road in them, and rivers the colour of jade. It's bigger than most countries and home to fewer than fifty thousand people, most of whom live in [Whitehorse](/blog/whitehorse-essential-guide). Step off the highway and you can be genuinely, completely alone in a way that is almost impossible to find anymore. ## But emptiness isn't the whole of it Plenty of places are big and empty. What gets me about the Yukon is the combination of that emptiness with the sense that humans have been here — really been here, lived and struggled and built things here — and the wilderness took most of it back. You feel it in [Dawson City](/blog/dawson-city-at-its-peak), a town that was briefly the largest city west of Winnipeg and is now a few hundred people among the false-front buildings. You feel it at an abandoned roadhouse, or a [dredge](/blog/dredge-number-4-klondike) rusting in its own tailings. The [gold rush](/blog/klondike-gold-rush-how-it-started) came through like a fever and left these traces, and the country just absorbed them. ## And underneath all of it, a much older story The thing it took me longest to understand is that the gold rush is the *recent* history here. This is the homeland of [Yukon First Nations](/blog/trondk-hwechin-original-people-klondike) who have lived on this land for thousands of years — through the ice ages, through the coming of the stampeders, and into a present where they govern their own territories again. Once you start to see the Yukon through that much longer timeline, the place stops feeling like "wilderness" and starts feeling like home ground that has been continuously known and used and loved. That shift changes everything. ## The light There's also the light. June in [Dawson City](/blog/dawson-city-48-hours) means nineteen hours of sunlight, and a "night" that never gets darker than dusk. The quality of that northern light does something to your sense of time that I haven't experienced anywhere else — you lose track of the hour entirely, you find yourself wide awake at one in the morning, and everything is lit gold. In winter the opposite is true, and the long dark brings the [northern lights](/blog/northern-lights-yukon-guide). ## So I keep going back I don't think there's a single reason. It's the scale and the silence, the layered history, the light, and a particular kind of person the country seems to produce. If you've never been, go once — and give it long enough to get under your skin. Start with my advice on [what first-timers get wrong](/blog/five-mistakes-first-time-yukon-visitors), and don't over-plan it. The Yukon is best met halfway. --- ## See Also on TheKlondike.net - [Dawson City Travel Guide](/blog/dawson-city-48-hours) — where the light is longest and the history deepest - [What It's Like to Drive the Dempster Highway](/blog/driving-dempster-highway) — the road that takes you above the tree line - [Five Things First-Time Yukon Visitors Always Get Wrong](/blog/five-mistakes-first-time-yukon-visitors) — practical orientation for new arrivals - [The Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in: The Original People of the Klondike](/blog/trondk-hwechin-original-people-klondike) — one reason the Yukon feels different