Dear fellow Arctic travelers,
...maybe i'm biased 'cause i used to live in the yukon, but i'd much rather
go to inuvik than to the oilfields...the yukon and northwest territories have
a lot of things going in their favor: the Dempster highway from Dawson city
to inuvik is absolutely stunningly beautiful. very few cars once you get past
North Fork Pass in the Tombstone Range, but i'd say that's rather a plus...
if you're into hotsprings, i know a couple on the alaska highway, and
there's one near whitehorse as well. if you're into museums: Whitehorse and
Dawson City have real cool ones from the gold rush days. Whitehorse also has
the coolest sternwheeler, and they give tours of it. The Klondike goldfields
in Dawson City are really fun to explore on your own: there's plenty of
mining still going on, but there's also ghosttowns, old dredges and
powerstations and lots of gold for us to pan...Nightlife: "Diamond Tooth
Gertie's" is the best gambling place in the north, and they have cheap
tables, too, and plenty of can-can-dancing until morning...
  to sum up, the yukon is a bit chaotic once in a while, people are
REALLY layed back (you get this feeling like everybody except you has got
an unlimited amount of time, and after a few weeks you've got plenty of time
as well...) but it's less developed than alaska which i think is a plus. if
you absolutely want to make it to alaska, we could come back via the "Top of
the world highway", which heads southwest from Dawson and into Alaska,
another supergorgeous road bytheway...
   my $can 0.02...
                    gregor