The Northern Frontier – Yukon

I am the land that listens, I am the land that broods;

Steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and woods.

Long have I waited lonely, shunned as a thing accurst,

Monstrous, moody, pathetic, the last of the lands and the first

Robert Service, The Law of the Yukon

To photograph the Yukon and Northwest Territories you must venture to Dawson, fly onto Whitehorse aboard a small yet sturdy plane out of aviation eras past, and brave a similar flight five times over the following eight days. On the ground your trusty vehicle will drive 2,500 kilometres over frozen rivers, crossing the Arctic Circle and passing Eagle Plains, Fort McPherson, Aklavik, Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk. This is the land of poet Robert Service and the Klondike Gold Rush, a place of hardship, adventure and harsh, unforgiving beauty. It is further north than many will ever venture and, come winter, it is the sight of fishing huts punctuating an otherwise uninterrupted white horizon that signals your arrival at the coast and frozen Beaufort Sea.

Photographer Tom Bunning was drawn to the vastness of the Yukon. It was wild, affording him the chance to meet those who regularly braved the ice roads and lived in extreme conditions in some of the world’s most remote communities. “It was a bit of a shock to the system. Not only temperature-wise but because you’re so far from normality. Life is quite simple, especially in the far north People take care of the land and the animals because they’re sustenance. They work out the number of beluga whales they can harvest each year, they monitor how many are bred and then how many they can cull to support that town, and if not as many are born then they eat less that year. Life is pretty straightforward and basic and they seem to have got it right. They maintain everything and everywhere you look is stunning.”

Bunning journeyed along the Dempster Highway with chatty German driver Robert. Behind them was their support driver Udo whose ancient two-seater truck didn’t come with anything as luxurious as heating He sat patiently in his woollen hat, prepared to spring to their aid should Bunning and his companions come off the road and into a snow drift that; after heavy winds, could easily be two metres high.

Early on the weather played havoc with their journey – as it is wont to do on the ice roads – and the group found themselves temporarily stranded at Eagle Plains with the road to Fort McPherson closed ahead. As the trucks piled up, Bunning embraced the opportunity to drink with the amassing drivers – he savouring a beer while they stuck to tea, not sure if they’d be driving again in an hour or in a week. He spent most of the evening with a father and son who hailed from the east coast and shared the driving. They’d been on the road for six months and had three more ahead of them before they could return home. All the while they seemed more interested in hearing about Running’s exploits than regaling him with their own. Why was he in the Yukon? How did he get here? What did he think? And this wasn’t unusual. Yukon residents are more than happy to chat, just not necessarily about themselves.

The following morning, while documenting the sunrise from the warmth of his motel room, a parade of caribou legs glided past Bunning’s window. Donning five layers of clothing boots, two pairs of socks and the obligatory head covering Bunning ran outside to find a hunter in a t-shirt, fro2en blood streaming down his wagon, preparing to walk out into the plain. He’d spent the last few days camping in -40°C conditions hunting caribou, which he used to feed his village. Later that day, about three hours north of Eagle Hams, Bunning saw three men on a nearby hill unloading yet more caribou into a wooden shed, one of whom began to wave “I realised it was the chap from Eagle Plains and I ran up the hill and went and saw how he lived, how he stored the caribou in these frozen sheds and lived in a tent next door. There was a shed with an open fire in it and very basic living conditions and a bed in the corner. He had a television plugged into a generator but that was his life and to see something so simple, and someone so resourceful, that’s just what life is like up there. In the summer he drives the boats along the rivers that had been the ice roads.”

Time is an odd thing in the Yukon. It may feel like you have an endless supply, a regular drive daiming eight to nine hours (not factoring in the frequent pauses taken to document the ever-changing light), yet it is not something you willingly waste. “When the road re-opened we started driving towards Fort McPherson and reached the pass where they had closed the road the day before. We made it through within half an hour. If we had been half an hour later we would have been stuck on that road, unable to go forward or back. You see a lot of lorry drivers sleeping in their cabins and they have no idea how long they will be stuck for. Your entire journey depends on the weather.” It was this part of the trip, the uncertainty, the potentially missed flight, that Bunning found most gripping. “You feel like you’re actually achieving something, there is this sense of excitement, and all the while you are seeing things you’ve never seen before. On the road from Eagje Hams to Aklavik there is only this beautiful white land and burnt forest from the tree fires. You can’t quite explain it, it’s almost science fiction at times. You don’t expect to see what you see, to do what you do.”

“The further north you go the more you forget that you’re on ice because everything is so white. All the roads are maintained because they are the connections between towns so when these ice roads go, getting from A to B is extremely difficult. When the roads start to crack they’re compacted with snow to try and keep them going a little bit longer. But you definitely know you’re travelling on ice because it’s so bloody cold outside and all you can see is blue ice under your feet.”

It’s important to remember that these roads are not without their dangers and require real skill to navigate. Robert never seemed to use the brake, instead relying on the momentum of the car as he made slight turns, the road following the natural path of the river. At one point they passed a car with a mother and her two children that had slid into a drift. As a local she seemed completely calm, waiting patiently for a truck large enough to tow them out, shovelling snow to pass the time while her children were absorbed in a snowball fight. But Bunning wasn’t worried, never pictured the ice cracking beneath him and didn’t fear the drifts. Instead he was scouring the horizon, waiting for the next photo opportunity. “I’d heard how vast it can be out there so I wanted to show the space, the wilderness. The thing that got to me most was the drive from Aklavik to Tuktoyaktuk where suddenly all the trees disappear and there is just stark white from sea to sky. It was an overcast day so there was this beautiful soft light and then the sun would break through and there v/as a pink cast to the horizon. We’d left Aklavik before the sun had come out and to see the sun rise on an ice road, there is nothing quite so magical. The colour of the ice changes to a deep blue and you get this beautiful red sky and all of a sudden everything changes. But it was like that every five, ten minutes. The light was constantly changing.”

Bunning travelled in February, long after the far north bid farewell to the near endless night. But although he had eight hours of light a day, the sun was never high in the sky. It would be just about to break and then set again, a unique, transformative light that is almost impossible to encounter. As a result, the landscape seems limitless, with the soft light reflected by the snow and the horizon almost non­existent. It would be hard to imagine such terrain in the summer but Robert, a keen camper and kayaker, excelled at regaling his passengers with accounts of the warmer months. “We pulled over at one point and I was eating a sandwich and these birds, whiskey jacks, landed at my feet and started eating from my hand. They’re renowned for being quite cheeky and helping themselves to whatever they want but it was lovely to sit in peace on the side of a river and feed birds out of your hand. Seeing the Yukon in the summer, you can only imagine what sort of wildlife there would be. There’s such a big difference in weather, winter to summer, they’re polar opposites. It’s something to return for.”