Cycling 4000 kilometres across northern Canada

My name's Tristan and I've spent more than half a year bikepacking and hiking across western Canada, cycling through the Yukon, British Columbia and Alberta, living on the road, climbing mountains, meeting the locals and exploring as much of the backcountry as possible. Over the course of these next two videos I'll share the highs and lows of my journey through Canada and hopefully show you a part of what makes this place so special. If you're new here and haven't watched my videos before, I left off having spent two months bikepacking through Alaska in the summer of 2023 and then crossed into Canada via the Top of the World Highway and rolled down to Dawson City in the Yukon. The home of the American Gold Rush, Dawson City was for a brief period in the late 1800s one of the wealthiest settlements in the world and is still a very cool place to visit. I've been cycling with my friend Chloe for the past two months in Alaska but we'd be taking separate routes going forward so we caught one last beer together and I hit the road by myself. I cycled to the junction of the Dempster Highway, a road that runs over 700 kilometers north all the way up to the Arctic Ocean at Tuktoyaktuk. I didn't have time to go that far up and the northern part of the road was already burning with some huge wildfires but I really wanted to see a bit more of the area before turning south so I decided to hitch a ride 100 kilometers up from the junction to Tombstone, a territorial park I'd heard was spectacular in order to stash my bike and do some hiking. The skies were clear and the visibility was good as I arrived in the late afternoon and Tombstone really blew me away. My plan had been to spend a day or two doing day hikes from the campground in the center of the park but the rangers there told me that the best multi-day hike in the park, a trail which was normally pretty booked out, had had a bunch of cancellations due to the wildfires and a bad weather forecast and that there was actually space for me if I wanted to go. I had enough food so I figured why not and committed myself to heading out for a four-day loop in the park. The next morning I kind of felt like I might have made a mistake, the smoke had gotten really bad overnight, the visibility was super low and smoke was not fun to breathe. I figured I'd hope for the best and luckily the smoke eventually did give way to heavy rain as I arrived drenched to my first campground at Grizzly Lake and spent a fun night hanging out with a few other hikers who were also braving the conditions. Fortunately the wet weather seemed to clear out the smoke and although I did get a lot of rain, smoke wasn't an issue for the rest of my time in Tombstone. So I've just had a very crazy storm pass through, a lot of lightning and thunder and rain, but it's now clearing up. The lake is looking absolutely beautiful, hopefully tomorrow is going to be a better day. I've got another night at this really lovely campsite here and tomorrow I'm just going to do a little day hike, leave my tent up here and just hike over the ridge. It should only be a few hours to the next lake which is Tellus Lake and I'll be back here tomorrow night and then I'll be hiking out the following day and back to the Dempster Highway. But yeah, just absolutely beautiful here, I can't, I really, I wasn't even going to be coming here, this was a total accident, a very spontaneous trip and this is why it pays to do spontaneous trips, because I never would have seen this place and it is so beautiful. I mean, yeah God, I'm just, I'm so happy I came. I completed an amazing hike and then hitched a ride back to the visitor's centre where I'd stashed my bike. I cycled back down to the junction, camping through another big thunderstorm and then made my way down to the biggest town in the Yukon of Whitehorse. I spent a few days in and around Whitehorse, doing some hiking in the surrounding area with some people I met and then headed west to ride a loop I've been looking forward to for months, a route called the Golden Circle which crosses both Canada and Alaska through some of the most spectacular scenery in the north. I'm often a little wary of these very hyped up tourist routes but I have to say that the Golden Circle definitely is everything it's cracked up to be. The scenery was absolutely insane throughout and if I could only recommend one road route in the whole of the north for someone to cycle or drive, this would undoubtedly be it. I was swimming in crystal clear water multiple times a day, the scenery was world class and surprisingly the traffic wasn't bad at all. The only downside was that this was the last time I got to use my drone, as while getting these last few shots my drone was attacked by a raven who evidently woke up that day and chose violence, knocking my drone out of the sky. My drone almost went down into the lake but luckily I had enough control left to bring it in for a crash landing on the road so I was able to recover the footage but my drone had taken some damage and was going to be out of commission until I could get it replaced a few months later. I crossed briefly back into Alaska at Haines and then the next morning I hopped onto a ferry back across to Skagway in a section which reminded me a lot of Norway for obvious reasons. I headed up over White Pass following a route taken by thousands of prospectors during the Klondike Gold Rush at the turn of the 20th century. I