We turned in on Thursday night, not long after arriving in Whitehorse at 11 p.m. and we left the next morning with our lovely and amazing host and driver, Deb from Yukon Tourism. Deb moved north from Simcoe, Ontario over twenty years ago with her husband, a RCMP officer. Back then, she told us, he had to pass a psychological test before his work transfer was approved: “They wanted to know whether he was crazy enough,” she joked.

While I’ve arrived in Dawson by float plane and would like to one day get there by canoe, the drive up is made pleasurable by the distinctly regional nature of its highway culture. On the Klondike Highway, you won’t find a single Taco Bell or Denny’s. Instead, you’ll find idiosyncratically ornamented gas stations that double as gift shops and diners. The Braeburn Lodge is famous across the territory for selling cinnamon buns that are roughly the size of a newborn infant. While we’re there, a carload of teenagers pops in and each one of them picks up a bun to presumably feed them the weekend. In a rock yard outside another diner off the highway is a giant mosquito carved from wood.

The drive up is framed by birch and spruce trees and knuckled, brown hills. Occasionally we’ll stop and admire a particularly breath-taking canyon overlooking the river or the Five Finger Rapids. We have vistas like this “down south” in BC–for instance, on the way between Vancouver and Calgary–but, to this blogger at least, the views are felt more viscerally knowing how far we are from anything.

We stop to look at a stretch of tree stumps left after a forest fire. Deb tells us the purple fireweeds, when fully blossomed, means there’s six weeks to the first snowfall.

Sadly, we’re a few weeks too late to catch the fleet of Bentleys touring the north, but outside of Dawson we do catch a glimpse of the solar car, which looks like a cross between a UFO and a giant halibut on wheels.

It was sunny and pleasantly toasty in Dawson. The festival doesn’t get into full-swing until Saturday, when people who’ve finished their work weeks in Whitehorse arrive, so the main stage and beer garden are only operating at three-quarters capacity. We watch the Ottawa-based rockers Acorn and Calgary’s lo-fi savant, Chad Van Gaalen, in the main garden.

To be honest, the carnival tent setting isn’t my favourite place to watch music at the festival–I’m looking forward to catching indoor sets by these acts at the Palace Grand and St. Paul’s–and we leave to catch one of the nightly performances by Gertie and her Gertie Gals at the town’s non-profit casino, Diamond Tooth Gerties.

The night became a little more dissolute after that. I promised not to go very hard this time, but a flurry of wine, beer, theme drinks (i.e. a creme de cacao-based cocktail named after the Handsome Family at Bombay Peggy’s), highballs, and cigarettes came my way. When I got back to my room at two in the morning, the night had settle into a baby blue dusk.

My head, this morning, felt like the bowl of oatmeal I used to settle my stomach. We’re leaving for some afternoon workshop performances, so I’ll write a little more about the actual music fest tomorrow.

Photos by Michelle Mayne.