crossed back into Canada at one of the most scenic border crossings I've done in quite a long time and enjoyed what was probably my favourite part of the Golden Circle, the lakeside road up to Carcross. I stopped briefly to explore Carcross Desert which is unofficially the smallest desert in North America and then cycled down to Atland Lake for one last detour before I started the long road north. Good morning, so last night I camped in some guy's garden after getting permission and I'm now heading down to Atland which I've been told by lots of people is super super beautiful so I'm really excited to see it. The town of Atland itself was kind of strange, another former gold rush town that now survives mostly on tourism but the lake was super beautiful so it was well worth the detour. Sometimes it just works out and tonight it's really really worked out because I found the perfect spot. So this is where I'm camping as you can see and this is Atland Lake so yeah I'm within like 10 meters of the lake, I've got my own private little beach here, god what an amazing place. I hitched a ride back up from Atland to the Alaska Highway and then made my way east over to the town of Watson Lake where I'd be turning south onto the Cassiar Highway and where things had already gotten very smoky as I arrived to find that the wildfire situation caught up with me once again. Watson Lake is home to the somewhat famous signpost forest. Visitors from all over the world have brought signposts and license plates from their respective home towns and there are now going on a hundred thousand signposts making up the ever-growing forest. So I'm now at the junction of the Cassiar Highway going south having spent a nice few days in Watson Lake and well there's a massive wildfire raging just south of where I am right along where the highway goes and it was closed, the highway was closed a few days ago and it's now open I'm told. There's an advisory in place on the road and there's a really strong wind warning for the next couple of days which is going to blow the wind into the road and possibly across it so um yeah I decided I'm going to try and get through today before it gets any worse and before the road closes again but I have no idea how bad it's going to be how smoky and whether I'm going to be allowed to ride through or whether I'm going to have to put my bike onto a truck or something to get through the smoky bit but yeah anyway it's going to be interesting fingers crossed. They wouldn't let me cycle through so I chucked my bike in the back of a pickup as I got a ride with a pilot car through the wildfire zone. It's scary isn't it? It's moving really fast up there with the clouds. It's rolling, it's super hot. Yeah I bet. It's gonna burst into flame right away. Right beside the road isn't it? It is. With the fire getting worse they actually ended up closing the road behind me so no other vehicles were able to get through and for the next two days I had the road almost entirely to myself. The next 500 kilometers on the Cassiar highway went by pretty quickly. There were some lovely views, some great campsites and lots of nice lakes to swim in but the main thing I remember about the Cassiar was the wildlife. Having seen only one bear in three months throughout Alaska and the Yukon it seemed like as soon as I crossed over into British Columbia there they all were. Black bears were everywhere with multiple sightings every day and it was a real thrill to see so many of them in the wild. I never really worried about safety. I always kept my distance and had my bear spray handy but all the bears I saw looked very well fed. A few were actually downright fat and all were very happy to mind their own business. So I'm currently in Stewart having done a little bit of a detour off the Cassiar highway. It's absolutely spectacular here. Yesterday I decided to take a tour bus up to visit the Salmon Glacier. I could have cycled up but I was feeling very lazy. I wanted to drink myself and it was just incredible. It's the largest reachable by road glacier in the world, fifth largest glacier in Canada and just absolutely breathtaking. The video is not going to do any justice but mind-blowingly beautiful. Just so impressive. I'm now cycling back across the border into Alaska again to go through Haida which is a very tiny little Alaskan settlement and I'm going to be visiting a salmon bear observation platform to watch the salmon run and if we get lucky maybe see some bears fishing for salmon. Yeah what a spectacular place this is. Nights were getting colder as the last of the summer came to an end so after Stewart I decided it was time to get a move on south. I took a shortcut on some forest roads and crossed the lava fields of the Nisga'a nation, the site of Canada's most recent volcanic eruption around 300 years ago. I also got to enjoy a few last lakeside campsites. Pitching my tent besides beautiful lakes was a recurring theme of my time in Canada so if this kind of thing sounds appealing then Canada is definitely somewhere you should think about visiting. I made my way down to Prince Rupert on the coast and then hopped on a 15-hour ferry down Canada's beautiful Inside Passage taking me to the northern part of Vancouver Island at Port Hardy. I then spent the following couple of weeks making my way down taking another ferry back across to the mainland and then finishing off my journey with a ride along the Sunshine Coast and one last ferry into Vancouver.